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His face is pale in the dashboard light. There’s a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead. His breathing is still too fast, too shallow.

“Are you okay?” I ask quietly.

He laughs. It’s a bitter sound that doesn’t match his face at all.

“That was fucking crazy,” he says.

And then I can’t hold it in anymore. The questions come tumbling out, one after another. My voice rises with each one.

“What happens now? What are you going to do? Is she going to tell your dad? Is she going to⁠—”

Lucien’s hand lands on my thigh, firm, grounding.

“Cam,” he says. “Stop.”

I stop.

“Breathe,” he says.

I try. I suck in air through my nose, but it catches in my throat. It comes out shaky and uneven.

“With me,” Lucien says.

He takes a deep breath, and I watch his chest expand. Then he lets it out just as slowly.

I match him.

My heart rate starts to slow. The panic recedes enough that I can think again.

“Put some music on,” Lucien says. His voice is softer now.

I reach for his phone in the cupholder. My hands are still shaking. I realize he doesn’t have a passcode, or maybe he disabled it.

I don’t know what to play. My mind is blank.

So I just type the first thing that comes to mind into Spotify. Something soothing.

“The Night We Met” starts playing through the car speakers. The voices are lulling and haunting. For a moment, we just drive. The music fills the space between us, and my breathing evens out. My pulse returns to something close to normal.

Then Lucien starts laughing. It’s quiet at first, just a huff of air through his nose. But then it builds, becoming a real laugh, warm and deeply masculine, a sound that fills the car and makes me want to hear it again.

I stare at him, confused. “What?”

“It couldn’t have gone worse,” he says, and he’s still laughing.

There’s a slightly hysterical edge to it that makes me think he might be losing it. But then I’m laughing too. Because he’s right. It literally could not have gone worse. His mother walked in on him with his mouth on my dick. I came. There were ice cubes and sweet tea everywhere. And then we ran.

It’s so absurd that all I can do is laugh. The sound mixes with Lord Huron’s and Phoebe Bridgers’ voices.

Then the phone rings.

The music cuts out abruptly, replaced by the sharp trill of an incoming call. The name flashes on the car’s display screen: Dad.

The laughter dies in my throat.

Lucien’s hands tighten on the wheel. His face goes from flushed with laughter to pale in an instant.

The phone keeps ringing.