My heart is pounding. It doesn’t feel safe having Frankie in my room. It’s too much like having her in my head.

“So, why are you really here?” I say. Way too bluntly.

Frankie straightens and turns to look at me. “To see you.”

She moves toward me. I back up.

Frankie stops between my bed and the row of guitars. Yvonne is still on the carpet, where I left her. She glints like an oil slick. Frankie reaches out and gently touches the neck of the acoustic, propped on its stand. “It seems like there’s always someone else around, you know? Like somebody’s always watching. Like we’re never really alone.”

My heart pounds harder. Jesus. Is she actually reading my mind? “Yeah,” I say.

Frankie faces me. She steps closer. I try to step backward again and bump straight into the closed closet door.

Frankie’s a lot shorter than I am. We’ve stood face-to-face so seldom—because I’ve avoided it, in part—that I’m surprised by it all over again. But when she looks up at me, with those dark eyes, I know that I’m the smaller one.

“What are you afraid of?” she says.

There are so many answers that they crash into one another. My head’s full of rubble.

Frankie is something else I haven’t earned. She’s something else that could disappear in a second, and it will only hurt if I try to hold on.

“I’m not afraid,” I say. “I just— We’re about to graduate. Leave. I don’t think I can, like, promise anything.”

Frankie looks like she might laugh. “Have I asked you to promise anything? Because I don’t remember doing that.”

“Okay. No. You haven’t.”

“So, how about instead of guessing what I want, you just let me tell you?”

My skin is electric. If my heart pounds any harder, she’ll be able to hear it. Christ, my deaf cat who’s hiding somewhere in another part of the house will be able to hear it. “All right,” I say.

But Frankie doesn’t tell me anything. She stands on her toes, and she places both hands on me, one on my neck, one on my chest, so I’m sure she can feel my pulse, and then she presses her lips against mine.

And I’m lost.

In an eighth beat, my arms are around her. One wraps behind her back, all the way around her body, crushing her against me. The other hand slides up through her sleek black hair.

She moves her palm against my jaw, tilting my face downward, so she can kiss me more deeply.

My breath is on fire.

She pulls me backward. We stumble together toward the bed. My foot bumps Yvonne, still lying on the floor. I don’t even glance down.

We hit the saggy little bed with a creak.

Frankie Lynde. In my bed. Beneath me. Her body, the shape of her, the hollows and curves, pinned under me, my weight crushing the space between us until there isn’t any space left.