I waited for her to mention Emily. I waited for her to somehow explain what she thought my problem was. Girls did that sometimes when I asked them not to touch me, when I touched them and they couldn’t understand why I didn’t want anything more from them. I waited to see what diagnosis Aly had for me, but she only inhaled, like she needed extra breath to organize her thoughts.

“It’s all chemical. Endorphins and serotonin that our brains produce when the right stimulus is introduced to our environment.” My eyebrows came up and I blinked, astounded by her theory. “What?” she said. “I watch ‘Forensic Files’ and ‘Bones’.”

This time when I laughed, Aly joined in immediately, a little sheepish, but that smile was wide, it was beautiful and my humor faded when that damn strange déjà-vu sensation hit me again. I knew I’d seen that smile before but damn if I could place it.

“Anyway, I just…”

“I get what you’re saying.”

“You do?”

She let me take her hand, didn’t raise that guard of hers. “No kissing?”

Aly hesitated, squeezing my fingers. There was something in her expression that I couldn’t place. It seemed like doubt, indecision and disappointment, but then what the hell did I know? “I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t like it. But we can’t…”

“No, right… I get it,” I said, sighing, resigned, when I pulled my hand away. “We’ll just stick with being friends. That’s what you want. Right?”

There was something in her eyes then, a weird flick that told me she was keeping something from me and part of me wanted to know what that was. The more sensible part, though, won out for once and I let her keep her secrets.

“Exactly,” she said finally. Then the weirdest thing happened. When the noise of my teammates entering the parking lot sounded behind my car and Aly looked in the rear view mirror to watch them, that easy, relaxed expression on her face suddenly vanished. Someone had spooked her, had her turning from me, fumbling with the door latch and mumbling something about needing to catch the bus. She muttered “See you later” and fled before I even had the chance to offer her a ride.

“Ransom!” Trent shouted, banging once on the roof of my Mustang. “Was that the same hottie that was here with your kid brother?” he asked, edging his body to the side so he could watch Aly as she disappeared from the parking lot. “You hooking up?”

“No, man,” I said, pushing his arm off my door. “She’s just a…a friend.” As soon as I said the words, I could taste something rotten coiling up my throat.

I meant to go after her, to ask her what about my teammates had her running off like a scared rabbit, but then my cell chirped with a text and I picked it up, waving Trent off, nodding to several of the guys as they ambled to their cars. Timber had the news I’d been waiting to hear.

Saturday night, after the game, you’re getting your dance.

I’d waited weeks for that message, had amped myself up with visions of that masked dancer as she moved around me, like some pathetic kid casing Playboy to help him along the first time he jacked off. I should have been excited. I should have been stoked, but all I felt still was disappointment that Aly had stopped kissing me, and acute curiosity about why she’d taken off.

I remembered everything about being with her, in excruciating detail. She made sure of it.

No one had ever had a hold on me like Emily. I’d loved her something fierce, right at a time when my parents had married and began the job of extending our family, when I thought I’d never stop smiling, never stop feeling like the world was mine to take. Sixteen and I believed I knew everything there was to know. I believed my heart could not grow fuller. I’d fought for her and won her. Then I’d chased her, dared her to defy her father, promised I’d make myself worth the rebellion.

And though I had no idea why, she eagerly broke the rules that were set to protect her. I promised her everything my sixteen year old hands could deliver, and in return I got that smile, that beautiful, wild smile that always had me guessing what she’d been thinking. I never could guess, I never had a clue. Not once. That should have been a warning.

I remembered it all—the small scar in the center of her palm and the tiny freckle directly over her heart that was the darkest among the faint browns and beige spots that covered the rest of her body. The quick breath of air that would morph into the sweetest groan when I kissed her on the back of the neck. They were all still so real to me, sacred images that I would not let leave my mind.

Until now.

That wasn’t true. Not completely.

I wasn’t truly asleep, despite the late hour. That place that keeps you from honest sleep is where I’d stayed that night. I was still aware of what was going on around me. Tossing my blankets back, shuffling my pillow under my chin while beyond my door hearing the quiet laughter and clink of ice sliding around in glasses. Trent with three girls from Tri Sig, all seniors who didn’t care whose bed they ended up in or when they got there.

They were, at least, not loud. It wasn’t the faint, sultry laughter that kept me from my dreams.

Like always, it was the guilt and, of course, that voice.

You forgot me, it said, pushing past the recall of Emily’s hair tangled between my fingers. I huddled down deeper into my pillow, blindingly grabbing for another one to blot out her words.

You don’t love me.

“Not true. Not true,” I whispered and without really thinking about it, I rested my fingers over that tattoo.

How could I not? Every kiss was burned into my mind. Every touch left behind scars that could never be seen. Emily’s soft, small fingers gliding along my skin, her hands shaking as I stood in front of her for the first time wearing nothing but my boxers. Me taking those hands, holding them close to my chest to keep them still.

“Are you scared?” she’d asked and though I knew I’d have come off looking bolder, stronger if I’d lied, I couldn’t do it. I’d never lie to her.

“Hell yes.”

We’d escaped the city in the offseason, sneaking away to her family’s cabin on Cane River Lake away from my parents and Emily’s obligations at dating a boy she didn’t like. Eddie Parker didn’t have her, no matter how often her father had him over for dinner or told her his plans for their future.

She was mine, and that March night with the lake around us purring frigid winds over the cottage and the waters quieter than a library during mid-terms, I kissed Emily and knew she would not stop me from going as far as I had dreamed we would.

We’d managed to get undressed, awkwardly holding on to each other as we fumbled to the bed. And when I hovered above her and all that straight, red hair fanned out around her, I thought maybe, once in my life, I’d have a perfect moment. It was something that had never happened for me, something I’d prayed for. “Blessings delayed are not blessing denied,” Bobby would always say, but I didn’t think God cared for my prayers or that the raging hormones in my body edged me toward a sin I wouldn’t want to ever be forgiven for.

“Ransom?” she’d asked, stopping me with her hands on my shoulders and in my mind I worried that she’d changed her mind, or if, like so many times before, Emily had once again gotten scared of what we both professed to want.

Arms trembling as I paused over her, my hips on top of hers, my dick covered in a condom, ready to take what I believed was mine, I looked down at her, expecting that her fear had won out again.

It hadn’t.

Those small fingers moved from my shoulders, to my neck, then to back of my messed hair and Emily touched my face, fingertips on my mouth, the cleft in my chin as though she needed a moment to see me and think about nothing but the two of us right there in that moment. “You’re getting something no one else in the world will ever have. I’m giving that to you because I love you.”