“I don’t know how many times I dove. I just know I did it long enough for the sun to come out and stopped only when a speedboat approached me with the sheriff and my parents on board.”

I took a long pause before continuing. “Two days later, they found him.”

“Shit, Thomas.”

“So…that. That was the pain I was focusing on. For the most part.”

Ethan didn’t say anything. He didn’t say he was sorry, nor did he ask me anything else. He simply raised my hand by the wrist and softly kissed it where my scar was. It wasn’t a particularly long moment, but it felt as if it had happened in slow motion.

I grabbed his shirt and made a fist, putting some weight on it so I could rise up a bit and look at him properly, then I kissed him. I climbed on top of him, and it was the first time I had kissed him, and in that moment, my heart almost leaped out of my chest and ran to him.

We kissed for what felt like hours and were eventually interrupted by my phone, vibrating on the side table, just above our heads.

“Can you reach it?” he asked breathlessly.

“I don’t want to,” I told him, barely pulling away. “But it might be Noah.” I then kissed him some more.

The way he kept running his hands down my lower back was so fucking distracting. I reached out, knocking an empty beer bottle to the floor as well as a pile of books under my mother’s copper lamp—which also fell to the floor but thankfully didn’t break—and finally was able to grab my phone. As I looked up at it, Ethan kept kissing my Adam’s apple and biting my neck. I swear, I could barely keep my eyes open.

I typed whatever message I could think of and all but threw my phone back on the side table, and then I went back to tending to his lips for another minute.

“Was it him?” he asked, mid-kiss.

“Uh-huh.” I nodded.

“Do I have to leave?” he asked before biting my neck again.

“Don’t you dare,” I said, and we kissed for a few more minutes.

It was then that his phone started to ring.

“Ugh,” I sighed.

“I’m not picking up. I just need to take it out.”

I moaned. “What? Why?”

“It’s in my back pocket. It’s confusing.”

I couldn’t help but smirk.

Ethan wrapped one arm around my waist and, in a single motion, flipped us both and got on top of me, removing his phone and throwing it next to mine on the table. It was quite impressive.

“Don’t you want to know who it was?” I asked and almost hit myself as soon as because, really, who the fuck?