I take a quick breath. He’s right — what we’re doing at the moment isn’t hanging out. Nobody climbs to the top of a tree on a date. There are rituals. Rules. Tonight doesn’t have ropes around it, so it’s outside of everything real, a fact that leaves a sour memory-taste in my mouth.

Lip gloss, cigarettes.

“Danny?” Sebastian asks, his confidence draining as quickly as the dark. “What do you think?”

I don’t know how to answer. It has nothing to do with how lovely and kissable Sebastian is. Even after all the girls I’ve been with, I sometimes find myself wanting to kiss a boy, and that makes it harder for a lot of people — I won’t declare myself and stick to one side of a fence. I don’t know how to explain that I don’t even see the fence.

Sebastian does this nervous look-away, and his long, exposed throat begs for my attention. This is when I should let my fingers drift toward his skin. When I would normally lean into the moment, touch my lips to his. Wind nudges me forward, urging me to do it. Yellow deepens to gold and pours in thick and heavy, and he’s goddamn glowing. The moment is here.

This is where a kiss would fit.

But I can’t. There is a weight making me too heavy to move. A hand pinning me in place. I’m not supposed to kiss this boy, and I don’t know why. But I trust the pressure that is telling me no.

“Hanging out is a good plan, Sebastian,” I say, voice deeper than usual, long patches of silence seeping between the words. Almost Californian. “Let’s talk about it when we get back on solid ground. Of course, this tree is my natural habitat now.”

Sebastian smiles, and I think I’ve saved us from death by awkwardness, but a new sound nudges me off balance. At first I assume it’s the trees. Sometimes they are monumentally silent, but when the wind picks up, they creak like doors learning to open.

This sound is different, though. Fainter and farther down. Shushshushshush — a rain of steps.

I look past branches that took an hour to climb and would probably take about three seconds to fall past. Sebastian gives me a seasick grimace. I can finally feel the danger of what we’ve done together. I reach for the nearest thing that I can brace myself against, and it turns out to be Sebastian’s thigh.

Below us, I see a sweatshirt hood but can’t tell anything about the person beneath it, not that I’d be able to recognize someone from Tempest by the top of their head. I twist around to follow their path through the woods, but I’ve already lost them.

“Were you expecting someone else?” Sebastian asks with a laugh that skitters away from him.