It’s Wednesday night, and I’m at Tyler’s house. Once again, we’re practicing our Shakespearean scene in his bedroom.

“Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take,” Tyler says, his blue eyes glinting behind his mask. “This is where I kiss you, right?”

I nod.

Tyler pulls me close and lays a sexy kiss on my lips. And then he whispers, without needing to glance at the book sitting next to him on the bed, “Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged.”

“Then have my lips the sin that they have took,” I reply.

“Sin from thy lips?” Tyler replies. “O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again.”

He kisses me again, only this time like he’s going to fuck the living hell out of me.

“Oh, my God. That was amazing, Tyler!” I’m giddy with excitement. “You were amazing! My only note is that you can’t kiss me quite that passionately when we perform it for the class. But, otherwise, it was absolutely perfect.”

“Why can’t I kiss you that passionately? Romeo and Juliet are totally hot for each other. You said Romeo feels like he was struck by a thunderbolt.”

“Yeah, but they just met.”

“So what? Five minutes after I met you, we were swallowing each other’s faces and dry-humping each other on a dance floor.”

“Things were different back then. The slightest kiss was a huge thing.”

“Oh, come on. You think Romeo would have been any less hot for Juliet than I was for you out of the gate, just because it was the sixteenth century? For fuck’s sake, the dude kills himself over her at the end. That’s some next-level passion, son. I say we let the poor guy mack down on his bae the same way I macked down on you.”

“No, we need to do a stage kiss. Like this.” I give him a prim, little peck.

Tyler shakes his head. “Juliet’s not his sister. When Romeo sees her, she ignites a forest fire in the depths of his soul. He instantly knows she’s the answer to a prayer he didn’t even know he had. Yes, as it turns out at the end, they’re star-crossed lovers and totally doomed, but Romeo doesn’t know that when he first lays eyes on her. All he knows is he wants that girl more than he wants to breathe. More than he ever thought possible. He feels like he’s going to die if he doesn’t get a taste of her perfect lips. And that means Romeo needs to kiss Juliet exactly the way I kissed you at the party.”

Um… Did Tyler just say what I think he said? I clutch my heart, feeling like it just exploded all over the Muhammad Ali poster on the nearby wall. But Tyler seems oblivious to what he’s just implied. Indeed, he forges right ahead, apparently determined to convince me he’s in the right about the appropriate level of heat for our theatrical kiss.

“Zooey, you’re the one who always says great acting isn’t pretending—that it’s telling the truth. So let’s tell the truth about how a young, horny, hopeless romantic would kiss his dream girl when given the chance. I guarantee you, whether the story takes place today or five hundred years ago, that dude’s going to kiss the hell out of that girl, the same way I kissed you our first night on the dance floor.”

I’m blown away. Utterly incapable of forming words.

“Good. So it’s settled then,” Tyler declares, apparently misinterpreting my stunned silence as agreement.

I quickly gather myself. “No, Tyler. No matter how passionately Romeo might have felt about Juliet, you still can’t kiss me with that much heat in front of our class. No way.”

“Why not? They’re all adults. They can handle it.”

I shake my head. “If you kiss me with that much passion, everyone will know we’ve been having sex.”

“We have. No shame in that.”

“No shame for you. But everyone knows your reputation, Tyler. They’ll assume I’m just another one of your many conquests, and I don’t want people thinking that about me. It’s embarrassing.”

“Who cares what anyone else thinks about us? As long as we both know you’re not some ‘conquest’ of mine, that’s all that matters.”

My heart lurches into my throat. “I’m not a conquest?”

Tyler scoffs. “Don’t be ridiculous, Zooey. Of course, not.”

I shouldn’t do it. I really shouldn’t. But I can’t help myself. “What am I, then, if you had to put a word to it?”

Tyler takes off his masquerade mask, so I do the same.

“You’re my beaver. My adorable, weird, sexy, talented, funny, sexpot of an eager beaver.”

I make a face that says, Not what I was hoping for.

Tyler exhales. “Aw, Zooey.” He rubs his forehead. “I don’t like labels. We are what we are. It is what it is. We’re just doing our thing, feeling what we feel. There’s no need to call it anything in particular. A label won’t change anything.”

I remain stone-faced. A label will change everything, I think. But I don’t say it.

“Okay, here’s what I know,” Tyler says. He counts off on his fingers. “One, I’m having a blast with you—in and out of bed. Two, since I met you, I’ve been playing the best football of my life.” He shrugs. “So I’m just trying not to think too much about what it all means, or I’m afraid I’ll fuck everything up. It’s so damned awesome, why fuck it up?” He looks at me with pleading eyes. “Okay?”

I scoot closer to him, put my palms onto his cheeks, and kiss him. “Okay.”

“You’re my eager little beaver,” he whispers softly into my mouth. “That’s all I know. My dorky, weird Zooey Cartwright who’s going to be a star one day. And that’s all I need to know.”