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Nash presses two fingers lightly to my cheek, like he’s asking me to look at him, and it brings me back to this moment. His eyes are hazel, green in the middle and gold around the rim. I don’t appreciate them enough.

Bianca keeps walking.

“My ex is here,” I murmur.

Nash looks over my head. It takes him maybe two seconds to find him, and he doesn’t ask which one. Then he looks back down at me, and he doesn’t say anything. He’s waiting to see what I’ll do.

“I’m gonna go say hi.”

His eyebrows pull in a fraction. “Why?”

“Because he’s going to see me anyway.”

I can tell he doesn’t get it at all. But he takes his hand off my face and steps out of the doorway, and I go. I’m doing it because the alternative is spending two hours pretending the room is bigger than it is.

His girlfriend sees me first, and her smile drops.

“Hi,” I say.

Brandon turns around. “Hey, Kylie.”

“Hey,” Evan says.

“Hi,” I say again, to him this time. Then, because his girlfriend is standing right there and it would be insane not to, “Hi.”

“Hi,” she says.

And then there’s nothing. Three years, three Christmases. I know his mother’s middle name and what he sounds like at six in the morning, and I’m standing in front of him, and the only word in my whole head is hi.

“How are you?” I ask.

“Good,” Evan says. “Good. Yeah. You?”

“Good.”

“Cool.”

“Cool.”

His girlfriend drinks from her cup. Somebody gets something out of the fridge behind them.

“There were cookies,” I say. “Down the hall. Somebody made cookies. They’re gone now.”

Brandon says, “They’re gone?”

“They’re gone. I got the last two.” I don’t know what to do with my hand, so I shrug. “They were good.”

Evan rubs the back of his neck again. The song ends, and the next one starts. I look across the room, and Nash is looking at me. He’s back at the window with his water. He isn’t looking at Evan. He’s looking at me, the way you look at a clock when you’re timing something, and when he sees me look, he keeps doing it. He doesn’t come over. He doesn’t move at all. I don’t know what he’s asking. I raise my eyebrows at him, and he raises his back.

“Okay,” I say to the three of them. “Well. Good seeing you guys.”

“Yeah,” Evan says. “You, too.”

“Nice to meet you,” his girlfriend says, and then her face does something, because we met in August in the worst way two people have ever met, and she knows it and I know it.

“Yeah,” I say, and walk away.

Kenzie intercepts me halfway across the room and steers me against the wall by the bathroom with a hand on my elbow. “Are you insane? You went over there.”