I tried to talk, but I couldn’t. I sucked in a breath that did nothing to help me calm down. Then I grabbed my chest. “I can’t breathe,” I sobbed. “Kane…I can’t breathe.”

He put an arm around me and let me cry into his shoulder, making quiet shushing noises to get me to calm down, but my heart was going a million miles an hour and I felt like it might explode.

“He’s not coming back. I can’t do this,” I said into the warm dampness of his sweatshirt hood.

“I know,” he said.

I’m not sure how I ended up in the passenger seat of my Jeep in the empty lot of the high school. When he slid into the driver’s seat, he was holding the keys, but I couldn’t remember giving them to him. He looked at me and said, “You’re going to be okay.”

Except I felt as though my heart was so scarred, it would never heal. Still, sometime during the walk to the Jeep, I’d stopped feeling sorry. Now, my blood was boiling. I leaned over the console, without hesitation, and kissed him, hard.

“You never kissed me,” I said, humiliation creeping in as I realized what I’d done. “That first time. And I was too drunk to remember the second.”

The look of surprise that flashed on his face soon dissolved as he reached a hand around my neck, pulling me close to him again. We kissed, ravenously. It turned out, while those first fumblings when we were fifteen had been nothing worth writing home about, kissing him hit me in all the right places. For the first time that year, I felt more than the fear of losing the best thing that had ever happened to me. No wonder Declan hated me. If it had been this good on New Year’s, then it must have been obvious how much I enjoyed it.

We ended up in the cramped back seat of my Jeep, half-clothed, doing what we shouldn’t have, considering we were dating other people. All the while, he kept whispering that we were going to be okay, that I’d survive this. Even if it didn’t feel real, it felt right. And the hurting stopped, briefly, which was the best that I could hope for.

Wednesday, March 6

When I stepped out of my Jeep after school, I looked across the street at the Weeks place. Mrs. Weeks’s SUV was in the driveway.

Kane hadn’t been at school. I’d only seen him once since Friday, and that was out my bedroom window, when he got into his father’s truck. He was wearing a sling on his arm and a baseball cap on his head, so I couldn’t see his face. I imagine he was still pissed at me. I hadn’t had the guts to text him.