Dang, now I feel bad. I hope I didn’t hurt him. “Trust me, if you had anything besides highlight clips on your Instagram, I would’ve been stalking you, too.”

His face brightens way up. “Oh, you looked?”

A strange lightness rushes to the center of my forehead. I can’t ever remember making a boy so happy. It feels so reassuring, so good. “Of course. Had to do my background research.”

“Is that right?” he says, grinning, and tilts his head to the side. His nose is crooked, like maybe it’s been broken a few times. I wish I could kiss that, too.

“Not that it gave up any goods on you. You don’t have any real pics on there. No friends. No ex-girls. Nothing but basketball stuff. And nobody has time to be sitting around watching you dunk and drain threes all day,” I say.

He smiles big, like I’m making his day.

But I’m greedy. I want to make his year, his life. So I gently reach for the menu in my back pocket. The one I wrote the fact about kisses on before I even knew how he felt about me. The one I carried around in my back pocket for over a week—steady stream of hope coming from my right butt cheek. Rex is about to flip when he sees it. But it’s not there. “Damn,” I mumble, remembering the menu is with Jordan and she’s not coming until the end of Rex’s game.

“Oh, is it your stomach?” Rex asks, thick eyebrows raised in concern.

“No, I’m okay.”

“What is it then?”

“Nothing.”

“You can tell me.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll tell you later.”

“Why can’t you tell me now?” he says.

I’m a little surprised by his persistence, but it feels kinda nice. Like we’ve skipped right over the beginning phase of our relationship, when people hold back trying to say and do all the right things. Like we’re already in this thing deep. “Because,” I say.

“Because what?”

“Because it’ll be better later,” I explain. For the full effect, I want to give him the menu in person. Telling him about it wouldn’t be the same.

“I hate when people do that.”

“Do what?”

“Tell you there’s a secret without telling you the secret.”

“Secret? There is no secret,” I say, now wondering if we’re having our first argument.

“Yeah, you just told me there was something to tell and simultaneously told me you can’t tell me what it is.”

“No, I said damn, and then you got nosy.”

“Well, if you weren’t going to tell me, why not keep the damn to yourself?”