“Zaaaack,” Alexa cooed. “Do you want to date him? Does he want to date you?” She gasped. “Are you already dating? Oh my God, I have to call Kira.” She fumbled with her phone.

“No!” Zack insisted. “No, we’re not dating. Don’t call Kira. She’ll skin me if she thinks I told you before I told her.”

“But there is something to tell, right?”

Zack sighed. “You get more like Kira with every passing day. This is why I’ve avoided dating all these years: everyone puts so much pressure on you.”

“And here I was thinking it was because you were a giant, self-sabotaging commitment-phobe.”

Zack arched a brow. “Thank you. Look, John and I are not at the boyfriend stage right now, and we may not be for a long time. There’s still a metric fuckton of stuff we don’t know about each other.”

“But?”

“But during our date yesterday, he told me that’s where he wants this to go.”

Alexa actually kicked up a heel in glee. “And did you tell him that’s what you want too?”

“Yeah,” Zack said, “I did.”

“Did you mean it?”

Zack huffed. “Alexa.”

“Okay, okay.” She held up two hands defensively. “I’m only prying because it’s refreshing to see you interested in someone. Not that there’s anything wrong with dating casually in your youth, or hell, never settling down at all, but somehow I never saw that as the endgame for you.”

“Really? Why?” Zack was genuinely curious.

Alexa shrugged. “I can’t say exactly. Maybe it’s the way you spoil Ziggy rotten. Maybe it’s the way you refuse to blow off your family no matter how much they drive you crazy. I know we haven’t known each other for that long, but you always struck me as someone who wasn’t so much disinterested in love as afraid of it.”

Zack took another contemplative drag on his cigarette. Eventually, he said, “I don’t know. I remember being thirteen and realizing that I like boys. I was in denial for a few years, but then I came out to my parents right before I left for college, and after that . . . Well, there was so much sex to be had, I didn’t have time to think about it.”

Alexa laughed. “That sounds about right.”

Zack threw his cigarette on the ground. “I guess I just watched so many of my friends fall head over heels for the wrong person and then get their hearts broken that I decided I wasn’t going to let that happen.”

“Those were teenagers, though,” Alexa pointed out. “Very few people marry the first person they meet in college.”

“I get that, but I was a teenager myself less than two years ago. How am I any better off than them?”