“No,” she said, and he pulled away. “Wait. No. I just mean this would be okay if I weren’t so short.”

They moved from the bench to the grass. She stretched her legs out across the lawn, and nestled the back of her head in the crook of his right elbow. Her side was pressed to his warm chest. His leg shook beneath her back. Lia pulled his left arm across her waist. He laid his hand against her side.

“I like listening to you talk.” Devon sighed, his fingers tapping against her hip. “You used to talk all the time in class.”

“I got in trouble all the time, too.” Lia swallowed. She talked too much when she got started—rambling off facts and going on tangents no one asked for. She never noticed until midway through a sentence, and then it was too late. “Do you really like listening to me?”

“When you talk about things you like? Yes.” He rubbed the hem of her shirt between his fingers, knuckles grazing bare skin. “Physics was the best. You always talked in physics.”

“You know there’s a planet we can’t see but is there,” she said slowly, trying to remember something she hadn’t talked about in physics. His hand, warm and soft, flattened against her skin beneath her shirt. Her breathing quickened. “We only know it’s there because everything we can see reacts to it in some way. Invisible but consequential. I feel like that sometimes.”

“You have an interesting take on romance.” He chuckled.

Lia turned her face to look at him. “It’s true. You never notice me.”

“I always notice you,” he said. “I hate that you sit behind me in biology. Makes me nervous. What if I do something embarrassing? You’ll write it down in that little leather journal.”

“That’s my Assassins journal. I wouldn’t write about you in it, and it’s gone anyway. I left it in Ms. Christie’s class. It had my email in it and everything, but no one messaged me to return it.” Lia’s skin was too warm, too tight, and her next words were a whisper. “It’s my spiral journal where I write down all your embarrassing moments.”

He laughed, and her head bounced against him. His heart pounded through his ribs, a steady beat she could barely hear.

“Is this supposed to be romantic?” she asked softly, voice muffled by his sweater.

“Yes, we’re stargazing,” he said, tilting his head back to stare at the stars. “I wanted to focus on my grades and not date anyone, and I don’t know what I’m doing, but school’s basically over and you’re going away probably. I wasn’t sure what to do. But I knew I wanted to get to know you.”

“So you joined the game.” She brought her right hand up to his face and traced a line from the corner of his mouth to his eye. “You joined the game to talk to me?”

He licked his lips. “That about sums it up.”