“I’m not,” she said, her voice hoarse, and she kissed me again so I could feel the heat coming from her mouth, her skin. “Or they’ve done an excellent job of implanting some really super gay thoughts into my head right now.”

It seemed redundant to blush after everything, but my cheeks didn’t get the message.

“What about you?”

“Well, you already know I kissed Oliver once. I mean, it’s something I’d dearly like to erase from my memory, but sadly the technology does not yet exist.”

Instantly I flinched, realizing what I’d said. Ruby didn’t seem to notice.

“I forgot you told me that before. So weird.”

“We were about eleven. It was not one of the erotic highlights of my adolescence.”

“Did you and Hannah . . . ?”

“No.” I felt myself turn colder at her name and tried to remind myself that it wasn’t Ruby’s fault. She didn’t know what talking about Hannah did to me.

“I haven’t had sex with anyone.”

I hadn’t had sex with Hannah and I’d obviously never had sex with any of the straight girls I’d kissed between Hannah and Ruby. Would having sex with Ruby be a step too far? Would having sex with Ruby break the rules? It wasn’t one of the harbingers of doom specifically, but it was pretty serious, wasn’t it? Would it mean something because it was the first time? If literally everything I’d ever heard was right, the first was one you remembered forever. It was important. Whether it was good or bad or weird, you wouldn’t forget it. Then again, I knew it was perfectly possible to forget extremely important things. Husbands, children, thirty years of your life.

Ruby smiled and kissed me. “We should probably go. Your dad will be wondering where you got to.”

I didn’t want to go, but I pulled my T-shirt over my head anyway and I watched Ruby put hers on too. There was something more intimate about seeing her putting her clothes on than taking them off. For a second, I saw us in our imaginary flat in our imaginary future again. Waking up beside her and getting dressed before going downstairs. It was the kind of moment you only shared with one person and most people probably didn’t think about it much at all.

When I drove Ruby back to Oliver’s, the car only stalled four times. I parked in the driveway and we kissed until the sensor light turned off. Then we agreed it was definitely time for me to go home before Dad started calling to see if I’d been in some kind of serious accident.