I felt my body freeze in a rolling tide from my toes to my face. He didn’t want to. I was his girlfriend as of tonight and we’d run through the city in the rain and we were all alone and it wasn’t going to get more romantic than this, so what could be . . .

I sat up. “Do we need to get protection?”

I wobbled on the word protection. I’d never said it in this context in my life.

“Ah . . . I do have some condoms. After the other night . . .” Oscar motioned upward, indicating the spot where my piano bench sat. “I guess I was feeling optimistic.”

He was smiling, but he was also shifting as far across the dorm bed as he could get.

“Well, great. So . . .” I felt really naked now. And wet and cold, with Oscar’s window-unit AC aimed straight at me.

“Oh, crap, let me get you a towel,” Oscar said, hopping off the bed. As he walked away, my skin went goose-bumpy. I crossed my arms over myself, weirdly ashamed, like I’d thrown myself at him instead of reciprocating.

He draped a striped beach towel over my shoulders like a queen’s mantle. “I think this is a little fast. I mean, I’m gonna sound like you now, but it feels like we just met. Do we know each other well enough for . . . this?”

My mind raced back to the museum, his rebuttal. “I know you better than you think.”

“Really?” His eyes lit, playful.

“I know your favorite composer, whether you’ll admit it or not.”

“Who?”

I whapped him. “Come on. ‘The man’?”

He almost smiled. “What else?”

“Um.” I bit my knuckle. “The way you write, the way your fingers move when you’re composing in your head . . .”

I demonstrated, a tiny spell.

A grin flashed over his face. “Fair enough. But . . . there are key things we haven’t even . . .”

“Oh.” I waited for him to admit it—the cause of the tension I could still see whirring underneath his smile. Was it what he’d started telling me that night at Wing Club, the feeling he had of being on parade?

But he shrugged. “Your non-summer life. My life back home. My friends, my school, your friends, your school. Whether I have pets. I realize this sounds stupid—”

“You have a beagle.” I tucked my knees under the towel, the fever of a few minutes ago feeling more like an illness now. “Sorry, go ahead.”

Oscar let out a frustrated groan. “I don’t want to be some fling for you.”

I closed my eyes, reliving that shock of emotion I’d felt tonight listening to his symphony. Not fling. Catapult.

“Anybody else, not you. I don’t want to wind up some story you tell your friends, about that time you were seventeen and . . .” He cleared his throat, nervous. “This feels more important than that. To me.”