Catie squirmed, parting her lips to remind her friend that—the aforementioned shagging aside—it was all pretend. But she couldn’t do it. Not after last night, when they’d slept cuddled up and he’d made her breakfast again and she’d wrapped her arms around him from behind and kissed his back on her way to make the coffee.

None of that had been pretend.

“We’ve annoyed each other the entire time since we met,” she said at last. “This is… new.” Her honest words opened the floodgates, and she blurted out the truth. “It’s freaking me out.”

“I get it. Big change in the relationship.”

“It’s not a relationship,” Catie said automatically.

“Cat.” Veni was the only person in Catie’s life who could make that single-syllable nickname stretch out to three syllables. “You two have always had a relationship. It’s just that before, it was a relationship of frenemies—”

“He was my nemesis, thank you very much.”

“Whatever. You two were nemeses then.” Veni took off her sunglasses just so she could roll her eyes at Catie. “Thing is, you guys have never actively disliked each other.”

Catie parted her lips, shut them. Because Veni was right. She’d never not liked Danny. He’d just been the annoying teenage boy who irritated her but whom she’d cooperate with when it was to their advantage. “If we had actual potential,” she said, her chest tight, “shouldn’t we have come together earlier?”

“I dunno.” Picking up her coffee, Veni leaned back in her chair. “Maybe he was an asshole until now and you were a diva.”

“Danny was never an asshole,” Catie blurted out.

Only to have her best friend grin at her. “You just defended your nemesis before yourself. You’re in deep, girlfriend.”

Making a face at her too perceptive friend, Catie leaned back in her own chair.

“Seriously though,” Veni said. “Sometimes we meet people at the wrong time in our lives. Like if I’d met Ben the week after I left the loser, I would’ve sneered inside and walked away—because on the surface, Ben is as blond and blue-eyed and arrogant as that asshole. I was too raw to see to the marshmallow heart beyond.”

Catie chewed on that, had a glimmer of a thought too scary to share. Instead, she said, “Enough about my messed-up dating life. Tell me about you and Ben and the gathering of the parents.”

It was exactly the right thing to say to derail Laveni’s focus. So it was only after their breakfast, as Catie was walking back to her car, that she allowed that powerful, scary thought she’d stifled to bloom: What if the reason she’d never seen Danny as a potential lover was that she’d known it would never be just a flirtation between them? What if some part of her had known that it’d be deadly serious?