Clark didn’t say anything for a long moment, and it was like I could practically feel him turning over these words, thinking about their implications. Finally, I felt him kiss the top of my head and rest his chin there. “How about that.”

“So next summer,” I said, “you’re going to want to refine your strategy early. If you want a chance of winning, that is, because—” It was like my brain caught up to what I was saying just a moment too late. Clark wouldn’t be here next summer. He’d be back in Colorado, or he’d be somewhere else, but he would not be in Stanwich, doing a scavenger hunt with my friends.

“Oh,” Clark said, pulling away a little so he could look at me and dashing my hopes that he had just not been paying attention to the last thing I’d said. “Um. Are you—”

“Never mind,” I said quickly, feeling like this was a conversation I really didn’t want to have. We had been having a nice moment, and the last thing I wanted to do was spoil it. I stretched up to kiss him, wishing I could rewind the last minute and delete it. “We’re good.”

We had to get moving not long after that. Clark finally gave me my keys back, and we kissed good-bye when he insisted on walking me to my car, even though it was only parked a few feet from his. After we’d kissed as long as we could without me really being in danger of staying out past my curfew, Clark got into his car and kissed me one last time through his open driver’s-side window, and I watched him drive away, his taillights growing fainter until he rounded the bend in the road and I lost them. Then I headed home, yawning.

I let myself in, and stopped in the kitchen for a glass of water. As I was drinking it, I saw a note taped to the kitchen TV, in my dad’s neat, slanted handwriting.

Well?

DID WE WIN?

I smiled at that, then looked down at the phone in my hand. I normally just texted my dad when I got home, so that even if he was sleeping, he could see the time stamp. But I was pretty sure I’d seen a light on as I’d driven up to the house, and as I glanced down the hallway, I saw that there was a light on in my dad’s study and that the door was cracked open.

I walked down the hall and knocked once before pushing the door open all the way. My dad was lying on the leather couch in his study, reading some papers that he was holding above his head. He pushed his reading glasses up and smiled when he saw me.

“Hi,” I said, leaning against the doorway, giving him a small smile back. “I’m home.”

Chapter THIRTEEN

“So Karl and Marjorie are on the run,” I said, as Clark, lying next to me on the couch, pointed the remote at the movie we’d been totally ignoring, silencing it. “But,” I said as I ran my fingers through his hair, “Karl doesn’t know Marjorie’s sold him out. Told the highwaymen about him.”

Clark tossed the remote in the general direction of the coffee table and started kissing down my neck. “Oh, are there highwaymen now?”

“Of course,” I said, twirling my fingers in his hair, leaning in to kiss him. “Every good story has them.”

? ? ?

“And so I asked Bri what I should do about Wyatt now, since he told me about this other girl he likes, and she had like nothing to say,” Toby said as she paced in front of me in the gallery that was mostly impressionist, except for the unicorn tapestry and the Warhol.

“Hmm,” I said, trying my best to focus on her, but finding that every few seconds, my thoughts were straying back to Clark. His eyes, his lips, his hands . . .

“Andie!” Toby said, waving her hand in front of my face. “Are you even listening to me?”

? ? ?

“Of course,” Clark said, as I rolled on top on him on the couch. We’d removed the side and back pillows, since they kept getting in the way. We hadn’t yet moved things into his bedroom—I think we were both a little too aware of the implications that might come with that—but we had pretty much turned every couch in his house into a bed equivalent. “Marjorie doesn’t know that Karl has some plans of his own.”

“Oh, yeah?” I asked, in between kisses, as I slipped my hands under the fabric of Clark’s T-shirt and pulled it over his head. Ever since I’d seen his abs on the beach, I tended to need constant verification that they were still present and accounted for. “And what might those be?”

? ? ?

“She needs to let it go,” Palmer said as she glanced away from the stage and to me. I was slouched down in the theater seat, my feet propped on the seat back in front of me. I’d mostly come to the community theater for the free air-conditioning between walks, and had found myself pulled into the Toby-Wyatt conundrum. “And Bri agrees with me. He told her how he felt, and now it’s just getting super awkward.”

“Right,” I said, nodding. There was part of me that agreed with Palmer. But most of me was thinking about the fact that I’d get to see Clark in less than two hours, and my pulse was already racing just thinking about it. “Totally.”

“Oh my god.” I looked over to see Palmer shaking her head at me. “Alexandra. You are so far gone.”

? ? ?

I was beginning to understand what Palmer, and even Bri, had been talking about now. My boundaries, the ones I’d once clung to so fiercely, had long since vanished. Now I was the one moving us forward, while Clark would stop, his eyes searching mine in the darkness, asking me if I was okay. If I was sure. And with every new threshold we crossed, it was getting harder to remember just why I’d clung to all those rules in the first place. When I could think about it clearly—always after the fact, my brain no longer gone fuzzy at the sight of Clark and the feel of his hands on me—I would realize that it wasn’t a coincidence it was happening now. It was Clark. I trusted him, and I knew him, and it made me wonder, every time we stopped, just why we weren’t going forward. And as I started to care very little for anything that wasn’t the two of us, alone in the darkness, it fell to Clark to pick up the slack.