I let a grin slide across my face, my eyes drifting to my friend. “I wouldn’t say I’m a prude…”

“Okay, now we’re getting somewhere.” Lily sits up expectantly, fully facing me. “You are, aren’t you? Holy shit, Cora. You and Dean? Holy shit.”

“You said that twice.”

“I’ll say it again: holy shit.” She bounces up and down like we’re two teenagers swapping our first kiss experiences. “You know I need all the gory details, starting with penis size. Go.”

I just can’t with her.

I shake my head through a sigh, riddled with giddy nerves. “It’s a mess, Lily.” I duck my head, stretching a smile. “A hot mess.”

“Lord, it’s probably fire. All that built up sexual tension with life and death situations thrown into the mix?” She releases a slow breath, fanning herself dramatically. “So, are you guys together? Like, official?”

Cue the ice water. “No. No. Of course not… it’s just sex.”

“How can it just be sex after all you went through together? There’s no feelings?”

Oh, there’s feelings. A crap ton of feelings. In fact, those feelings are climbing up my chest right now, lodging in my throat. “It’s… really complicated. There’s definitely feelings, but there’s nothing I can do about them. I’m sort of keeping him at arm’s length.”

Lily squints her eyes at me, as if she’s trying to read between the lines. “So, you just bang and bolt?”

“Your vocabulary concerns me,” I joke, avoiding the question.

Avoid, avoid, avoid.

But it’s kind of hard to avoid someone sitting a foot away, staring you down in Taylor Swift socks. “I guess that’s one way to put it,” I relent. “I basically show up on his doorstep a few times a week and we have crazy, amazing, rough sex. Then I skip out before sunrise and avoid him until the next time. In the beginning, he would try talking about it, but I think he’s just accepting our fate at this point.”

I worry my lip between my teeth, sounding like a giant hooker when I word it like that. I’m far from slutty—not that there would be anything wrong with that, really. I enjoy sex, but I’ve only been with three guys prior to Dean. Two of them were serious relationships with men who cheated on me, and then there was Troy Adilman, who was just kind of a drunken, weird, virginity-losing one-night stand. And Dean… well, he’s in his own category.

Lily’s eyes are getting extra squinty, which means she’s still trying to read me and trying to conjure up some kind of best friend advice that will probably be terrible. “That sounds equally hot and depressing,” she says after a few minutes of consideration. “Does Mandy know?”

My stomach pitches at the sound of Mandy’s name, sending waves of nausea right through me. “She knows we had sex, but not that we’re still having sex. I haven’t even spoken to her since the hospital. I… don’t really know what to say.”