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Avery bit her lip to keep from laughing, and Theo’s eyes danced, although his face stayed in his usual perma-scowl.

“Everything okay?” Theo asked.

“Fine. He just wanted to talk, that’s all.”

“I was thinking we should too, and I probably need to get home. If you want to catch a ride with someone else, though, that’s fine,” he added, looking abruptly uncomfortable.

“No, I think that’s a good idea. We can, um, talk along the way.”

But the car ride from Grace’s was completely silent. It wasn’t that far of a drive. Honestly, if it hadn’t been snowing and she didn’t have her bags, she might have suggested that she just walk home. Nothing in Itasca was all that far apart, after all. But when they arrived at her house, he killed the engine. “So, boundaries,” he started. “We should probably set them?”

“Yeah, probably,” she agreed, the nervous energy that had been coursing through her system after he kissed her returning with a vengeance. “I didn’t mean to get weird back there. The kiss just really caught me off guard, you know?”

“That bad, huh?” he said with a rueful chuckle.

“Not at all,” Avery said without thinking, because above all else she didn’t want Theo to think he was the problem. “It was . . . good.”

Theo sat quietly in the driver’s seat. “Oh,” he said finally.

“And hand holding and whatever, that’s fine too.”

“Too? As in—we should kiss again?”

“If the situation calls for it,” she said.

“Like what sort of situation?”

“I don’t know. We’ll probably know it when we see it,” she said, wishing her brain would cool it on the constant replay of kissing him.

“Did you want it to be like tonight?”

Avery had to take a second to drag her thoughts back from the brink, but as she did, another idea occurred to her. Their first kiss had caught her off guard, but maybe that’s all it was. Maybe they needed to kiss one more time, to remind herself that the sparks she felt from his kiss before was just because of the surprise and having an audience. Here, in his car, with her house in front of them, windows dark, fully prepared, she wouldn’t risk any of that. Better to do it now, so that she didn’t build it up into meaning something that it didn’t. “Yeah,” she said, before she could chicken out. “But maybe we should practice.”

“Practice,” he echoed, staring resolutely out the window. “Do you think that would help?”

“I do, yeah.”

He nodded, still not looking at her. “Now?”

“Do you—do you not want to?”

“No,” he said hastily. “I just wasn’t sure.”

If nothing else, Avery wanted to kiss him so they could stop having such a painfully awkward conversation. Things with Theo weren’t supposed to be stilted and uncomfortable, or at least, not like this. It seemed like he was holding something back from her, something that was making him uneasy too. She wasn’t sure what it was, and she didn’t like it. She didn’t like the idea of Theo having doubts, even if she couldn’t say what those doubts were, or if they were the same ones she was having. The ones that whispered, You could break everything and Be careful and You lose him, you lose everything every time she glanced at him. Even still, Avery unbuckled and leaned toward the center console, and Theo did the same, making sure not to smack his elbow into the horn.

Avery had a wild urge to laugh when she thought about her parents—her mom in particular—catching her kissing Theo in their driveway. Her mom would hate it, and her dad wouldn’t be as angry but wouldn’t be thrilled either, since he played golf with Cam’s dad most Saturdays in the summer. And—

Theo took her face in his hands, more gently than he had at the party, and her rambling thoughts evaporated into a fine mist. She hadn’t had time then to think about what his hands felt like, his long fingers, careful and deft. And then their lips pressed together, and she considered the fact that his mouth seemed to fit perfectly on hers, like they were carved from the same piece of clay, each of them the inverse of the other. It was like nothing else she’d ever felt, and that was before his tongue traced her lips.

Their surroundings faded away, and she felt like she was floating, surrounded by soft clouds, or maybe that was just Theo’s fingers slipping into her hair. Kissing Cameron had sometimes tasted like vodka and whatever cheap-ass mixer he had dug up from somewhere, and other times like the Mountain Dew he loved so much, but Theo tasted—right. Good. She wasn’t sure how to describe it, but it was like his touch, perfectly calibrated to her.

Avery reached out, fingers exploring his hair, which was softer than she’d imagined. Everything about him this time was softer than she ever would have thought. She had known he had a secret soft side—he’d cried at Up when they watched it with Jacob and then sworn her to secrecy—but she hadn’t considered, or maybe hadn’t let herself consider, that he could be soft in other ways too.

She hoped that when the weekend was over, she would be able to forget that. Because if not, she was in trouble.

Chapter Eleven

Theo