“He was rolling around on the fucking ground, pointing and laughing at me!” Josh yelled. “My mouth was full of blood from my knocked-out teeth. And I kept trying to spit it out, but I was flipped over the edge, and high, and had blood rushing to my head, and my balls were sore from being so cold.”

“Help me, Hunter! Help me!” Blake mocked in a feminine tone.

“What happened?” I couldn’t stop laughing. “How did you get down?”

“Some guy walking his dog saw us and called an ambulance,” Josh said.

“Why the fuck didn’t he just get you down?” Blake yelled.

“Why the fuck didn’t you just get me down?” Josh retorted.

“What happened?” I was laughing so hard my sides hurt.

Josh answered. “So the guy called an ambulance. It took them forever to get there.”

“It was, like, two minutes, you pussy,” Blake said.

“Fuck you, Squinty. It felt like forever.” Josh’s eyes moved to me. “So the ambulance gets there, and the dudes help me down, check my teeth and shit, and then they asked us what’d happened.”

Blake laughed again and pulled me closer.

“And?” I placed my hands over his and linked our fingers. “What did you tell them?”

“This is so fucking bad.” Josh shook his head. “Hunter and I looked at each other, and I don’t even know what happened . . . I think we were both so paranoid from the weed that we thought we couldn’t tell them the truth.”

“What did you say?” I needed to know.

“Hunter here—” He stopped, unable to speak through his cackle. When he finally calmed down, he continued, “Hunter said that vampires came and tried to attack us! We tried to fight them off, but they got me, hence the blood, and then they hung me off the end of the bleachers as a warning to the werewolves that they’d been there!”

We all roared with laughter.

I looked up at Blake, with teary eyes. The good kind. “Vampires? Werewolves?”

He just shrugged and said, “Twilight had just come out.”

“Where to next?” The cab driver asked as he started to reverse out of Josh’s driveway.

Blake pulled me so close to him that I was almost on his lap.

“My house, I guess.” I looked up at him, but he was looking out the window, his mind somewhere else. “Blake?”

His gaze dropped to mine. “Huh?”

“The cab. My house or yours first?”

His eyes fell shut. When he opened them, they were glazed and red. He was holding in tears. “Stay with me tonight?”

And that was all it took.

I’d known it was coming. And I’d known it would be soon. But I wasn’t prepared for it. I wasn’t ready for the moment where my mind caught up to my heart and the walls I’d built crumbled.

I wasn’t ready to admit that I’d fallen in love.

Without a word, he took my hand and led me up to his bedroom. I stood in the middle of his room while he went through his dresser and pulled out a shirt. He didn’t hand it to me like I’d expected. Instead, he set it on his bed, turned to me, and slowly slipped my dress over my head. I stood in front of him, in the darkness of his room—lit only by the moon outside—in nothing but my bra and panties.

And I’d never felt more beautiful in my life.

My eyes drifted shut. I waited for him to touch me. For his hands to follow where his eyes had roamed. But it never happened. The touch never came. Then the soft material of his shirt covered me. His voice came out in a whisper: “I like you in my clothes, Not Abby.”

He waited for me to get into his bed before following. Then he pulled me into him—the heat of his bare chest against my back. His hold was tight. So tight I almost couldn’t breathe. But that was fine—because in this moment, all I needed to breathe was Blake.

His nose skimmed along the back of my neck, moving my hair to make way for his lips. His kisses were soft and slow, but they were also commanding. His hand moved under my shirt and flattened against my stomach. Then his palm crept higher. And higher. “Blake.”

“Mmm?” The wetness of his open mouth, followed by his tongue, made me shiver.

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t know,” he said. The frustration, the plea, the need in his voice was enough to make me turn in his arms. Once we were face-to-face, he continued, “I feel like I need to—no, we need to—do something so that you don’t forget me.”

I reared back. “You think I could forget you?”

He dropped his gaze, but he didn’t speak.

“So you want to have sex?”

“No,” he said quickly, lifting his eyes to meet mine. “I don’t know. Yes. I just want you to remember me.”

My chest tightened at his words. “Would you forget me?”

“Never.”

“Then what makes you think I’d forget you?”

“Because that’s your goal in life, Chloe. To be forgettable.”

“That’s not fair, Blake.”

He sighed. “Maybe not, but it’s the truth.”

I let his words sink in and settle before I spoke. “I’ve had sex, Blake.”

His eyes narrowed.

“With lots of guys.”

His lips thinned to a line.

“And I don’t remember them.”

“So what are you saying?”