Frankie remembered running her fingers over that curve, awed by the perfect crescent on what she used to think was a perfect face. Though she hated to acknowledge it, even under the veil of sleep and in need of a shower, Ezra Jones was beautiful.

“Why are you in bed with me?” Ezra responded, bringing her back. “And what . . . I mean . . . Are we in a dorm room?”

“A dorm room?” Frankie snapped. “I’m staying at the Inn. Why would we be in a—”

She stopped, as something clicked into place. The beige furniture, the vague familiarity, the generic blandness of it all. They had, indeed, inexplicably landed in bed together in a dorm room. If this were a rom-com, someone in the audience would squeal. This was not a rom-com, however. Neither of them squealed. Both of them were horrified.

Frankie arched and tilted her head back. The wall behind them was covered in posters. The Backstreet Boys. The Cranberries. Nirvana. Night Vixen. (Hooray, Frankie thought, despite everything else.)

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess this is a dorm room. What the fuck.”

She thought about pointing out that her clients were on the wall above them but decided she didn’t care about impressing Ezra. She regretted that she even had the instinct to impress Ezra Jones.

“Did we . . . ?” Ezra gestured back and forth between them. “I mean, do you remember what happened? Like, with us? Was there—”

“Oh my God, no!” Frankie said, though she honestly had no idea if they did or didn’t. She sure as shit hoped they didn’t though. Frankie had a motto that if something was over, it was over, which wasn’t to equate that motto with the fact that she had zero inkling of what happened last night. Still, it felt more solid, more concrete to simply rule it out. “No,” she said again. “For sure not. We did not.”

She ran her hands down to her waist. She still had on her underwear, so that was . . . promising. She raised the sheets and sighed: though Ezra’s flannel shirt was flung to the floor, he was also still in his jeans, although his belt, disturbingly, was undone.

She focused on the positive: “Your belt’s still on,” she said. “And I’m in my tank top. I’ll take that as a good sign.”

He stared at her for a beat, as if he were going to argue, but instead, let it wash over him.

Well, well, Frankie thought, a little annoyed that he didn’t take her bait, a little relieved too. Back then, he’d rarely pushed back, and they’d never argued. Until they finally did in the archway of Burton Library on a clear day in May when their divide became a crevasse, when she’d said goodbye to Ezra forever and didn’t lay eyes on him again until now.

“Are we in Homer?” Ezra asked. “Doesn’t this look like Homer?”

Homer. Their freshman dorm.

Frankie screwed up her face into something that she hoped connoted: That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Inarguably, Ezra was almost always the smartest person in the room—he’d gotten a full merit scholarship to Middleton and was easily the brains of their group, so she never minded one-upping him when she had the chance.