We spent a couple hours in the parking lot of the Giant supermarket. I caught on pretty quickly. And he made a very attractive teacher, patient, helpful…and all mine. I’d been starved of him for over a month, and right then, it was as if someone had laid a banquet in front of me. About a half hour into the lesson, I couldn’t take it anymore. I threw the car in Park, making it squeal.

“Whoa, you want the transmission to drop out of your car?” he asked.

I pushed down the brake, climbed over the stick, and into his lap. “No, I want this.” And I kissed him.

He kissed me back, sucking my lower lip into his mouth. “You like your birthday present?”

“Birthday present?” I breathed into his neck. “That was months ago.”

I wanted his hands on me, but when I tore my mouth from his skin, I realized he was petting the dashboard. “This sure is a pretty piece of crap you own, isn’t it?”

Rolling my eyes, I grabbed his jaw, hard, turning and focusing his eyes on me. Sometimes his car hobby could be a little annoying, as consuming as it was. “You’re my pretty piece of crap, dude. Kiss me.”

He did. But as usual, we stopped before things got too heavy. At least, we physically stopped. As usual, as his erection pressed against my body, my mind stretched out into what could happen, if he would only let it. If he would only do what came naturally.

When we got back to the cul-de-sac, it was ten, and I was in a bad mood. For weeks I’d been wanting Declan back, loving me. And now that he was…I wanted more.

I was disappointed, tired, and had made zero progress on that damn Gatsby book. As we were pulling into the driveway, my phone lit up with a text. Declan pulled it out of the cup holder and read it. “Luisa.”

I groaned. “What does she want?” Luisa and I were still friends. Maybe we weren’t the best buddies who hung out all the time and read each other’s minds—she had Nina for that—but we were still tight. I looked at the message. Can I sleep over tonight?

Luisa hadn’t slept over in a year, at least. Oh, she’d told her parents she was sleeping over my house, but most of the time, it was when Kane’s parents were away and she was staying over there. I always had to cover for her. It was exhausting, doing favors for her, when she never did anything in return. I jabbed in: Why?

Then I looked at Declan and sighed. “She wants to sleep over.”

He was fiddling with the dials on the center console. “Why do you hate her so much?”