“Midnight.”
“What happens if you miss curfew?”
I shrugged.
He pulled up to a traffic light and looked over at me. “Nate, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”
“You’re mad?”
“You think?”
“Don’t play games with me. Just tell me what’s wrong.”
“Maybe you should ask Chloe.”
“Chloe?”
I finally turned to look at him. “You had quite the little party going there tonight. Too bad she had her car at school. You could have dropped me off first and made her your last stop.”
He stared at me for a long moment like I’d lost my mind. “You cannot be serious.”
“The light’s green. Go.”
He took his foot off the brake and made a left turn. “Nate—”
“You practically ignored me the entire evening.”
“I thought that’s what you wanted. You flinch every time I get anywhere near you when other people are around.” He made a frustrated noise in the back of his throat. “I don’t know what you want.”
“I want you.”
“You’ve got me.”
“Chloe thinks she’s got you. Do you know how that makes me feel?”
He glanced over at me. “How does that make you feel?”
I couldn’t answer. I picked at my cuticles. Up ahead, a deer darted across the road. I watched it disappear into the dark. “Can we go to your house for a while?”
“Mom and Ben invited some friends over after the play. I don’t want to get caught up in all that adult-adoration crap tonight.” He glanced at me. “I want to be alone with you. Unless you don’t want to—”
“No,” I interrupted him. “I mean, yeah. I want that too.”
He turned into a small parking lot in a wooded area and pulled the car far up under a stand of trees. He cut the engine and turned off the lights without waiting for the auto shutoff. The quiet was sudden. I used my sleeve to wipe the condensation off the window.
“Where are we?”
“Ridgewood Park. There’s a pool and tennis courts and a basketball court right over there.” He pointed, but it was too dark to see anything.
He shifted in his seat to look at me. I could hear his breathing and my breathing, unnaturally loud in the quiet car.
“It makes me feel like it’s not real,” I said, looking out my window at the blackness, “like we’re not real. Everybody looks at you and Chloe, and they think she’s what you want.”
He reached across the console and found my hand and pulled it to his lips. “What I want is right here. What’s real is right here.”
“Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way.”
“What do you want me to do? You can’t have it both ways. You want me to act like there’s nothing going on between us when we’re in public, and then you’re mad when that’s what you get. What do you really want, Nate?”
“You can’t always get what you want,” I mumbled.
“But if you try ... you might get what you need.”
I sniffed. “You’re quoting The Rolling Stones to me?”
“Mick Jagger must have known something. The Stones stayed together for decades.”
“I always thought he had a thing for Keith Richards.”
“He wasn’t singing ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’ for nothing.”
I laughed a little. It faded quickly. He pulled me to him. “Oh, Nate. I don’t know how to make this right. I don’t like pretending around our friends. I wanted to be celebrating with you tonight. I wanted you running your hands under my shirt and sitting next to me and squeezing my leg under the table.”
“She was squeezing your leg under the table?”
“Stop.” He pressed his forehead against mine. “Look. Either we go on pretending we’re something we’re not, something we’ve never been, and keep on getting hurt and angry and frustrated, or we ...” He stopped.
“We what?”
He didn’t answer. He closed his eyes and looked away from me for the first time.
“Is that what you want?” I asked.
“What I want is you. All of you. All the time.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, an image of Chloe leaning against him, giggling, touching him sharp in my mind. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“No more pretending.”
“Do you know what you’re saying?”
“I know. And if that bitch Chloe ever lays another hand on you, I’m going to break her fingers.”
He chuckled. “I’ll hold them out for you.”
A silence descended upon us as we tried to figure out where to go from here.
“You know,” I said, “I think we just had our first fight.”
He laughed a little and said, “Hmm.”
“I think this means we get to have makeup sex now,” I said, my voice slightly hoarse.
“I thought you were playing hard to get?”
“Yeah, well, I got over it.”
“Does that mean I can do this now?” He slipped his hand up under my shirt and flattened it across my chest. My heart pounded against the warmth of his palm. I watched his face watching mine. “How about this?” His dropped his hand and grazed it across the strained zipper of my jeans.
I swallowed hard. “I have a curfew, you know.”
He grinned, and then we were all over each other. Our mouths, our hands. I wanted him, and I had no patience with buttons and zippers and things. And we didn’t let the console keep us from pressing our bodies together, his on mine and mine on his.
Suddenly, Adam pushed against me with his hands. “Nate. Nate. Nate. Slow down.”
“What?”
He was breathless. “Damn, you know, you really should come with a black-box warning. You’re going to hurt yourself... or me.”
“You lit the fuse, so don’t complain if you get a little gunpowder on your fingers.”
“Gunpowder?” He laughed and pulled me back to him. “I’ll show you gunpowder.” He released the seat and it flopped back, then he twisted me around in a maneuver I thought impossible in such a small space.
Suddenly, a beam of light. My eyes snapped open.
“Shit.” I scrambled to get my jeans up and zipped.
The light shone through the fogged-up window, and then a fist pounded the glass. “Step out of the car, please.”
“Dammit.” I groped around for my shirt. “Where’s my fucking shirt?”
“Here, I’ve got it.” I grabbed for it, but he held it behind him, just out of my reach. “Nate, calm down. Kids get busted messing around in cars all the time. It’s not that big a deal.” He handed me the shirt and I yanked it over my head.
“You