“I don’t really feel the cold,” he explains with the same bright, easy smile that made me all swoony for him in the first place, and I try to detect artifice in it now. “But it actually gets pretty warm at these things. You might want to change.”

He follows me upstairs, because I can’t think of a decent excuse to keep him waiting on the porch, and I watch him explore the territory where I spend most of my time. I’ve never had a boy in my room before. My parents are out at a fancy dinner to celebrate their upcoming trip to London, and I’m acutely aware of how empty the house is—of how sexy he is, even if I can’t completely trust him.

I’m increasingly self-conscious as I go through my clothes, until Gunnar finally takes over, pulling out the tiniest pair of shorts I own. “These are perfect.”

“Isn’t it, like, forty degrees out?” My face warms a little.

“Trust me,” he says unironically. “If you wear pants tonight, you’ll be miserable.”

Walking outside in the middle of March, however, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and tiny shorts, is plenty miserable itself. My teeth are chattering by the time we make it to the car, and I’ve only just started to thaw when we’re already parking again. Gunnar stops on a lonely stretch of curb on the “bad” side of town, where the empty, shuttered buildings that the city can’t afford to demolish have become the favored hideouts of the undead.

Music pulses faintly in the air, and we follow the sound to a blocky edifice of whitewashed brick. Its weedy lot separated from the foliage of Colgate Woods by a frail chain-link fence, I recognize the former Trapans Glassworks factory, and send off a discreet text. As I slip my phone back into my pocket, I catch Gunnar’s watchful eye and give him an innocent smile. We’re playing a game, but I don’t want him to know that I know it.

At the rear of the building, where thick shadows keep a multitude of secrets, a line to get inside stretches for at least twenty yards. Gunnar pushes past the crowd, all the way to the velvet rope, where an undead bouncer screens the would-be entrants, his frame packed with muscle he doesn’t need. Lacing his fingers through mine, Gunnar whispers something to the doorman—and, just like that, we’re waved past the crowd and into the party.