He understood at once that it was a money thing. He called, “Come on! It’s my cousin who stood you up. The family honor is besmirched. I have to buy you breakfast.”

He called the order to a passing waitress, not really giving Lexie a choice. She came and perched lightly opposite him, shy but pleased, he thought. He learned she wanted to study English lit and be a teacher. That surprised him. He realized how little he knew about her. Only what Spence had told him. That was mostly weird sex stories, but he’d gleaned a few facts. Like, he knew that her mother was a religious fanatic who’d hounded Lexie about both her grades and her virginity all her life. If she ever got a B, it was as bad as being pregnant. If she ever got pregnant, she might as well be dead.

“Her mom told her she’d been born in a little white dress that she could never take off. It would grow with her, and anything she did to stain that dress would stay. On her wedding day, she would have to wear it as she walked down the aisle at church. God and her husband would see it clear as day, so she must keep it free of blood and filth. Crazy, huh?” Spence had told him, and then cocked an eyebrow, grinning. “I gotta tell you, Trey. I have done some damage to that dress.”

Spence thought the mother was the reason she was both so wild and so damn stealthy about it. Also why she never skipped a single class and studied more than any girl he knew. As if an A were not enough. She needed 100s.

Trey didn’t learn much else that morning. He’d ask her things, but she’d answer short and then ask a question of her own. She had a way of cocking her head sideways, alert as a little squirrel, looking into his eyes with such attention that he felt worldly and interesting. It made him chatty. When she got up to go, Trey stood, too, and helped her into her patched jean jacket. It smelled like Swisher Sweets and almond oil, and she startled when she felt him sliding it onto her narrow shoulders.

Spencer told him later how much that simple gesture had impressed her.

“She’s like, ‘Oh! He’s such a gentleman!’” Spence batted his eyelashes, doing a swoony-girl voice. “Which translates to she kinda wants to bone you.”

He didn’t say it seriously, much less as if it made him jealous. Just in the bawdy, overconfident way the brothers all talked about sex. As if they were jaded forty-year-olds with orgies and opium in their long and sordid pasts, when really they were kids. Kids who had sex the same way they had beer: as much as they could get and mostly of low quality.