Bee and I still hadn’t talked about that afternoon at the pageant, which, to be honest, was fine by me. Nobody can repress better than a good Southern girl, and I wondered if the best thing to do was to forget any of that had ever happened. So Bee and Ryan were a thing. So she hadn’t told me.

That was... fine. No big deal at all. I certainly wasn’t watching the two of them, waiting to see if their hands touched or if they glanced at each other the way they had that afternoon. And I definitely hadn’t spent a lot of time wondering if, no matter what they’d told me, there hadn’t been a spark of something there before.

No, definitely not wondering any of that.

Next to me, David felt like he was strung so tightly that he nearly vibrated, and I couldn’t blame him. There was this bizarre vibe in the car, like something bad was coming, but that could have been all the tension. Still, when Ryan made the turn onto the highway out to the country club, I almost told him to turn back. Which would have been dumb, of course. I’d promised David we could do this, but if I was being honest, I didn’t expect anything to happen. Alexander had taken David’s powers from him, and no matter how much David thought he could somehow overcome that, I didn’t have particularly high expectations. If anything, this felt more like a favor we could do for him.

That thought in mind, I laid my hand on David’s leg, trying not to notice how he flinched when I first touched him. But then he glanced over at me, his blue eyes bright behind his glasses, and he linked his fingers with mine. It had been a while since we’d touched, and I was surprised by how good it felt to have his hand in mine, even if it was only for a second.

The big stone and wood sign announcing the Pine Grove Country Club was lit up, but everything else was dark as we turned down the winding drive. Ryan rolled down his window, waving a card in front of a sensor, and the gate slowly swung open. Technically, the club closed at seven, but since Ryan’s dad owned the place, he could come and go as he pleased. And if his dad asked him why he’d been out at the club on a Wednesday night at ten, Ryan could always say he’d been cleaning the pool or something. That’s what he’d said on the nights we’d come out here after hours—memories I didn’t want to dwell on right now.

From the almost embarrassed way Ryan’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror, I didn’t think he wanted to stroll down memory lane either.