Boner. I’d had a boner. Which was…not great.

Kiss Numero Dos occurred when I was fourteen and had a pretty good grasp of the fact that my cock liked Luna just as much as the rest of me.

By then I’d learned a bunch of tricks to avoid attacking her with it, especially since we slept together every night.

I’d been a freshman, Luna a sophomore. I’d been gaining popularity at All Saints High thanks to my last name and ability to throw a fucking ball, which was something the rest of the football team wasn’t so good at.

Girls had been all over me, and I’d hoped Luna might’ve noticed all the notes that poured out of my locker whenever I opened it. We’d still been best friends. Nothing had changed. Well, other than me. I’d started to fill out my skin with muscles, and a few growth spurts had resulted in my reaching five-eleven seemingly overnight.

It had been nighttime when I’d climbed up to her window like I’d done every single night for years after our families went to sleep. When she’d opened it to let me in, I’d pressed my lips against hers, whispering, “Take two.”

Biggest fucking mistake I’d ever made. She nearly slammed the window on my fingers. It had grazed my nails before I’d pulled away. By some miracle I’d managed to hold on to her chimney, and it had taken Luna a second to realize what she’d done. Once she did, she’d pulled me back in and saved me from certain death.

That night, while I’d been pretending to sleep in her bed, she’d been for-real writing me a letter of apology, in which she’d explained that she loved me, but only saw us as friends.

This time, I’d accepted it. Not long-term, obviously. But I knew this was a Luna problem, not a Knight problem. I saw the way she looked at me when girls were around, when notes were passed to me, when my phone lit up with unanswered text messages.

There was hunger there. Desperation—that hot, green liquid that slithered into your soul when you watched something that was yours be admired by others.

And so, I continued to slip into her room every night. I got it. She needed time. Time? I had plenty.

I’d decided to show her I wasn’t some kind of obsessed stalker. That I was capable of moving on. To bring the point home, I’d stopped ignoring other girls’ advances. I’d started dating, texting back, and flirting.

I stayed closest to her, keeping my alliance firmly with the girl next door. But I also had a chain of girlfriends who came and went—a revolving door of glossy-lipped beauties who wore the right brands and said the right things. I paraded them around school and brought them over for family BBQs, expecting Luna to ease back into our friendship now that I wasn’t trying to suck her face every time she looked my way.

Ironically, that’s what brought on kiss number three.

Kiss Numero Tres happened when she was seventeen and I was sixteen. I call it The Kiss of Death, because the damage it inflicted on our relationship was huge. Even now, a year and a half later, I was still dealing with the echoes of its destruction. For instance, Luna before kiss number three would have told me she was coming to Vaughn’s party. Luna after kiss number three barely communicated with me about what she was doing or where she was going. We were still hanging out most days, but it had turned into a bad habit more than anything else.

Back to that kiss. I was fooling around with a girl named Noei at the time. But I’d still cleared the day for Luna’s seventeenth birthday. I’d bought us tickets to a museum, even though the carnival was in town, because Luna hated carnivals—and zoos, and Seaworld, and anyplace where animals were captured for human entertainment. I’d had it all planned out. Luna was a vegetarian, and a vegan curry place had opened in downtown Todos Santos, right across from the museum. I’d bought her a bunch of weird-ass shit from Brandy Melville and had a seahorse tattoo inked on my spine, hoping she’d get the underlying message: that she was my backbone.

Luna loved seahorses with a passion. They were her favorite animals—something about the male seahorse being the one to give birth… Mom gave me so much shit before she signed the consent for the tattoo, but she’d known it was a part of a bigger plan, so she’d let it slide.

And if that wasn’t enough, I’d made Luna seventeen different birthday cards, all the while trying to downplay my excitement that we were spending the entire day together.

The day had been pretty perfect, as far as birthdays go. So perfect, in fact, that when I dropped Luna back at her door, she’d taken my face between her palms and smiled up at me. I’d stared at her like an idiot, thinking, Should I or shouldn’t I?

Darkness had washed over our street. Our families had been inside, probably eating dinner. No one could see us—not that anyone would have cared. It wasn’t a secret I’d chop heads and bring down the sun for Luna Rexroth.

Still, I’d kept on staring at her, searching for the okay in her face. By that time, I was pretty damn good at recognizing the okay in girls’ eyes when I looked at them. But not with Luna, apparently. Every time her eyes said yes, the rest of her said no. I’d decided this time I needed more affirmation before I fucked everything up and earned an unfriendly visit to my house from Trent Rexroth, Luna’s dad, with his even unfriendlier baseball bat.

She’d pressed my hand over her heart through her shirt. It was beating so fast, I’d thought she needed me to squeeze it back into her chest. My fingers had involuntarily twitched against the swell of her breast. The hint of a puckered nipple under my palm had almost made my knees buckle.