I lean forward to brush his cheek with a kiss, catching a hint of something crisp and foresty and definitely not at all like cat pee. When I start to stand, Aiden tugs me back.

“Then what?” His voice is as gentle as his touch. “’Cause I keep expecting you to just ghost me one of these days, and I’m fully ready to admit how much that would suck.” His hand slips over mine. “I like you, Katelyn. I’m fine if it’s more than you like me, but tell me I’m not wasting my time here.”

Every bit of the humor that initially attracted me to Aiden is gone. We’ve always kept things light and fun. Now he looks like my next words have all the power in the world to elate or crush him.

And I will crush him. Not intentionally, and probably not without crushing myself a bit in the process, but it’s going to happen. Not because Aiden is a bad guy—I think the fact that he’s in my bedroom despite all Mom’s rules speaks for itself. As does the fact that he made a cute Rapunzel joke instead of complaining when I told him he’d have to climb the drainpipe and sneak into my bedroom if he wanted to see me. I couldn’t risk letting him use the front entrance like a normal person (I wouldn’t put it past Mom to rig the door with some kind of undetectable sign to check if it’s been opened when she leaves me home alone).

I should probably explain about my mom.

She’s amazing and funny—but nearly every hour of the day she’s terrified out of her mind that something terrible is going to happen to me. I think it has to do with how she grew up. She’s never been exactly forthcoming about her past, but I do know that her mom dropped her on the doorstep of her unsuspecting father’s trailer when she was three, never to be seen again, and that the height of her dad’s parenting skills was remembering to feed her most of the time. He died shortly before I was born, so I’ve never met him, but given my mom’s lack of parental supervision growing up, it seems like she swung really far the other way with me.

Until a few years ago, the only time I was allowed on the computer was for school—home school, that is. And I think it was more my mom’s fear of algebra than any of my pleading that finally made her relent and allow me to go to public school. Though, to be fair, it might also have been the hunger strike I enacted.