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Avery brought her other leg up to sit cross-legged on her bed. She picked at her comforter, and silence spread throughout the room. She wasn’t sure what she was waiting for, but she knew the ball was in his court.

“Was there anything else?” Theo asked, and she realized he’d been thinking the same thing.

“Are you going to apologize?” she asked. She desperately needed things between them to be even. She didn’t like feeling like she was solely at fault, like the mess they were in was just on her and not on both of them.

Theo licked his lips. “Honestly? No.” He looked straight at her, pinning her in place with his dark gaze. “I’m not going to—”

Her temper flared and she cut him off. “Seriously? You’re going to sit there and tell me that you had nothing to do with this? That you’re blameless? That—”

“Let me finish,” he said. “I’m not going to apologize for being in love with you, okay? I know you don’t deal well with being lied to, and I get why now. But you cannot expect me to risk everything to tell you that the minute I figured it out, which, if you’d forgotten, is when you were at orientation for a college I don’t go to. Time was up for us, I thought. I’d missed my chance.”

He stood up and started pacing, apparently not done. “And then you made that suggestion in the diner, and it just seemed like—if I told you how I felt right then, what would you have done? Be honest.”

I would have panicked, because it would have felt like too much right then. “I probably would have called someone else to get me. Or just, like, walked back to Itasca.”

Theo looked viciously triumphant. “Exactly.”

“You could have said no, you know,” Avery threw back. She stood up and stepped in front of him, cutting off his escape route. It felt vaguely dangerous, like cornering a panther at the zoo, but it wasn’t like she was scared of him. Just of what he might say, and how much it would hurt. “Maybe you didn’t have to tell me then, but you could have just told me it was a dumb fucking idea.”

Theo opened his mouth to reply and then closed it. “You’re right,” he said. “But even if this means we’re done, I don’t regret it because—God, it was fucking worth it for me, Avery. Being with you, even for a few days? It was worth it.”

Avery tried her best to get her mind around his words. But that means—oh.

Oh.

But before she could say anything in response, he was kissing her. And even though they had kissed several times over Thanksgiving, some of the kisses fake and some of them real, something about this one felt different, like everything that had been between them had suddenly fallen away, leaving nothing but them, their truest selves.

There was nothing else to do but kiss him back.

Chapter Forty-Two

Avery

Four Years and Three Months Ago

“Mr. A? I, uh, have an awkward question,” Avery said just as her gym teacher blew the whistle to start the game. Dodgeballs started ricocheting around the gym, the high-pitched, resonant ringing of red plastic slamming into the hardwood floors surrounding her.

“Nielson, right?” Mr. Apanowicz said, consulting his tablet.

“Right. I have, um, a problem.”

He deftly slapped a ball away from her head and nodded. “What is it?”

Mostly, her problem was Avery fucking hated dodgeball. She could handle a lot of other gym-related activities, and even liked a few of them, but dodgeball? No. But she also knew that, on her first day as a freshman, she probably couldn’t get away with just saying I’d rather die than play this. There was, however, one trick Aunt Jenn had assured her would work like a charm on Mr. A, who, in Aunt Jenn’s words, was older than dirt and had been teaching at Itasca High since approximately the Stone Age. “I’m having female difficulties.”

“Meaning?”

“I’m in too much, um, discomfort to play,” Avery said, and motioned vaguely toward her stomach.

As usual, Aunt Jenn knew exactly what she was talking about. “Understood,” Mr. A said shortly, cutting off any further explanation. “You’re excused for the week, but no longer, okay? Go join that kid on the bleachers, and be prepared to play next week.”

Avery headed off, pleased that she was able to get out of it so quickly, and climbed up to the third riser, two lower than the new kid.

The new kid, as everyone kept whispering, was a major new addition to Itasca. Almost everyone had gone to Itasca Middle School together, which was two whole blocks down the road from Itasca High, and everyone who hadn’t had gone to St. Mary’s grade school out on the edge of town. But there were only twenty St. Mary’s kids, and Itasca was small no matter where you went to school, so they were mostly a known quantity. Like Cameron Finstad, whom Avery, Grace, and Tommy all agreed was very cute. Harper was the lone holdout, but that was because she didn’t find anyone of Cameron’s gender attractive.

A totally new kid, however, was nearly unheard of. Not many people moved to Itasca, and Avery could think of only maybe three other people in her entire class who hadn’t started in Wiggle Time Preschool with her.

Even more interesting? The new kid (whose name was Theo, Harper had reported, as she had first-period Spanish with him) was from Saint Paul. Avery had been there a handful of times—more if you counted the times she had driven down there with her parents to the airport to fly to the Florida condo. But someone who had lived there was almost as exotic as someone who had lived in New York or Los Angeles, those faraway bastions of culture and excitement. He was new, he was interesting, and, well, he was very, very cute. However, Harper had claimed he was kind of intense and not very friendly, although Avery wasn’t sure how Harper was able to garner that much information in a fifty-minute period, most of which was probably taken up with explanations of what the year was supposed to cover.