“Sean said that Alex told him that you two were together,” she said quietly, as if she were letting me in on a huge secret.

“Interesting,” I replied, raising one eyebrow. I was surprised that they’d spoken at all. From what I’d noticed, Alex didn’t like Sean.

For the next three hours, we listened to our professor make connections between the subject material and a movie he’d seen that weekend. None of his stories ever made sense, but we humored him. He was the one grading our papers, and we couldn’t afford to point out that he was rambling completely off topic. Plus, I liked Professor Morrow. He reminded me of one of my neighbors from New York. The old man had spent most of his time alone, and whenever he had company, he’d talk for the entire visit, barely letting his guest get a word in edgewise.

“Well?” Hailey asked when we took a fifteen-minute break.

“Well what?” I asked, pulling an apple and some crackers out of my bag.

“Well, are you two together?”

“I guess.”

“You guess?” she asked, looking at me like I’d grown an extra head. “Where’s the excitement? Where’s the joy? Where’s the drama?”

“You’ve got enough drama for both of us,” I replied, taking a bite of my apple. Hailey was all drama, all the time. That was probably why we got along so well—she was my complete opposite.

“Oh, whatever.” She swept away my words with a wave of her hand. “I can’t believe you guys hit it off. And all because of that double date.”

“It wasn’t the double date,” I said around my food, shaking my head. “I turned him down that night.”

“What?” Her eyes grew so wide it looked like they were going to pop out of her head. “Why the hell would you do that?”

“Because I’m busy.”

“No one is that busy,” she argued, stealing one of my crackers. “Alex is like a frigging unicorn. You don’t tell a unicorn you’re too busy—you just bask in its magnificence for as long as it allows.”

“I think you’re giving him too much credit,” I said, laughing a little. “He’s just a guy.”

“Unicorn,” she replied stubbornly.

“Handsome, yes.”

“Hotter than the sun, you mean?”

“And charming.”

“He could talk a nun into stripping out of her habit. To music. On a pole.”

I burst out laughing, choking on the apple. “Stop it,” I said, wheezing.

“You know it’s true,” she said, pointing a cracker at me.

“Well, he hasn’t convinced me to strip out of anything,” I said with a shrug.

“No,” she whispered, her mouth hanging open. “You haven’t hit that yet?”

“Ew, don’t say hit that.” I wrinkled my nose.