Well, that was some reunion.

I’m still trying to figure out what the fuck, exactly, just happened between us as I drive my rental car over the back roads away from Ganagua Lake towards the B&B, a damp towel wrapped around my waist. I hadn’t brought a change of clothes. I didn’t expect to go for a swim with Reggie, of all people, and then end up fighting with her on the beach.

The memory of her dark eyes flashing in the sun, and those pink cheeks I always loved when we were growing up, makes me smile in spite of our shouting match. It sucks that I can’t go back right now and tease her until she laughs.

I’ll just have to slowly back away and slip out of town before we run into each other again.

I don’t want to—I sure as hell don’t want to—but what choice do I have?

My thoughts are interrupted by the sound of my ringing cell phone, and I hit the button on the car’s dash that connects the call to my speakers.

“Hello?”

“Come out with us!” The voice of my best friend Gideon Hawke against a background hum of other voices fills the car. “I’ve got my plane ready to go. I want to get out of the city.” From how he sounds, and the various cheers in the background, there’s definitely alcohol involved. It sounds like a hell of a time. But I’m not jealous. No way.

“I’m already out of the city.” I adopt my best offended voice. “I can’t believe you forgot.”

Gideon pauses. “Oh, shit, buddy, did we make plans?”

“Hi, Adam!” Gideon’s wife’s voice comes through the speakers too loudly.

“Hi, Kennedy!” I answer back.

“Where the hell are you?” Gideon says, totally ignoring the interruption. “Am I supposed to be there?”

“At my high school reunion? No.”

“Hang on. I can’t hear a damn thing. Let me get away from all these people.”

There’s a muted rustling, like Gideon has actually put his phone into his pocket and walked away from wherever he was. Knowing Gideon, it’s somewhere over the top, somewhere that’s the perfect launching pad for whatever adventure he wants to go on next. It will probably involve skydiving, or some other death-defying stunt, although that kind of thing happens less often now that he’s with Kennedy. After a minute, he gets back on the phone.

“So you’re back in Reckless Falls,” he says, laughter in his voice. “Thought you were never going back there.”

I told Gideon as much on the very first day of college, when I burst into our shared dorm room with a kick to the door and way more swagger than I actually felt. He gave me a level look, told me it was bullshit, and then suggested we climb up the fire escape to the forbidden top floor. “To have a good view while we have some beers,” he’d said, and I went along with it. Instant best friendship, and we’ve never looked back.

“I decided to give this shithole one last kiss-off,” I tell him. “Plus, I want to sell my dad’s place.”

“That behemoth? Just renovate the shit out of it, my friend. You could put a fire pit in the living room.”

“That would be living dangerously.” Speaking of living dangerously... “I’ve already had one reunion, and I’ve only been here one night.”

“With who? Tell me it was someone hot as fuck who never gave you the time of day in high school.” Gideon sounds genuinely excited for me. “She won’t be able to resist you now.”

I open my mouth to tell him that it was, in fact, someone hot as fuck, but the words stick in my throat. I’ve said that about a lot of women over the years, and Gideon has probably heard it more often from me than anyone, but I just can’t say it about Reggie.

Not the Reggie I’ve known since I was twelve. Even if it’s true.

“No, she gave me the time of day in high school.” It’s coming back to me now, the way we were together. I haven’t thought about it in a long time. “I guess in the end I kind of...fucked her over.”

“In a good way?” Gideon laughs.

I laugh, too, but it rings a little false. “No, I—” It wasn’t a nice thing, what I did to Reggie, but it still doesn’t explain why she’s so unbelievably pissed off at me after all these years. “You know women. I don’t really know what I did, but it wasn’t good.” Then it occurs to me that Gideon might have zero clue who I’m talking about. “Do you remember Reggie? I think you must have met her once or twice in college. Or, wait—”

“I’ve never met a woman named Reggie. Especially a woman so attractive that you won’t even tell me what she looks like.”

“Irrelevant. I’ll never see her again after this. She hates me.” I hear the bewildered tone in my voice like it’s coming from another person. “But she’s cute when she’s angry.” That’s the most I can bring myself to say about her, and it feels slimy in my mouth. It’s God’s honest truth, but for some reason, it just feels wrong to say it. Even to Gideon.

“I know what you have to do,” he intones, and I hear it in his voice, what he’s about to suggest, before he says it.

“No.”

“You have to sleep with her.”

“No.”

“You must sleep with her before the clock strikes midnight on the night of your reunion.”

I laugh out loud. “For one thing, she didn’t even go to my high school, so that shoots a hole in your little plan. For another...” For another, my entire body is already on fire just thinking about stripping off Reggie’s clothes and running my hands over her hips, to her back, and lower... “For another, that ship has sailed.” I think of the boat I left abandoned in Ganagua Lake. “It was more of a rowboat, actually.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Gideon can’t contain his laughter. “I bet you, in the name of our friendship, that you can’t sleep with her by the end of—”

“It’s never going to happen. She wouldn’t go for it.”

“I bet you!” Gideon shouts out, the background noise growing louder. He must be rejoining his original party.

“I don’t accept—”

“I bet you, so you have to do it!” he shouts out one final time, and before I can argue any more, he ends the call.

I pull into the parking lot of the hotel and take the spot closest to my room. This bet with Gideon is just classic Gideon. And even if Reggie was the least bit interested, I wouldn’t want anything to do with sleeping with her. I’m only here to get one last look at my old classmates and unload my father’s house, hopefully to one of their parents.

Still, I hate to lose a bet.