“Huge. A milestone.”

“That so?” His voice dropped lower, so I leaned forward to hear him better. I mean, of course that was why I did it. “And besides that?”

A loud chorus of “What shall we do with a drunken sailor?” erupted from downstairs, then a hammering on the door. “Sundance! One down already! Mitchell threw up on the rug in that gray room.”

“Clean it up,” he called without looking away from me.

“No way, man. Your house.”

I almost offered to go clean it. Really.

Then Cass’s cell phone rang and he answered it, lowering his voice and turning slightly away from me. “Yeah. Yeah. I’ve got it handled. This is a bad time, but it’s all under control.”

If his buddies were going to use his cell to get his attention, it was only a matter of time until they barged in again. I stood up, twirled my hair into a knot, let it go loose.

“Any more?” Cass pressed. “The peacoat can’t be it.”

Abruptly I pictured the words on the girls’ bathroom wall after Connie Blythe caught her boyfriend pushing me up against the lockers to kiss me freshman year. But Cass wouldn’t have heard of that—this was his first year at SBH. “Oh, I have no secrets. Everyone knows about me.”

That came out in a way I didn’t intend, sadder, more ashamed, and Cass gave me a sharp glance, then stood up quickly. “Hey . . . d’you want to head out to the beach? Take a walk?”

The beach. Okay. That was good. The beach was my home, my safe place, evened the playing field. Which I desperately needed leveled, because as we walked through the house again, I kept, despite how pointless it was, cataloging all the differences between Cass Somers’s life and my own. At our house, we have stacked blue plastic milk crates to hold Mom’s love books and Nic’s training manuals and Em’s brightly colored children’s books and my . . . whatever. This house had glass-fronted cases with low lights and leather-bound editions. Our paint is dinged, and where we have wallpaper, it’s faded and peeling. They’d had an interior decorator and a “theme.”

But the beach, with the sand and the familiar sigh of the ocean, the beach was an equalizer.

It was a full moon shining across the water. Freezing. Hardly any stars. Cass exhaled a puff of white, chuckling silently as we crunched over leftover snow. When I looked back, I could see several intertwined silhouettes on the porch. Evidently the music hadn’t completely killed the vibe.

Cass was walking purposefully. It suddenly made me falter. Maybe there was a guest house. Maybe that’s where this had been intended to go all along. He was silent and the sound of nothing but our footsteps clomping along was making me nervous. Each step seemed to say a different thing, like when you pull the petals of a daisy. “He really likes me, No he doesn’t, This isn’t about a hookup, Yes it is.”

“Do you know,” he said softly, “the first maps were all of the sky, not earth? The ones on cave walls? I always thought that was cool.”

“Why were they?” I ask. “Do you know?”

“Not for sure. I’ve made up explanations—like that back then they thought the earth was too big to map, but they thought they could see the whole sky—didn’t know it was reversed.”

It isn’t about a hookup, I thought. It can’t be. That’s not a line. That’s nothing like something Alex would say. Or Jim Oberman.

“Sorry about that back there. Like I said, I underestimated the party thing. I just had one . . . so you would . . . um, come.”

I stopped dead. “You did not!”

He shrugged, smiled, his ears going pink. Or maybe that was just the cold.

“You couldn’t have just asked me on a date?”

“I didn’t think you did those.”

What was that supposed to mean? I’d landed hard on the “He likes me not” foot. “What? You think I just put out? Is that what the kiss in the car was about?”

Cass took a step backward. “No! I mean, yes, I do like you, but I didn’t just . . . that is, yeah, I’ve thought about that, I mean you . . .”

My temper was now rising fast enough to banish the cold. “Do you have any idea what you’re saying? ’Cause I have none. You’ve thought about what?”

“Oh for God’s sake!” Cass said, kicking away a piece of ice with his foot. “What do you want me to say? You. I’ve thought about you.”

Me? Or sex with me? Or both? “Why don’t we just go back to the party? Since I don’t do dates.”

He huffed out a breath of exasperation, white in the dark air. “Because whatever you want to believe—or hear—I really like you. You. Come on, Gwen. Let’s just keep walking.” He reached out his hand, palm up, holding it steady, letting me measure the sincerity in his eyes.

I took his hand. His fingers curled around mine and he tucked both our hands into his parka pocket. We walked for a while in silence. After a few minutes, Cass said, “You’re shaking again. I seem to keep leading you into hypothermia.”

By this point, what with all the high emotion, I had absolutely no idea where we were. When I looked around, I saw to my surprise that we’d walked a full circle around the house, and wound up standing right near my truck. Was it a sign? Should I leave now?

“Gwen . . . I just want everyone to go away. Except you. I don’t know why I thought all this was a good idea. Safety in numbers or something. Do you think we could just get in your car, get away for a bit before we have to face the keg-heads again?”

It seemed like a simple question.

The house was throbbing with loud people and even louder music. The night air was still, breeze soft and silty from the river, peaceful. I couldn’t read Cass’s expression, but I wanted to. I wanted to stay outside with him and talk the way we had in his room. “We could just warm up a little,” I said, nodding my head at the Bronco.

He opened the door for me. The front driver’s one, not the backseat door, waving his hand to gesture me in, in a gentlemanly way. Then he came around to the passenger side, sliding himself in. I flipped the key in the ignition, turned on the heat, swiftly muted Raffi talking about his Bananaphone.

“So . . .” I started, wondering where to go from here, whether I should tell him some private and personal thing about myself in exchange for knowing about his maps. I went for: “Does this ability to map things mean you never get lost?”

“I get lost,” he said firmly. “Like now. I can’t tell what you’re thinking. About me.”

But then maybe he could, because his eyes widened and he bent toward me, so slowly I almost didn’t realize he was moving. Or was it me?

Then his lips were on mine. One cold hand rubbed the back of my neck and the other slid slowly down the curve of my side, coming to rest just above the waistband of my jeans. I made a sound, which should have been shock, or protest, not a hum of pleasure.

But that’s what it was, because Cass Somers was the virtuoso of kissing, the master, compelling and accepting in equal measure. Like before, he didn’t rush immediately into deep kissing, just a soft firm pressure, then sliding to kiss my cheek, slipping back, hovering, waiting for me to fall into him.

And I did.

Before I knew it, I was running my hands all over his back, and his fingertips were slipping up my sides to my bra. It had a front clasp and his hands went right there, unerring. Then he moved them aside, muttered, “Sorry,” against the side of my mouth. “I . . . I . . . God, Gwen.”

“Mmf,” I responded logically, slanting his chin to angle his jaw toward me, pulling his lips to mine again.

Don’t talk. If he talked, I’d think, and stop those fingers, which were edging my bra straps down and off, smoothing a slow caress back up my forearms, trailing goose bumps in their wake.

Cass broke the kiss. His eyes were bright sea blue, pupils wide and black. I stared at him, stunned, consciousness slowly returning, which he must have seen in my face because he pulled back.

He cleared his throat. “Stop?”

Shaking my head emphatically was wrong. A mistake. Certainly, so was me flipping up the arm rest and moving closer. Which resulted in Cass pulling me right into his lap.

I took my hands out of his hair (warm at the roots, frost cold at the tips) and reached down. What was I doing? I was doing exactly what Cass was, and my fingers folded on his as he pulled the lever to recline the seat and BOOM I was lying on him and his hands were all over my back, then swirling my hair aside so he could put his open mouth on my neck.

Oh my God. Cass Somers had lightning-fast reflexes and some magic potion coming out of every pore that dissolved self-control, caution, rational thought.

It was all gone and the only thing I could think was that it was the best trade I ever made.

I was the one who practically crawled into his lap. I was the one whose hands slid first up under his shirt to all that smooth skin. After a few more minutes, he was the one who stilled my fingers with his own. “Gwen. Wait.” He shook his head, took deep breaths. “Slow down . . . We’d better . . .”

He sat, tugging me up with him, and said, “Let’s go back to the house. I’m not thinking clearly.”

I should not have said, “So . . . don’t. Think clearly.”

But I did say that.

He looked at me, startled, a little blankness and a little—what was it?—in those blue, blue eyes. I didn’t take the time to define it. I shrugged off my shirt, pushed myself farther onto his lap and reached down for the button of his jeans.

“Gwen—”

“Shh.”

“I don’t—”

“But I do.”

And we did.