“So in love with you, my love…” His eyes are locked on mine, silver-bright, and his voice is rich, and his acting, I remind myself, is superb. “Am I,” he murmurs. The music swells to a stop, and he drops my hand to acknowledge the scattered clapping of his fellow castmates, give a thumbs-up to someone in headphones. He turns back to me, grinning, and claps his hands together.

“We’re just sound testing, but—” He shrugs. “I think I sound all right.”

“You are a total, complete, cheesy show-off cheese ball,” I say.

“You are so impressed!” he says. “That’s your ‘I’m hiding how much I secretly love it’ face; I can tell.”

I roll my eyes at him, and he lets out a laugh, a real one. He’s always seemed to enjoy the fact that I refuse to take him seriously, or pretend to, anyway. I know how to protect my own heart. I thought I knew. Just chemicals, I remind myself.

“So what did you need to talk about that you couldn’t just text?” I ask.

“I thought you blocked me,” he says.

“Right! I mean if I hadn’t blocked you,” I say, fumbling.

He starts up the aisle and gestures to me. “Come here.”

“That can only work on me once,” I tell him, and he snorts another laugh, surprised. He remembers. It did work on me, just the once.

We met at one of the first blowoff parties during our summer intensives, him in drama and me in dance, and we just fell into flirting, the back-and-forth so easy and so fun, how he complimented me so ridiculously, how I teased him back and made him laugh, how he looked at me, how it made me feel so bright and glittery. I was smiling a lot when I thought of him.

The night of my showcase, he was waiting for me backstage. My heart was still pounding, my breath coming fast. Still exhilarated. When we locked eyes, he mouthed come here. I pushed through the crowd, and he caught me when I flung myself into his arms and kissed him.

When he tightened his arms around me, when he made that satisfied growl that carried through the noise and chaos around us, it was like having a shot of adrenaline punched directly into my heart.

The story always goes that boys want only one thing—but girls can want just one thing too.