Sunday dinner went about as well as I could have expected. Grace was already a known guest, regularly coming over for dinner or just to talk with Mom; the two of them had been bonding over backyard work over the last few weeks, discussing everything from the best timing for deadheading roses to planting for spring. Tabitha was a perfect guest, deeply interested in what had happened to me and how I was doing. We barely touched on the business, but something in me felt very, very weird just sitting at the table in conversation with my former marketing manager.

  Part of it was probably that I’d always kept the business separate from my personal life before; I’d never done company entertaining at home, so having her here felt strange in itself, but it also felt like she belonged in an entirely different world than Mom, Carl, and Grace. Like they were characters in two different movies getting spliced together. The disconnect between them, and my place in that, created a kind of mental vertigo.

  Mom must have been “listening” and felt my quiet disorientation, because she picked up the threads of conversation to do most of the talking. The subject became the story of the Seevers moving in here and how our next-door friendship had evolved, despite Mom’s teasing yesterday not becoming all about veterans of womanhood teaching the new girl how it was done. Instead, it spun into Grace and Tabitha asking Mom all sorts of questions about her pregnancy and the goblin’s first year and telling Mom their own pregnancy and baby stories—with enough detail that Carl and I shared more than one horrified look.

  “I wanna go back,” I whispered to him as we moved around each other doing the dishes afterwards.

  “What?”

  “I wanna go back,” I repeated, half laughing and half serious. “God. I can handle being small. And not having a dick. But pushing out a baby? Oh, my God.”

  He chuckled, taking the plates from me. “Sucks to be you. I count my blessings every day, old man.”

  I stuck my tongue out at him.

  **************************************

  Monday morning, I got off at Hadley’s rail station to find a smiling Papa waiting for me across the street at the school gate. And God, Achilles hadn’t helped. Stupid demi-god. Papa even had a dimple. Dimples weren’t fair, and I didn’t care if the thought was juvenile; it was better than acknowledging the hormones raging in my young body, forcing me to respond to every flag of positive attention from the object of my romantic attraction.

  Romantic attraction. Limerence. If I kept the labels firmly in mind, maybe I’d be able to navigate this without coming apart. Jogging across the street, I stopped beside him on the sidewalk as the flood of students continued around us. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted one or two stopping to watch.

  “Hey, you,” he said, dimple deepening, and looking down didn’t help because God he was hot, broad shoulders and narrow waist shown off by his tailored Hadley blazer and vest.

  “Hey,” I said, and with that bit of eloquence found my hand smoothly captured, fingers intwined as he tugged lightly, pulling us back into the flow.

  “Looking forward to running your third mile today?”

  I blinked at the question and, fuck, it was Monday. “Noooo,” I groaned. It showed how bad off I was that I hadn’t even thought about the other thing with Mondays. “Could I break something? I could trip? Get a nurse’s note?”

  He laughed, swinging our hands as we passed through the doors. “Not a good trade off. You’ll live.” He stopped us in front of the offices, where we had to split up to make our own ways into Boy Country and Girl Country. “I’ll see you at lunch.” And bending down, he kissed me, a light kiss, a mirror of what I’d dropped on him in his car on Friday night. His hand separated from mine, and, with a wink, he turned and disappeared into the flow of boys headed south.

  Leaving my fingers tingling, my heart beating so hard I could almost hear it, and my knees feeling weak. My knees.

  God, this is terrible.

  I managed to navigate to my locker and talk to Brain like a normal human being while I changed street-skirt for school skirt, and headed for class before Pinky showed her face; I didn’t think I could answer a single question about the weekend without exploding (Pinky had been light on the texts, I’d told her everything had been great but I needed time to think about it all).

  In gym class, Gemma gave me encouragement along the same lines as Papa—I’d live. Or as she put it, “It’ll all be over soon.” Advice that could apply to so many things. But my time got better. A little. And after the fourth lap I walked and stretched and got proper feeling back into my legs soon enough I wasn’t staggering back to the locker room this time. So, progress, yay.

  At lunch I sat by Papa with Pinky on my other side. Brain had abandoned us, as I’d thought she would, waving at us from a table by the wall on the girl’s side. The lure of her science peers had been too great, and it made me feel warm; we’d done it right.

  That distracted only a little bit from Papa, but I got through lunch ignoring knowing looks from Pinky. Papa just acted like normal, other than pulling me into more conversations, and even there he let me decide how involved I wanted to be in the table talk. Still, I knew I wasn’t acting completely natural; Delia raised an eyebrow at us once, though she didn’t ask any follow-up questions to Papa’s detailed description of his bowling game. And everyone else’s but mine (I groaned describing my own performance).

  He was covering for my lack of eloquence, the considerate jerk.

  Then Brad mentioned the laser tag games of Saturday, cheerfully ragging on me and Pinky and Brain and drawing laughing return fire from Pinky, and that was all there was to say about the weekend.

  Afternoon classes passed quickly though I’d been less prepared for them than I had last week—emotional drama cut into study time—but I was still on top of my subjects. And then Fight Club started its second week and was done babying us; it didn’t change anything, just got more serious about our kata form workouts. The point wasn’t to add a second sweat-fest to our day, but to get us used to moving faster. Including changing time, Fight Club took an hour and a half, so we got out the same time as Sports Club; we changed in a smaller women’s locker in the Armory and joined the flood of students heading back to the main building from the boys’ and girls’ gyms.

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  Which is where I knew I’d find Papa from his ping, and slipped up behind him this time, giving him a poke in the ribs and falling into step with him and Brad. “Good practice?” I asked.

  He threw an arm around my shoulder. “Would have been better if Thumbs here knew how to throw a ball.”

  “Hey!” Brad protested, giving Papa a shove that without his anchoring arm would have pushed me right off my feet as he swayed into me and recovered. “Hey!” Papa shot back and shoved his friend hard in return, making me sway the other way with his lean.

  Bubbling with cheer and not even thinking about it, I slapped Papa’s firm stomach to get the goof’s attention. “Hey! Girl on board!”

  “Sorry!” He laughed but didn’t swing us again, just threatening Brad with his scowl as I tried to figure out what had come over me.

  Oh. The feeling was Papa’s cheer; it hadn’t been mine a second ago. I slapped metaphorical headphones down over my mental ears but didn’t know if it had worked; their antics made me want to laugh anyway.

  “Walk you to the station?” Papa asked and I nodded without overthinking it. I’d changed into my street skirt and had my school bag with me, so I didn’t need to go to my locker, not even for my phone—they let us take them to club, turned off, for just that reason. (We’d still lose them if teachers saw them, of course.)

  Papa dropped his arm to take my hand when we cleared the outgoing student tide, and I realized he’d been forcing a way for us with his size without even bumping anybody; they just moved. At the rail station, timing perfect and the four-car rail train bearing down on us, he let go of my hand. “So, today? Enough? Too much? Same tomorrow?”

  It took me a moment to understand what he was asking about; the public face of our dating. “Um, yeah. It was fine.”

  His dastardly dimple flashed. “Excellent. See you tomorrow.” And before I thought to brace, his head dipped and lips brushed my cheek again. Walking backwards across the imbedded tracks as I stood there staring, he gave a last wave before the slowing train glided to a stop between us.

  . . . Dammit! My cheek tingled and my knees didn’t let me move for a good thirty seconds.

  **************************************

  Coming in the door I didn’t see Mom, which was just fine; thirty minutes of riding the rail hadn’t given me back my words. Going straight upstairs to my room, I closed my door and leaned against it. When no constructive thoughts entered my head, I dropped my bag and, flopping onto my bed, buried my face in my pillow.

  Pillows were very useful.

  A minute later there was a knock at the door. Mom. I absently tried to feel her thoughts. Nope. “Enter, entrer, Komm rein.”

  I heard the door open and a moment later she settled beside me on the bed, chuckling. “Using your voice today?”

  “I’m too wiped to think it at you,” I muttered into my pillow. Every time I’d seen Papa today had been an endorphin-spike to my system, and that was without the devastating cheek kisses. God, this was terrible. I wasn’t going to survive.

  And Mom’s hand was on my back, rubbing circles through my shirt and blazer. Like I was Steph needing to be calmed. “We should talk.”

  I rolled eyes she couldn’t see, but turned over and scooted back to sit up. She did the same so we sat shoulder to shoulder again. Well, shoulder to arm with our height difference, which made her shoulder the perfect place to rest my head.

  Mom gave me a minute or two of silence, and then, “You’re in love with Papa.”

  “That wasn’t obvious with my crying over him Saturday?”

  “Hush.” She patted my leg. “Of course I felt it then. Do you know what else I felt? Fear. You’re terrified.”

  “Again, obvious.”

  “Yes,” she agreed seriously. “And because of that we didn’t talk about it. But tonight, well, tonight you’ve hit the acceptance stage, so I think you’ll be able to take what I have to say better?”

  Oh, good. Advice from a veteran. “Lay it on me. I’m ready.”

  “Not really, but here goes. Papa likes you, too.”

  I jerked upright. “What? No. Not like—”

  She sighed. “And this is where you’re younger than all the students in Hadley. When Carl and I saw him Friday? When he saw you? I felt his mood jump even in the crowd. Again, when he took your hand. His thoughts had the feel of a young man with a young woman to whom he is very attracted. Not crushing over, but very attracted. Calm down.”

  She said that last because of the panic spiraling set off by her words. Oh, God. Her hand stayed on my leg, grounding me as I took deep breaths.

  “Okay,” I finally said. “So?”

  “So now I’m going to say something I’d never dreamed I’d be saying. You need to date him.”

  “I am.”

  “No. I mean, really date him.”

  “. . . What?”

  “Just listen. With your history, you’re in a really bad place right now. Your trained response to finding yourself really attracted to someone is fear. It’s to shut it down. To get distance. To hide. Because you know it’s going to hurt.”

  I nodded. That much was a no-brainer; after what felt like a dozen hopeless crushes in school I’d never dreamed of acting on, Lorrie Waters had destroyed me. I’d never risk that again. “Do you know the difference between teen romance and adult romance?” she said as I struggled for some sort of equilibrium.

  “Perspective?”

  “No.” She chuckled. “Well, not only perspective. Mostly it’s Teen Brain. Not fully developed, awash with hormones heightening every emotion. But perspective, too. Teenage love is the strongest, purest, most innocent, but also most ignorant, form of love. All the deep urges with none of the learned caution. It’s to fall in love and immediately imagine not just a now but a future together, and to feel down to your core that it’s destiny. But it’s real, just as real as adult love. And, if you grow together, that’s what it can become.”

  “So, what?” I tried to wrap my head around what she was suggesting. “You think Papa and I— But he’s— I’m not—”

  “No, I don’t think. I don’t know. Here’s the secret. A good relationship doesn’t depend on two people being some kind of perfect match. You don’t need similar tastes. And the whole ‘opposites attract’ thing is mostly fantasy. What makes a match, believe it or not, is how the other makes you feel about yourself. If you feel that they see you, that they value you, if they make you feel special and desired and safe, they could be anybody.” She laughed. “Of course, when you’re in deep for someone, well, you lose all discernment for a while. The ‘love-haze,’ or as one song put it, ‘When your heart’s on fire, smoke gets in your eyes.’ So, you take your time. You move forward slowly. You date.”

  “. . . And you said Papa . . .” I wanted to be sick. Why did I want to be sick?

  “Papa,” she said patiently, “like likes you. What I’m saying, and I don’t want you to panic, is Papa could love you back. Like a boy loves a girl.”

  “But I’m—”

  “And you are very loveable. As a friend. As a daughter. As you. So, my advice to you is to tell him. Tell him you like him. Tell him you don’t know what that means just yet, or even what you want, right now. Be at least that honest with him and, trust me, he won’t laugh in your face. He won’t run screaming.”

  And now she rolled her eyes. “And really, what’s the alternative? Trying to keep him from figuring out that you’re crushing on him while fake-dating him? Now that is a stupid idea. So date. Get to really know him. Since you’re already in it, try and imagine that this time can be different. Because you’re different, while still being the you that we love.”

  “But—”

  “Hup hup hup,” she stopped me. “I’ve said my piece, now you need to follow your own process for decision-making. Think about it, go to sleep on it at least one night. Then verbalize your decision and explain it to yourself. If you’re convincing in your own head, one way or the other, you’ll know. And remember you can always change your mind.”

  And with that she kissed my hair and scooted off the bed. “Dinner’s in an hour, sweetheart. Tonight’s rule is you can talk about anything else. Talk about tomorrow. You’re looking forward to Chess Club, right?” She left me staring at my closed door.

  What.