“Hey guys!” Hannah exclaimed, followed by Carter. “How is it up here?”

Eliza shot a shiver up my spine as she answered. “It’s amazing.” Her face practically glowed in the dark.

Something about her tone startled Carter, and his head whipped to us, eyeing the distance between me and his sister. Satisfied, seeing nothing off, Carter came over with Hannah following.

“They’re almost out of cupcakes,” he said. “You guys should go if you wanted any.”

“Are you trying to get rid of us, Carter?” asked Eliza, putting her hands on her hips.

Hannah’s ears turned pink, though it was hard to see how pink in the dim atmosphere. Carter shuffled to the railing, hiding his reaction.

“I, for one, would love another cupcake,” I said.

“Another?” Eliza caught my subtext. “Oh. Right. Another. We should hurry.”

“Definitely.” I led her to the ladder, climbing down first, ready to help her if she needed. She didn’t, but it gave us another few minutes to look at each other—really look—before it was time to go home.

RULE NUMBER 11

The forty-eight-hour rule.

Eliza. It took me ten minutes to drink my orange juice the next morning because I kept zoning out, unable to focus on anything but her dress, her hand on my shirt . . . what it was like to be near her. To breathe her air.

Gross.

The best part of kissing her wasn’t how natural it seemed or the way her long legs had pressed against mine. The best part was that she’d kissed me back.

I duct-taped my phone to the underside of my bed so I wouldn’t call Eliza or even text her. Every bro knows that after he hooks up with a girl, he has to wait forty-eight hours before he can ask to see her again. A long forty-eight hours. It would be worse than watching reality TV shows with my mom, which she’d made me sit through more than once.

When I was done, the job I had done on my phone was probably more effective than the security system in Fort Knox. It would take some serious work if I ever wanted it in my hands again.

A knock came on my bedroom door. “Nick?” my mom called. “Time to go.”

Really? What time is it? I reached to pull my phone out of my pocket.

I am an idiot.

“Coming.”

Twenty-five minutes later, my mom sat in the passenger seat of my car. Something had happened to the brakes in hers, and she had had to drop it off at the mechanic’s for who knew how long. Our town had one car mechanic, and we drove a few towns over to her client’s place where we’d get a discount. That was the town with the mall, three ice-cream places, the bowling alley, and the movie theater, which I used to go to before Carter got his own giant screen. I got to be the lucky chauffeur who’d escort her back to reality. My mom seized the twenty-minute car ride home as an opportunity to help me prep for my upcoming admissions interview.