I had to clarify something. “Are you lovesick?” I asked.

He met my eyes. “Horribly.”

“About me?” I asked, just making sure.

He gave me a look like I was adorable and ridiculous and lovable, all at once. Then he nodded and got serious again. “Every single minute of every single day.”

“It’s not you that scares me,” I said. “It’s the things I feel about you.”

“The things I feel about you scare me, too,” he said, looking very serious. “We’ll just have to be very careful with each other.”

“Okay,” I said. Agreed. Next, I kissed him breathless.

“We can stop whenever you want,” he kept saying.

“Okay,” I’d say, and keep going.

The official plan was to snuggle. But I just kept kissing him instead.

I don’t know how long this had been going on—an hour, maybe?—when I started tugging at his pants, like I wanted him to take them off. I’m not even sure what my plan was, exactly. I just wanted there to be fewer barriers between us. I just wanted to get rid of everything that was in the way.

He shook his head. He didn’t break the kiss, but he pulled my hand away. “Nope. Not a good idea.”

I went back to tug some more. “Why not?” I said, not breaking the kiss, either.

“Because we had an agreement. And I’m trying to stick to it.”

“But the agreement was more about me than you.”

He squinted at me, like, Kind of. “True. Ish.”

“So if anyone should be allowed to amend the agreement, it should be me.”

“We’re not amending the agreement.”

“Because we don’t have protection?”

At that, Owen squeezed his eyes closed.

“What?”

“We do, actually, have protection.”

“We do?”

He put his hand over his eyes. “My cousin Alex put a condom in my pocket at the party.”

I thought about that for a second. Problem solved. I went back after the pants.

“Nope,” the rookie said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t want you to regret anything.”

“I won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

Maybe he was right, but I was willing to find out. “Don’t you want to?” I asked.

He honked out a hoarse laugh. “There are not enough words in the universe to describe how much I want to. But we can’t.”

“I think we can.”

“Cassie,” he said, lifting up on his elbows, “I don’t want to mess this up with you.”

His saying no had the opposite of the effect he intended. It didn’t discourage me. It freed me up to go forward.

His saying no just made me say yes harder.

I pushed him back down on the bed and started working on him to change his mind. I kissed him with new purpose. I ran my hands through his hair. I draped myself over him.

He kept talking. “We don’t have to rush things.”

But I could tell he’d closed his eyes. And the way he was breathing—so deep and fast—I could tell that I was melting his resistance.

“We can do this anytime,” he went on, still protesting. “Life is long.”

“Life is not long,” I said, running my hand over his torso. “It’s short.”

“I think we should wait,” he said, kissing me back just as hard.

I was winning. Or maybe we both were. But I could feel him giving in.

Then I pulled back and looked him in the eyes. I had a serious question. “Do you think, if we got started, but then it wasn’t good for me, you could stop? After starting, I mean?”

He gave me a serious answer. “If we got started and it wasn’t good for you, I wouldn’t want to do anything but stop.”

“I might need to stop,” I said. “I don’t know. But what I do know—right now—is that I’d really, really, really like to get started.”

* * *

WE DIDN’T STOP.

I never even thought about stopping again after that.

All that closeness, and trust, and time we’d spent together—plus the fact that he was a Nobel Prize–level kisser—made it easy. There were fumblings and mistakes, and moments of self-conscious laughter. The point is, we laughed a lot, and we stumbled along, and we took things slow, and fast, all at the same time. At one point, he accidentally pulled my hair. A little while later, I accidentally elbowed him in the cheekbone. Somewhere in there, for a few scary minutes, he thought he’d lost Cousin Alex’s condom—which, laughing with relief after he found it, we decided would be a great name for a garage band.

But as goofy and silly and fun as everything that happened between us in that room, that night, on my virginal white bed, was—it was serious, too. And had nothing to do with the past or the future. We were just alive, and together, and happy—right then and right there.

Would it always be just exactly like this? Of course not.

The rookie was leaving, my mother was dying, and the world was full of monsters. Good things didn’t last, people hurt each other every day, and nobody got a happy ending. But that night with him made me see it all in a new way. All the hardships and insults and disappointments in life didn’t make this one blissful moment less important. They made it more. They made it matter. The very fact that it couldn’t last was the reason to hold on to it—however we could.

Yes, the world is full of unspeakable cruelty. But the answer wasn’t to never feel hope, or bliss, or love—but to savor every fleeting, precious second of those feelings when they came.

The answer wasn’t to never love anyone.

It was to love like crazy whenever you could.

So I kissed him back. And I made a choice to believe in that kiss. I stripped us down until there were no barriers left, and I made a choice to get started and see what happened.

What happened was good. What happened was just exactly what I needed.

There was something powerful between us, and I had this unshakable feeling that it could rebuild something essential that had crumbled inside me—the same way that laughter soothes sorrow, or company soothes loneliness, or a good meal soothes hunger.

It was a profound thing to realize. Love could heal me. Not the rookie, not some guy, but love itself—and my impossibly brave choice to practice it.

It really did turn out to be power, not weakness. The power to refuse to let the world’s monsters ruin everything. The power to claim my right to be happy.

I made a choice to trust the rookie, but it was the choice that mattered the most.

I won’t lie. Sleeping with the rookie that night was the hardest thing I’d ever done.

But it was also, without question, the easiest.

Twenty-four

THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up with a naked rookie in my bed.

I guess there’s a first time for everything.

Woke up late, I should add, because, understandably, I’d totally forgotten to set my alarm.

Nothing about this situation alarmed Owen—but everything about it alarmed me.

“Get up, get up!” I said, pulling the blanket to wrap up in. “My mom’s downstairs! It’s morning! We’re late! We’re on shift today! Come on, come on!”