“I made you into this perfect person in my mind. I was devastated the night we broke up, but I told myself that you were doing it for the greater good.” Stevie shrugged. “Remember earlier this evening when we were talking about always being seventeen in our hometown?”

Cody nodded. “What’s that got to do with this?”

“Everything,” Stevie answered. “Being seventeen in Honey Grove isn’t important. What is important is that when I’m around you, that I’m still seventeen again. I don’t know if I was your first, but you were mine.”

“I knew, and yes, you were,” Cody whispered.

“They say you never get over your first love, your first experience in sex, your first anything. I guess I didn’t,” she told him.

“Now that I recognize the problem, I will get over it. It’s been pretty damn immature of me not to own up to it and admit it before now. I hope that going forward we can be friends,” Stevie said.

“Whew!” Cody said. “That’s a lot of honesty for one night, but I’d like it very much if we could be friends.”

“I feel better for having said it,” Stevie told him. “It’s not fair to either of us for me to blame you for my failed relationships, and like you said, what I felt was pure infatuation, not love. You were wise enough to see that. I wasn’t, but I do now.”

“We were both too young to make a lifetime commitment or to change our plans to suit the other one,” Cody said. “I knew that you wanted more, and it scared me, because to give you that, like I said, it would have taken more than I had to offer at the time. The feelings I had for you back then scared me.”

In all the scenarios that had ever played out in her head, this one had never entered Stevie’s mind. She’d always thought the Ryan boys were super sure of themselves. In her eyes Cody had always been ten feet tall and bulletproof.

“I can’t imagine you being scared, but I understand,” she said.

“You’ve figured out things for yourself, and it took a lot of courage to talk to me about this,” Cody said, “and, honey, you are not seventeen in my eyes anymore.”

“Thank you for that.” Stevie felt as if a weight had been lifted off her heart.

“I’m glad we had this talk,” Cody said.

“Me too. We’ve kind of taken care of the elephant, haven’t we?” Stevie smiled.

“We have,” Cody agreed.