“You okay?” I ask.

“I should be asking you. I’m so sorry about your bus.”

The night air is heavy with moisture. Tinsley and I pull the blanket to our chins. It stinks of smoke. I think back to the first time Robin and I shared a mattress. We’d been going together for nearly five months. She was a virgin and insisted it be at my house, not hers. I tried to be gentle, but she was tense and couldn’t relax. The little mewls that left her lips were not of pleasure (sex would improve with practice). I’ve always felt bad that it wasn’t a magical experience for her.

“Don’t you love looking at the stars?” Tinsley asks. “They make everything in the universe seem closer, you know?”

“Makes everything seem really far away to me,” I answer. Maybe because right now, everything important seems so far away.

Tinsley props herself on her elbow. “It’s not about distance, Lucas. It’s a feeling. Being part of everything. You, me, the ground, the sky.” She places her hand on the blanket over my chest. “Breathe in. Feel the air enter your lungs.”

I take a deep breath and feel the air. I also feel Tinsley’s hand on my chest. She can’t possibly be coming on to me, can she? Not here. Not now. She has to know how completely bummed I am.

And yet her face moves closer in the dark. “You were amazing tonight. I mean, at the border. I was so certain we were going to get busted. My mother would have gone batshit.”

I continue to be astonished that my bluff worked. Dumb luck, I suspect.

“You had such command of the situation.” She brushes some hair away from my face, her fingers grazing my cheek.

Don’t, Tinsley, I hear myself think. You’ve chosen the wrong guy, wrong place, wrong time. And yet I don’t stop her. Do I like her attentions more than I want to admit?

“Barry showed his true colors, didn’t he?” Her voice goes hard in a way I haven’t heard from her before. Has, for just an instant, a vestige of her disciplinarian mother slipped through?

I defend my cousin. “He was freaking. You know, not thinking about the implications.”