I find myself nodding, even though I wouldn’t know right if it fell from the sky and bonked me on the head. He knows the look in my eyes. He knows me too well.

“All those times you were with him, in his room. Only a wall separating us. And I thought, This is all wrong. Did you feel it? You had to have to felt it too.”

He’s staring at me, expecting an answer. What the hell is with all this talking? I shouldn’t have asked about Luisa. “Yeah. Of course,” I lie. Like I can even remember a time when I felt, wanted to feel.

He spreads my legs, comes up close to me, and I feel him at my entrance. He pushes in with enough fierceness to make me gasp.

“Oh yeah,” he growls, and from the look on his face, the intensity of his mouth on my lips, I guess he likes it. His hands are tight on my shoulders as he moves against me, his hip bones grinding against mine. “Do you like that?”

“Oh yeah,” I repeat, the words muffled by his skin, because the second he’s inside me, I know this isn’t right, either. All I can think is, I must look like my mother did. What if Declan, wherever he is, can see me now?

I stay quiet, trying to fight back the tears in my eyes.

I’ve imagined Kane as a lover a million times since what happened between us, and each time, he always does the same thing. He rolls off me, embarrassed, like an awkward fifteen-year-old boy, and we don’t talk for what feels like an eternity afterward.

But this Kane doesn’t do that. When he’s done, he stays inside me, breathing hard, his hand playing near my ear, twisting a lock of my hair. He falls against me, resting his head on my shoulder.

“I love you,” he breathes out. Not once. Over and over again.

Why is he getting like this? The great Kane Weeks, why is he getting sentimental now? Over this? Over something I started because I wanted to prove to myself I could still feel? I should’ve cut myself with a file again. It would’ve been less painful.

I lie there, still, looking over the trophies. He has ones for every year, from when he was in Pee Wees, right on up to last season. I count them, noticing he’s missing one from last year. It should be the biggest one, because they’d made regionals. He’d been so proud. But the trophy is gone.

And Kane’s still whispering in my ear and twirling my hair around his finger.

Eventually, he realizes I’m waiting for him to get up.

“I never felt like Declan was wrong for me,” I say when he rolls off me.