And, lord of lords, Olivia actually laughed. “Okay, so what’s this Meg Ryan orgasm thing?”

“You’ve never seen When Harry Met Sally . . . ?” Chase stared at Olivia like she was an alien. Lame music, faking orgasms, and hadn’t seen the romantic classic?

“Nope. I guess I missed that one.”

“Sleepless in Seattle?”

Olivia shook her head.

“While You Were Sleeping?”

Olivia made a face. “Nope.”

“You’re so weird.” Chase was only twenty-five years old, but even she’d seen the romantic classics of the last few decades. “I hope your pawpaw’s house has a DVD player or Netflix. No wonder you have to fake orgasms. You’ve failed to watch only the most romantic movies ever.”

Olivia shrugged. “I’ve been busy. My turn. Truth or dare?”

Chase didn’t want to tell another truth. She hadn’t meant to let the one about orgasms slide. She’d had orgasms before, but only when she was by herself and didn’t have to feel someone touching her. She knew she was damaged and probably needed help, but since she’d never admitted to another therapist that she’d been raped when she was young, she’d never brought up her sexual dysfunctions. She’d had plenty of sex with plenty of people, which was shameful when she thought about it. She knew it wasn’t cool to shame women for having lots of sex these days, but she still felt like much of her sexual experience had been done trying to erase herself. So shame and censure were tangled up in her conceptions of sex. “Dare.”

Olivia grinned, and in her smile Chase saw someone she might not mind so much. Maybe Olivia wasn’t such a loser. If they had to spend the next few weeks together doing only God knows what, maybe they could at least find something in common . . . besides faking orgasms.

“Oh wait. Here we are,” Olivia said, slowing the car and putting on her blinker. “God, it’s been years, but it hasn’t changed a bit. Still has the old soda machine on the porch.”

To their left was a general store similar to ones she’d seen on movie sets. The front porch had an old-fashioned soda machine, the kind where you turned the lever and a glass-bottled soda rolled out, along with rocking chairs and a table that no doubt held a checkers board. Lettering scrawled across the window advertising FISH AND CHIPS and THE BEST BURGERS IN THE STATE. Only a few cars and trucks surrounded the older wooden building, which boded well since people still recognized her if they read dumb grocery checkout magazines.

Olivia pulled into an empty parking spot and shut off the engine. “I used to come here when I was younger. Every summer we drove up here to spend a month or so with my grandparents. My sisters and I piled into the back of the minivan, fighting over books and the iPod shuffle, while my parents yelled things like ‘Settle down back there.’ One thing we always agreed on was stopping at Foghat’s. They have the best onion rings.”