Cautiously, I return her embrace, sure she can feel the way I’m trembling with adrenaline. When she doesn’t let go right away, I let myself feel the draw of her breath as I hold her, in and out. I have never loved anything as much as the way she feels under my hands. I breathe her in, feeling the warmth of her neck beneath her hair.

I want to be against that skin.

My breath hitches and rattles around in my lungs like a dying thing as I run my hand through her exquisitely soft hair and down the gentle curve of her back. I am so dizzy with the smell and the feel of her that I can barely think. But I don’t want to. I’m done with that.

She pulls back just a little to look at me, a question in her eyes.

“Zoe,” I whisper in response, and close the distance between us until my lips meet hers.

Her mouth is warm and soft, the smell of her even more intoxicating right up close.

But instead of kissing me back, she pulls away.

The expression on her face is one I would give anything never to have seen. Is it disgust? Horror?

“Sam. No. I — I like you, but I don’t . . .” She shakes her head. “I’m not . . .”

Numbness courses through me from head to toe, and there aren’t enough multiplication tables in the world to save me. My heart is in my throat and my spleen is halfway out my ass, and all I know is I need to get away.

I leap up from her bed.

“I’m sorry,” I choke out. “I need to go.”

I grab my bag and race out of her bedroom and down the stairs, slowing only briefly as I pass the kitchen where Zoe’s parents are sticking candles into a bakery cake festooned with flowers and confetti.

“NicetomeetyoubutIhavetogo,” I say in a mumbled rush. I glance over to the living room where Jonah is watching something about penguins. He still has my drawing clutched to his chest. My heart pounds the breath out of my lungs.

I burst out of the front door, holding myself together until my ass hits the leather driver’s seat of my mom’s car. My vision blurs and my face explodes with a number of bodily fluids that robots most certainly should not have.