“I mean, she’s this sweet little girl without a mom . . .” He says it like it’s obvious why I’d stick around, and okay, from the outside I can see why he’d think that. But he doesn’t know them.

“She doesn’t need me,” I reassure him. “She’s got an awesome, involved dad. I’m this . . .” I wave my hand around, unsure. “This accessory. I mean, let’s be real: I don’t really know how to . . . ‘mom’ anyway, so she doesn’t seem to need anything from me.”

He grunts a little, looking down at the twig he’s slowly and methodically shredding. “Okay.”

I glare. “What does ‘okay’ mean?”

“It means okay.”

“You can’t think that long before giving me an ‘okay.’ That’s a condescending ‘okay.’ ”

He laughs, and tosses the stick to the ground before looking up at me. “Okay.”

A challenge. He wants to engage me, I can tell.

“Goddammit.” I turn and stare up at the education center and the gray clouds rolling in behind it.

“She might need a mom when she gets her period,” he says quietly. “Or when her friends are jerks.”

“Maybe she’ll have a friend in a closet who listens to her instead,” I counter, and then turn to look up at him, suspicious. “Why does it feel like you’re trying to talk me into staying with Sean? Are you reverse-psychologizing me?”

Grinning, he relents. “Come on, let’s talk about something else. Favorite word?”

Heat ripples across my skin. I’m so unprepared for this that my mind stalls and suddenly, there are no words, anywhere. “I’d need to think . . . What about you?”

His laugh comes as a low rumble. “Mellifluous.”

I scrunch my nose. “That’s a mouthful.”

“It most certainly is, ma’am,” he growls, with a meaningful lean to his words.

He gets a pebble tossed at him for that.

“Your voice is mellifluous,” he murmurs, pushing off the bench to stand and move toward me. “And come on. Your turn. You don’t get to think too hard on this, cheater. You know the rules.”

I watch his lips part as he looks at my mouth. Watch his tongue dart out.

“Limerence.”

There’s no other word like it: The state of being infatuated with another person.

Elliot’s eyes shoot up to mine, pupils dilating like a drop of ink in a pond. “You’re terrible.”

“I’m not trying to be.”

He nods to the trail marker, beckoning me to follow. We hike down the path, and it reminds me of walking with him through Armstrong Woods, or along the dry creek bed in summer. It’s so weird how it feels like another lifetime, and also like it was two weeks ago. Slowly, our steps converge into the crunch . . . crunch . . . crunch of feet on gravel moving in tandem. He’s shortened his strides to match mine.

“Are you happy?” I ask him.

The question is so abrupt, I expect him to balk a little, but he doesn’t. “I’ve had moments of it, yeah.”