“Hey,” he said. He sounded as tired as she felt.

“Hi.”

They’d been working side by side for almost eighteen hours, so the greeting was technically pointless. Eric sat on the edge of one of the remaining tables and rubbed at the traces of white makeup around his jawline. His bruise was barely visible in the dim light.

“I feel like we were talking just a minute ago,” he said. “I was trying to explain myself, and then everything blew up around us. Nothing ever goes normally around here, does it?”

“I guess it depends on what you think normal is,” Scarlett said, not looking up. Looking up would be a disaster. She pretended to have an unnatural and absorbing interest in the containers of chemical de-icer on the ground by their feet. When you really put your mind to it, you could get interested in anything. You could almost like chemical de-icer.

It was a good thing, too, because it was only through the power of de-icer that she could withstand the next sentence.

“All I want to do is kiss you,” he said in a low voice. “It’s taking all I’ve got not to do it.”

Scarlett could almost hear a circuit in her brain sizzling its way to extinction.

“So why don’t you?” she asked.

“Because I don’t know if you want me to. Do you?”

More than anything. Almost anything.

“Do you really think you’ll dump me when you get to NYU?” she asked.

“Right now, no. But I don’t know who I’ll be then, once I’m there, once it all starts. Does that make sense? Am I the worst person in the world?”

There was probably some stupid self-help book out there that said this particularly brand of honesty was healthy and wonderful, and if Scarlett ever found that book, she was prepared to rip out those pages and eat them.

“I kind of hate that you tell the truth,” she said, her voice cracking a little.

“Me, too.”

“Eric?” Spencer called from the top of the steps. “You down there? You and Trevor need to get the van out of here.”

“Got it,” Eric said over his shoulder.

“I guess you’d better go,” she said, coughing and getting her voice back to normal. “We should take this table up.”

“I guess.”

He made no move to kiss her. They each stood their ground on opposite sides of the table, staring at each other.

“It has to be up to you,” he said in a low voice.

There were footsteps pounding down the basement stairs, and Spencer appeared. He regarded them both slightly suspiciously, but clearly had other things on his mind.

“The cops are coming down the street,” he said to Eric. “The van is about to get ticketed. You have the keys. I’ll get the table.”

“Right,” Eric said. “See you guys later.”

It was probably better that it ended so abruptly, because Scarlett had no idea what to think. Spencer had to pry the table from Scarlett’s grip.