“We don’t have a thing.”

“You kissed her on three separate occasions!”

He accepted this with a nod. “Have you kissed anyone?”

“No.”

He froze with his sandwich midway to his lips. “No one?”

I shook my head, taking a bite and breaking eye contact. “I would have told you.”

“Really?” he said.

I nodded, face burning. I was sixteen and hadn’t been kissed. His No one? echoed inside my head, and I felt completely pathetic.

“What about Donny? Or . . . what’s his name?”

I looked up at him and stared meaningfully. He knew Danny’s name.

“Danny?”

He smiled, busted. “Yeah, Danny.”

“Nope. Not even Danny. Like I said, I would have told you. Because you’re my best friend—jerk.”

“Wow.”

He took a ginormous bite of sandwich and stared at me as he chewed.

I thought back to all the weekends we’d spent together, all the stories he’d told me about Christian being a maniac or Brandon having zero game with girls at school. I thought about his updates about his brothers and their girlfriends, and wondered why Elliot was always so tight-lipped about his own escapades. It threw me. It made me feel like maybe we weren’t as close as I thought we were.

“Have you kissed a lot of girls?”

He mumbled, “A couple.”

Something inside me was rioting. “Have you done more than kiss?”

He turned a new shade of red and finally nodded, taking another big bite so he wouldn’t have to elaborate.

My jaw slowly lowered to the floor. I waited until he was done chewing and had taken a sip of lemonade to ask, “How far?”

Countries were established, went to war, and split into smaller countries in the time it took for Elliot to answer.

“Elliot.”

“Shirts off.” He scratched his eyebrow and nudged his glasses up his nose again with the tip of his finger. Stalling. Avoiding eye contact. “Um . . . and with one girl—not Emma—hands in pants.”

“You have?” I felt my eyes bug out. “Who?”

“Emma was just shirts off. The rest was this other girl, Jill.”

I put my sandwich down, my appetite completely gone. The kitchen was on the darkest side of the house this time of day, and it suddenly felt too cold. I lifted my hands, rubbing my bare arms.

“Macy, don’t be mad.”

“I’m not mad! Why would I be mad?” I took a shaky sip of lemonade, trying to calm down. “I’m not your girlfriend. I’m just your best friend who apparently knows nothing about you.”

He took a step around the kitchen island, and stopped. “Macy.”

“Am I overreacting?”

“No . . .” he said, and took another step closer. “I would definitely take issue if I knew some guy had his hand down your pants.”

“I think you’d also take issue if it happened and I never told you.”

He seemed to give this fair consideration. “Like I said, it depends. It would bug me, yeah, so I wouldn’t want to know about it unless you felt something more than . . . momentary attraction.”