“Avalon. Avalon. You have it wrong! I swear to God! Please, talk to me, for God’s sake!”

She only picked up the pace. Of course she knew how to run, sort of, in flip-flops. They’d lived in flip-flops as kids. Running in them without falling flat on your face was kind of an art.

Between her flippy-flopping and him mincing in his bare feet over the ground, it was the slowest, most ridiculous pursuit ever.

“Avalon! LOOK OUT FOR THAT WELL!”

She stopped so abruptly her arms windmilled. Her head whipped to and fro looking down at the ground.

He caught up triumphantly.

Still hopping. He seized the opportunity to drop a boot and shove a foot in.

She glared at him. Two bright pink spots of temper high in her cheeks.

“There’s no well, is there? I should have known the only way you know how to get your way is through bullshit.”

“No. I wouldn’t let you fall down it regardless. But I’m not going to let you walk back to the house by yourself.”

She just growled ferally and spun and took off again.

At a flippy-floppy trot.

He had a clear view for at least a few yards so he shoved his other foot into his other boot and stuffed the laces in and ran to catch up to her. He flanked her most of the way but she never turned.

Her temper was a force field that could have repelled Star Wars–type lasers and it didn’t matter because he was going to see her safely home.

She ignored him all the way to the house, rammed her key into the lock and slammed into the house.

ARRGH.

He clawed his fingers up through his hair.

“Well, fuck me,” he muttered. It was safe to say that had not gone the way he’d hoped it would.

He stood there indecisively, staring at the door.

She reemerged a minute later with the dog in her arms and gave a little yelp. “Jesus, Mac, are you still here? Shoo! Go home.”

“Not going anywhere until you talk to me.”

That was the plan, he decided.

Chick Pea selected the azalea nearest to the porch rail to tinkle on. Then returned and hopped up on the lounge chair.

Mac eyed her dubiously as she did all this. That was definitely a sort of hybrid dog-cat. Not necessarily a bad thing, just an unusual thing.

Avalon finally heaved a sigh. “Fine, Mac. Say what you have to say.”

“Can I come up there on the porch? Or do I have to semi-shout it from where I’m standing?”

She actually hesitated. And finally she stood aside. Well aside. As if in the absence of the availability of a hazmat suit, distance would have to do.

Two pairs of brown eyes, hers and Chick Pea’s, watched as he made his way up the flagstone path to the porch.

He took a deep breath. And then the words came in a rush, as if he was arguing for his life. He kind of was.

“Okay. I want to tell you some things about me. The reason I really hate the song ‘Don’t Cry Out Loud.’ My mom used to play it on that grand piano in that room with the chandelier and sing in this very sort of pointed, melodramatic way, just banging away and howling with her eyes closed, and my brother and I knew she was passively-aggressively singing it to my dad and about my dad. And oh my GOD I hated it. I wanted to curl up and die. It was farcical. Back then it was torture. Every day was a cavalcade of tension. Of things implied but never said. No one ever talked to each other and my brother and I were both together and alone because I couldn’t really talk to him, either.”

“Jesus, Mac . . .”

“Not fun to hear, right? I used to go out to the hot springs with my brother to get away from Mom and Dad fighting. Going at it hammer and tongs. Yelling at each other, over each other, about each other. Never, ever solving a damn thing. Sometimes I think they liked big houses because both loved the sound of their own voices, so the echo in a big marble foyer was just an added bonus. I have never told anyone that in my entire life.”

The silence almost rang. As if it was the aftermath of a little explosion. Perhaps a stair crash.

Her eyes were on him, softer now. But still wary.

“So you don’t talk to your mom at all?” she ventured. Not accusingly. Trying to understand.

“No. Not really. She remarried a plastic surgeon. Her nose changes subtly every year. I get the Christmas card.”

She tried and failed not to smile at that. “Maybe you can make a flip book out of them.”

It was a relief to laugh at that. She was such a smartass, but it came with such warmth.

They had inched closer to each other, without realizing it.

“What about Ty?” she pressed.

He blew out a breath and swept his hand through his hair. “Ty kind of turned into my dad, if you exclude the bit about felonies and federal prison, and that was exactly what my dad always wanted. He’s a venture capitalist. Puts deals together for other companies. Brokers buyouts, that sort of thing. He thought I was an idiot for joining the national guard. He was always sticking up for my dad. We fought. It got ugly. We haven’t talked in about eight years.”

She was still. He watched her shoulders rise high as she pulled in a long breath.

“Wow. I just . . . Yeah, I can imagine you wouldn’t back down.”

He couldn’t quite read her tone. Soft, just a little ironic. But not without affection. And not without a certain sadness. She did know him, after all.

He was breathing easier, now. “It’s just . . . I wanted to be as different from my dad as possible. My dad was a destroyer. So I wanted to build things. My life was chaotic. I wanted order and predictability. I never really learned a damn useful thing, unless you counted getting hair gel just right. I never felt I’d been much good to anyone. I wanted to know what it was like to grow or create something from the very beginning, to know my life had an impact and a reason. It felt like if you could plan it, and build it, and see it, and touch it, then no one could rip it right out from under you.”

She was silent for a moment, taking this in. “Mac . . . you’ve always had value. You know that now, right?”

He wished she would say, “You, in fact, meant everything to me.”

Because he once could have said those words to her and it would have been true.

“Sure,” he said softly. Because she was waiting for reassurance, hurting on his behalf. And he wanted to reassure her.

She’d fallen silent again.

Somehow, like shadows stretching toward each other, they’d moved closer still.

“Anyway. I was good at the work in the guard and I made friends based on what I could do and on my own strengths, not who my dad was or how much money I had. I knew I’d made the right decision for me.”

Her big dark eyes were fixed on him, and her mouth was turned up in a sort of rueful way. “I just . . .” She gave up and made a helpless little gesture with her hands, almost supplicating. “That’s one of the finest things I’ve ever heard.”

He loved the word finest. Elegant and somber, almost ceremonial.

“Yeah, I’m a prince. I didn’t actually like the regimentation one bit.”

“I was gonna say . . .”

He laughed and so did she.

It felt luxurious to be known. “I’m better at leading, I think. Which I eventually was able to do. And I know how to survive. And so . . . here I am.”

There passed a moment of silence interrupted only by Chick Pea making snorkeling noises into her flank as she cleaned.

“I honestly don’t know what I would do if my world fell apart like that, Mac.”

“Ah, you’d be fine. You’re a fighter, Avalon. You’d probably go about it differently, but I have no doubt you’d still buy this house out from under me.”

She laughed again, and he knew then, definitively, that it was all right. That whatever had spooked her back there he had fixed for now.

“I swear to you . . . all I wanted to do was show you the damn hot springs because you were sore. That bathing suit with the frill on it was so worth it.”

She flashed a swift little smile. “I believe you.”

The mood was feather-soft, suddenly. “So you like my abs, huh?”

“Nope,” she said instantly.

They both knew this was a big lie.

“So since I just told you something pretty awkward, why don’t you tell me why you’re really here in Hellcat Canyon, Avalon. I read SilliPutty. I have my theories.”

“Oh, is that how it works?” She sighed. “I might as well tell you. Corbin cheated on me. To be more specific, I caught him cheating on me.”

He hissed in a breath. “That sucks, Avalon. I’m sorry.”

This won him a bleakish laugh. “Nothing a little retail therapy couldn’t help.”

She gestured to the house.

His theory had been correct. She was kind of doing what he’d done: trying to impose a little order on something in the wake of destruction. Metaphorically reforming something that had fallen into disrepair.

He thought of a dozen things he could say about Corbin and how he was out of his fucking mind to cheat on her. But he didn’t want another guy in the conversation any longer than necessary.

“You’re through?” he said shortly. “The two of you?”

“Yeah,” she confirmed. “Mac . . . can I ask you something?” She sounded tentative.

“Of course.”

“Do you think GradYouAte is stupid?”

He was so astonished by the question for a moment he was speechless. “Stupid? Avalon, it’s amazing.”

She pushed a streamer of still-damp hair behind her ear. “It’s just . . . some days I feel like I got caught up in the momentum of it before I knew whether it was what I really wanted. I had this idea and we just sort of made it happen. I bought this house because I wanted to make a deliberate choice. To do something from the beginning to the end. Kind of like you did, I guess.”

He moved closer, nearly closing completely the remaining distance between them.

“Listen, Avalon . . . I know I’ve given you a little shit about it. But you created a virtual world, something that had never before existed, from just an idea. As far as I’m concerned, you’re like Hermione Granger with a wand, conjuring something from the ether. No matter how you feel about it now, I’m convinced you can do anything you want. You’re kind of a sorceress.”

He was a little embarrassed that he’d pulled out a word like sorceress. But her face was turned up toward his, luminous and unguarded, close enough for him to count her freckles. She was listening, softly enthralled, her eyes brilliant, intent, in that way he remembered from when they were so hungry to touch each other.

And just like that it felt like someone was playing racquetball with his heart.

His hand closed around her arm. He tugged her up against him.

Her mouth was there to meet his, all softness and yielding hunger. Everything he knew her to be—the sweetness, the ferocity, the fearless pleasure seeker—was in her kiss, and any plans he had for finessing it were swept under by a greedy panic of want. They kissed as though they’d been starved of each other.

Her fingers curled into his belt loops to pull his hips hard against hers; he slid his hands down to cup the curve of her butt and urge her hard up against his cock. A bolt of pleasure cleaved him; her breath snagged and her head fell back; he claimed her lips with his again, and their tongues met, tangled, teased, in a familiar carnal little dance. The only sound was the saw of breath as their lips met, parted, went back for more, for harder, for deeper.

And now their hips were doing what their lips were doing, finding a rhythm that helped them mine every second of contact for every minute degree of bliss, just like teenagers. His cock was rock hard and he thought his head might fly from his body to join the moon overhead from the rush of pleasure. He was beginning to plan how to get her out of that ridiculous bathing suit when . . . not abruptly . . . gently, but decidedly . . .

She took her lips from his.

She ducked her head.

And went still.

A second after that she placed her hand gently on his chest.

He knew that signal. The one for “Stop.”

He looked down.

Her hand was rising and falling with the rapid sway of his breathing, like something tossed into a tide.

He lifted his head.

The world was spiraling.

“Mac . . .” The word was scarcely more than a breath.

He decided he had the sexiest name in the world, if it could be said like that.

“Mmm?”

He had a powerful feeling he wasn’t going to like what she said next.

“I can’t do this.”

At least his intuition was dead on.

“If by ‘this’ you mean kiss like you invented kissing, I disagree.” His voice was a husk.

But that was just him trying to be glib.

To rearrange his armor and pull it back into place. He was just trying to forestall the inevitable.

He was pretty sure he knew what she meant.

She eased out of his arms. He had no choice, really, but to let her. It still felt like a sundering. He literally had vertigo.

“Mac . . . it’s . . .” She swept a hand back through her hair. “It’s just . . .”

And said nothing more.

She stared at him. Her chest still rising and falling with swift breathing.

“Avalon?”

“Sorry . . . thank you. Good night,” she said finally.

She pivoted and headed for the house.

He stared blankly.

Thank you, good night? Like she was Lynyrd Skynyrd, and he was a San Francisco crowd?

Chick Pea jumped down from the lounge chair and clicked along after her, and he watched both butts sway off.

It was a pretty adorable view, even if they were walking away from him.

Click.

She turned the lock.

He realized that he did not, however, like watching her disappear, whether it was behind a door or not.

He gave a soft, stunned laugh.

Kissing her for the first time, in the path lined with wild blackberries on the way up to Devil’s Leap, to this day remained one of the braver things he’d ever done.

And he’d been here at Devil’s Leap for about three years, but now he understood something: touching her again was the real homecoming.

But it was both perilous and as exhilarating as walking a wire strung high over the Hellcat River at snowmelt, when the water is moving most violently over jagged rocks.

The kiss was leaving his body only slowly.

And so that’s how he made his way back to his cottage. Slowly, so he could feel every moment of that unique intoxication; and by feel, through the dark, the familiar pale flagstones of the lawn and the moon overhead lighting his way.

If she’d been fifteen again, that’s what she would have written in her diary that night. She would have surrounded it with little hearts and exclamation points. And maybe some lyrics from that particular Roxy Music song.

And then she would have written “Avalon Coltrane” about a dozen times under that. Just testing it out.

How dangerous it now seemed to be that innocent. To not know that kissing boys had ramifications that could fan out through a lifetime and trip you up when you least expected it and cause all kinds of problems, like those invisible laser security systems in sci-fi movies.

She headed upstairs to the bathroom, Chick Pea clicking daintily behind her. She peeled off her mother’s absurd old swimsuit with some effort and got in the shower, turned on the warm water, closed her eyes and aimed her face up at it the way you would if something ached. She did ache. Everything ached. Sweetly and savagely. She felt precisely as if she were being pulled apart, slowly, along some sort of serrated internal edge.

She started to tremble.

It was a surfeit of emotion, but damned if she knew whether it was stress or joy or what on earth to call it. The kiss had been so amazing she wanted to cry from it. Not because of its beauty or anything so precious or any of the romantic words that would have made Mac scoff; just because it was now very clear that nothing, nothing had ever felt that right since the last time he’d kissed her. So enormous, so peaceful, so consumingly hot. And laughing or crying, those were the things available to humans when emotions needed celebrating or releasing. Maybe the next iteration of human should include the ability to shoot rainbows from their eyes.

It was entirely possible she’d spent too much time looking at animated games.

So: it felt right.

But that didn’t mean it was right.

She’d learned that from him, after all.

But shouldn’t things that felt so good and promised to be amazing be good for you and meant for you, and not cause pain instead? What in God’s name was the point?

Life. Now with More Irony.

She reached up to turn the water off and the old but handsome hot water handle broke off in her hand. She swore blackly.

And she got into the giant flannel nightgown and roped her hair up into a ponytail and sat down on her bed in the turret and curled her feet up underneath her, and Chick Pea went up her doggie stairs to sit on the bed next to her.

She stared through those old curved windows, ever so slightly warped, at the sky full of icily glinting stars, and thought she understood why the original millionaire had built the house there and why they’d included a turret. Because it was like sitting in a pile of diamonds.

It occurred to her that Mac had been a lot of things to her over the years. Rich Boy and First Crush and First Orgasm and Traitorous Heartbreaker and Flag Bearer for All That Was Perfidious About Men. Above all, a symbol.

Implicit in the word symbol was a sort of distance.

And distance was safety.

And as an icon he was manageable.

As a person . . . he was potentially devastating. In every sense of that word.

But until tonight, she realized it was entirely possible she hadn’t fully experienced him as . . . a person. With dimensions and complexities and motives and vulnerabilities that in all likelihood didn’t have much to do with her, though she would bet a few of them did. Shaped by forces she could have actually analyzed and sussed out if she’d tried, because she was good at that sort of thing. She’d been so focused on her own heartbreak. She’d been the tragic heroine of her own story. One she’d allowed to be dictated by the hero.

The hero’s story kept going after that book was over.

She had a hunch Mac, on the other hand, had always really, fully seen her. Maybe better than anyone else had back then. She knew it based on how she felt with him: as though the entire world was dialed cleanly into focus.

She’d thought of herself as enmeshed with Corbin, but it wasn’t entirely true. The details of their lives were. But it ought to have hurt more to pull free of him. Really hurt, clean to the bone. And here she was, kissing another guy, as if this was where she actually belonged.

She could only imagine the kind of pain that would lead Mac to just sever ties with his whole family. If something was killing you with pain, wouldn’t you want it gone? But cutting off a member of her family seemed to her like hacking off a limb because she’d sprained it.

Whether Mac realized it or not, he had his dad’s ruthlessness, too. He saw things in black-and-white.

Avalon had a hunch that inherent in that ruthlessness was fear.

So while Mac kissed like an angel, it wouldn’t pay to forget that he was just as hard as he was gentle. Being seduced by one could mean being destroyed by the other. He was not a guy who did things by halves.

She sighed.

When she’d laid her hand against his chest to end that kiss . . . she’d felt his heart thudding against her palm. Racing exactly as it had the very first time he kissed her on the path between wild blackberries.

She turned her palm upright and rested it on her lap like something she’d rescued.

She closed her eyes. Suddenly unutterably weary.

Her bed wanted to suck her in the way the hot springs had.

And in one of those romantic gestures that likely would have made Mac scoff, she raised her palm and pressed her lips gently to it. As if she could comfort him that way.

As if she could comfort herself that way.

She certainly wasn’t going to come up with any solutions tonight. All she would do was create more existential shreds. Kind of like she’d done to the wallpaper in the master bedroom.

She gave a start when her phone buzzed in a message.

She looked down at it. Her heart gave a sickening, reflexive lurch.

It was Corbin.

Aw. Corbin didn’t “blame” her. Wasn’t that magnanimous of him.

Still, she could almost hear the misery in his voice. Her throat knotted.

She never could bear his misery, either. Mostly because that’s what she did: she wanted to comfort and she wanted to save.

She needed to comfort and save herself.

She did have an answer to one of his questions. She didn’t know if he’d find it a relief or not.

She sent it, and then shut the phone off.

She wasn’t going to be able to avoid an actual conversation with him, or her life in San Francisco, forever. But unlike Corbin, she didn’t just foist the difficult things, the things that hurt, the things she didn’t want to do, off onto someone else. She would talk to him. And she would take it like a big girl.

She patted the bed next to her and Chick Pea settled into a circle in the crook of her arm.

She closed her eyes and breathed in and breathed out.

And before sleep took her under, she tucked her palm against her cheek.

And she imagined Mac’s heart beating against it.