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He nodded and followed her toward the tiny kitchen, where she filled two glasses with ice and lemonade. Jonathan thanked her and took a sip.

“Should we sit outside?” Phoebe felt like she needed some fresh air.

They settled on the outdoor sofa, a horseshoe-patterned throw pillow between them. She pulled the pillow onto her lap. Jonathan was giving off some intense energy, and it was making her stomach hurt.

“Last night was fun,” Phoebe offered tentatively.

“Yeah.” Jonathan relaxed. “I’m really glad you came. It’s always wild to see my old friends once a year. Every year, someone has had some major life milestone. Except me.” He rubbed the back of his neck.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. None of them has written a screenplay.” Phoebe resisted the urge to rest a hand on his knee. She didn’t trust herself to touch him right now.

“True. And it’s a great accomplishment to have a collection of screenplays gathering dust in a drawer.”

“Hey, come on.” Jonathan wasn’t usually this self-deprecating. “What’s wrong?”

He sat up straighter. “I wanted to talk about last night. I mean, about us.”

“Oh. Okay. Sure. I wanted to talk about us, too.”

“Really?” Hope sparked in Jonathan’s eyes.

“Yeah.”

Phoebe hugged the pillow to her chest, hoping he wouldn’t ask her to go first. Because, while it was true that she had wanted to talk about them, she didn’t know what she wanted to say. She was feeling a lot of things—that very confusing desire to see what it would be like to kiss him after all these years, for example. But the thing that always kept her grounded—that gave her life meaning—was her work. She felt that the safest path forward was to stick to the plan, to become business partners. And she couldn’t see a way around that.

Jonathan took a sip of his lemonade, waiting. When Phoebe didn’t elaborate, he spoke. “Phoebe, it’s been kind of amazing, seeing you again.”

The hairs on the back of Phoebe’s neck prickled. She was both scared of what he might say and longing to hear it.

“I honestly—I know this is dramatic, but I honestly thought I might never see you again after graduation. With the way we left things. And that made me so, so sad, even if I thought it was the right choice.”

Phoebe looked into his brown eyes, currently round with a combination of earnestness and embarrassment. “It did?”

He tilted his head. “Of course it did. Why does that surprise you?”

“I just thought you never wanted to see me again.”

“Part of me didn’t. That was my pride.”

“And the rest of you?”

He’d been sitting back against the couch cushions with his knees spread, holding the lemonade on one knee. Now he put his glass down on the table and turned so that both knees and shoulders were pointing directly at her.

“The rest of me thought about you basically every day.”

“Every day?”

Jonathan pretended to think about it. “Basically.”

“I thought about you a lot, too.” Phoebe looked down at their knees, so close that if she moved hers by an inch, they would be touching. The idea scared her. Did she really want to kiss Jonathan? Or was that just some hormonal response that she had no control over? Maybe because she hadn’t hooked up with a guy in months? She didn’t actually want to throw a wrench into the progress they’d been making on their marketing agency. She had wanted to start her own agency for years. This wanting-to-kiss-Jonathan thing was a much more recent phenomenon. Wasn’t it?

It wasn’t like she had secretly been pining for him all these years. Had she?

Was it possible to keep a secret like that from herself? Because seeing Jonathan now, eight years later, all grown up, was making her question a lot of things.

This was all making her head hurt.

Phoebe looked from Jonathan’s knees to his hands, resting lightly on his thighs, to his face—she skimmed right over his tattooed arms, which she simply could not handle right now—and imagined what could happen in the next few moments. She could reach for him. She could even just let her leg fall against his, inch her fingers closer to any part of him. She could hold his gaze. She could let Jonathan Lee finally, finally kiss her.