We must have sat like that for several minutes without saying anything. Which was probably a good thing, given how talkative I’d been recently.

“We should probably get back to the club,” I said at last, when my breathing and my pulse had returned to normal. My brain, of course, was blown away. “There’s a car coming to take me home.”

He gave me a sidelong glance. “But we’re not done yet. You only had two. I owe you another orgasm.”

I laughed and grabbed my panties and my purse. “I’ll take a rain check.”

He looked surprised. “Really?”

My mouth clamped shut. “I—that’s not what I meant. I meant it’s fine. Two is plenty.”

“But then how will you know I was telling the truth?”

I shook my head at him and checked the time on my phone. Yeah, we had to get back. It was nearly eight. “Honestly, I don’t think I could handle another right now.” That was categorically untrue. I could have half a dozen more of those and still beg for more. Literally beg, as it turned out.

What the hell had happened to me just now? Hannah Swift did not behave that way.

He plucked the phone from my fingers. “Okay,” he said, typing away, “but I owe you.” He handed it back to me and I saw he’d added his number.

I looked down at the entry, confused. Is this how it usually went with one-night stands? I had no basis for comparison.

The ride back to the yacht club, we chatted about utterly mundane things. Weather, traffic to and from the mainland, and even, to my eternal chagrin, how the gas mileage was on the truck. I can’t believe I asked him that. I can’t believe he answered.

When we got to the club, I saw a black town car waiting for me near the front.

“Guess that’s my ride,” I said to Boone.

“Swanky.” As I moved to get out of the car, he put his hand over mine on the bench seat. “Hannah.”

“Yes?” I turned back. His face was in shadow.

“You have my number.”

I nodded.

“Hey,” he said suddenly. “You’re okay, right?”

A tiny, nervous laugh escaped my lips. “Oh, Boone,” I said. “I’m more than okay.” I leaned across the seat and placed a soft kiss on his lips. “Thank you for tonight.”

And then I slipped away. Boone waited until I was in the town car before driving off, which I thought was sweet of him. The driver was an older gentleman who barely said two sentences for the whole ride back to Canton.

Which was a relief. I sat back against the plush leather seats, my hands trailing idly over my sensitized skin, through my mussed hair, across my swollen lips. I was probably going to be sore tomorrow, both from that hard truck bed and from the sex itself.

Oh my God, what had I done? Don’t get me wrong, it was incredible, but also absolutely insane. I looked at the phone, where his number was in my contacts. Boone. That’s it. No last name.

I’d just has sex with a guy whose last name I didn’t know. Who did that kind of thing? Not Hannah Swift, that’s for sure. And then he gave me his number.

Quickly, before I could talk myself out of it, I texted him back.

Now he had my number, too.

Oh, who was I kidding? He had my number from the first moment at the bar. He certainly had my number in the back of that truck. Why had I said those things to him? I was not a talker in bed. I always thought the idea was ridiculous. But I’d talked for him. I’d begged for him. And he’d talked, too. He’d called me baby…and I liked it. And every time he’d told me to come, I’d complied, as if I could somehow orgasm on command. Or maybe only on his command.

I let my head thunk back against the buttery-soft seat. So much for my innocent little flirtation with the neighbors’ handyman. Right now, I didn’t know who I knew less: Boone or myself.

I put my hands down on either side of my legs and pressed into the seat, fighting for a calm I couldn’t conjure. Okay, Hannah, get a grip. Yes, you did that crazy, crazy thing. It was totally wild and very unlike you. But—be honest—was there a single moment of this evening you didn’t like?

Nope. Not one second, not one iota, not one little tiny bit. I’d loved it all. I may be stuck in a dark little car, but my spirit was floating somewhere in the stratosphere, and there was a smile on my face that seemed stuck there for good.

---

I was still wearing that ridiculous grin the next afternoon, when I met a few friends for lunch. They’d suggested Verde, a favorite restaurant of ours near the Canton campus. I suggested about five other places, while secretly thinking anyplace but Verde. I never wanted to set foot in that restaurant again. Even though I knew Tess was out of town and not waiting tables, I’d spent a few days stalking that place last winter in an attempt to confront my sister about our relationship. Everyone on staff knew me, and I’m sure what they knew wasn’t great.

“You’ve been a total hermit since you got back from Europe, Hannah,” Caitlin said as we took our seats at the Thai restaurant I’d dragged them to instead. I made the excuse that you couldn’t get good Asian food in Europe—such a lie, by the way, the Indian in London is to die for— and that I was craving some drunken noodles. “Part of the benefit of you being a townie is I have someone to hang out with during summer school.”

“Sorry.” I shrugged. “It’s been a hectic summer.”

“Well,” she said, smoothing her curly halo of red hair, “my utter lack of a social life has been a boon to my grades at least.”

Boon. My cheeks went nuclear and my facial muscles seems to have a mind of their own. I quickly took a sip of my water to try to cover it. They needed to work on the air-conditioning in this place. I fanned myself with my menu.

“Hannah?” Emily asked from across the table. “You okay?”

“I’m great.” I studied the menu. Great didn’t even touch it. I was spectacular. Ecstatic. Orgasmic, even.

Caitlin sat back in her seat and crossed her arms over her chest. “You just got laid.”

I stared at her. “What?”

“Don’t try to deny it. You’re smiling like the town fool, blushing like a schoolgirl and your skin looks like you just stepped out of a spa. You got laid.”

What was the point in denying it? “Yes.”

Emily pounced. “Who is he?”

“No one,” I said, and started reading the soup menu. It was too hot for soup. Way too hot for soup.

“He’s someone,” Caitlin said. That girl was entirely too perceptive for her own good. She was the first to realize there was more than I thought between Dylan and Tess last fall, too.

“No one you know,” I said. “And it’s nothing. He’s just some guy I met.”

Emily snorted. “Leave it to you, Hannah, to spend six months traipsing around Europe only to come back to Canton to nail some random.”

“Wait,” said Caitlin, sitting up. “You didn’t sleep with anyone in Europe?”

“You know, Caitlin,” I said, closing my menu and folding my hands primly on top, “I’m a little concerned by your obsession with my love life. Have you ‘nailed’ anyone recently?”

“As a matter of fact, I have,” she answered, her own nose up in the air. “I hooked up with an adorable Beta just last weekend.”

Emily high fived her. “That a girl. Sadly, I have to live vicariously through you two. I haven’t slept with anyone but Dean in five years.”

“Oh, poor Emily, trapped in the bonds of true love,” Caitlin quipped. I thought I might be off the hook, but she whirled back and fixed me with an intense glare. “Now you spill. Who is this guy? He’s not a Canton student?”

“No way,” I said. “He’s just a guy I met. In my neighborhood.”

“In your neighborhood?” Emily asked skeptically. “Is he…old?”

“Oh my God,” gushed Caitlin. “Is he married?”

“No!” I held my hands up in defeat. “He’s just some guy. He’s twenty-two. We were bored, we had a few drinks, one thing led to another…it was nothing.” It was not nothing. “It’s not going to happen again.” There. That was more like it.

“So he’s home for the summer?” Emily said. “Where’d he go to school?”

No, and he didn’t. I sighed. “I really—it was just one time.”

“Fine.” Caitlin nodded satisfied. “I, for one, am glad you’re finally moving past that whole thing with dickhead Dylan.”

“And his slutbitchskank.” Emily nodded.

This was why we couldn’t go to Verde. Even if the slutbitchskank in question was not waiting tables, all her friends were.

I knew my friends were just trying to be supportive, but I hated it when they talked about Tess this way. I had a hard enough time trying not to think of her in horrible terms. Tess was very open about the fact that she was the reason Dylan broke up with me, and that she was very sorry that they’d hurt me. I wondered if that had anything to do with her upbringing. Maybe all those years of keeping her very existence a secret from me and my mom made her less inclined to lie to me now.

Most girls would not own it like that, and maybe that helped me believe her that neither of them had wanted to hurt me at all. It also helped that it was so blatantly obvious that Dylan loved Tess. Like, loved her. Every time he looked at her I half-expected time to stop and stars to start falling from the sky. He’d never looked at me like that. No one had.

Also, trying to forgive Tess was super important if I ever actually wanted my sister to be a sister. And I think she wanted it, too. But my friends didn’t know anything about all that, so I just laughed good-naturedly at their jokes and waved to the waiter to come take our orders.

I was halfway through my plate of noodles when my phone buzzed. I checked the readout and my eyes widened. Boone.

I tore it? Me? That was rich. He’d been the one dragging me all over the back of the truck. I sneaked a peek at my companions, but no one seemed interested in my text. Grinning and blushing again, I texted back:

There. That was plenty flippant. I returned to my lunch. Emily was telling us a story about her father’s new girlfriend, who was about twenty-five and dumb as a rock.

“So then she asks how you get to Paris from France,” she was saying when my phone buzzed again.

Wait, he slept in that truck? I stared at my phone as if it somehow held the answers.

I do a lot of camping, he’d said last night.

Was Boone homeless? Had I slept with a homeless stranger last night? More to the point, had I let him pay for drinks?

No, that was silly. I’d been the one who suggested the truck. He’d wanted to go back to the yacht club. Except, where would he have been staying at the yacht club? Not in one of the rooms, surely…

“Earth to Hannah!” Caitlin called. “If that’s not a naked picture of Channing Tatum on your phone then I have no idea what has you so captivated.”

“Sorry,” I said, and stuck the phone in my purse. I’d figure this out after lunch. Right now, every flirty thing I’d planned to say to him seemed designed to make me sound like a spoiled, sheltered ditz.

Boone might be homeless. The fact that he had a job and a cellphone didn’t mean he had a place to live. Lots of laborers lived in their cars. Except, he hadn’t had any stuff crowding the truck, just that one toolbox thingy strapped to the bed.

The rest of lunch I was pretty much a lump, since I was so busy reviewing everything I’d said to him last night to see how naive and privileged I must have sounded. Talking about my trips to Europe and my taste for wine…oh, Hannah, you bitch. And I’d let him pay. He’d rescued me twice that afternoon, and I didn’t even buy the man a beer.

By the time I got back to my house in my mother’s borrowed car, the unanswered text was practically burning through my purse. I felt its magnetic pull at every stoplight between the restaurant and my driveway. My eyes went automatically to the Gardners’ driveway, but no pickup truck sat there this time.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Somehow it would be easier to talk to him face to face than through the anonymity of text. But I should just ask him. He’d been blunt and forward enough with me yesterday, both in the bar and…afterward.

I picked up the phone. How could I word this so I didn’t sound rude, or prying, or like a total rich bitch?

I held my breath until his reply came back:

His words conjured an image in my mind of Boone flat on his back in the bed of the truck, shirt off on a hot summer night, staring up at the stars. If there was ever an excuse not to have air-conditioning, that sight would be it. I felt a bit better, though, just knowing there was a place he called home. Still, I should have paid for the drinks. Maybe I could make it up to him.

My phone buzzed a few seconds later.