She wanted to prove to him that she’d grown up too. And yet, she heard herself saying:

“How would we be in Homer?”

Ezra rubbed his eyes. “I don’t remember anything from last night.”

Frankie considered this. To be honest, she didn’t either. She remembered getting ready in her hotel room; she remembered getting a call from Laila; she remembered—a jolt ran through her—locking eyes with Ezra as the elevator door closed. But then, well, she tried to find the rest of the night somewhere hidden in her cerebral folds. Nothing. There was nothing else there.

But she was not about to admit that to him, the brains, the ex.

“I loathe you,” she said instead. “I can’t imagine that I wanted to sleep with you.”

“So.” He paused. “You don’t remember either?”

Ezra always did have a way of cutting through her horseshit. She recalled that clearly now too. It helped that they’d been friends before they’d fallen desperately in love at the start of their junior year.

“Of course I remember.” She tutted. “I remember that I absolutely do not want to sleep with you. I remember that the last time I saw you, I swore that if I ever saw you naked again, I’d run into a pit of fire before anything happened between the two of us.”

“You didn’t swear that,” he said. “I have a very clear memory of that scene. Anyone who was walking by probably did too. I’m surprised it didn’t make the evening news.”

“I didn’t swear it aloud, maybe. But to myself, yes, I did.”

Ezra sighed and swung his feet over the bed to scrounge his shirt off the floor. Frankie wanted to look away, but she didn’t. He was fitter than a decade ago, certainly. Back then, he had the torso of a twenty-one-year-old former cross-country runner with a good metabolism, who occasionally played a game of pickup basketball but who also had a McDonald’s habit, which was just off campus for drivers passing through to the bigger Berkshire towns. She remembered the game they invented: whenever Frankie would look at him and say run, Ezra had to. He had to. They could be at Burton pulling an all-nighter; he could be wearing a towel fresh from the shower; he could be standing in line at the cereal bar in the dining hall. If she said run, he had to race her, and Frankie, sometimes because she would cheat and sometimes because he would let her, would always win. Now, she eyed him, saw his six-pack, the way his back was lean and sinewy, and thought she wouldn’t stand a chance.

Ezra reached down, swiped a balled-up ivory sweater from the foot of the bed and held it up, and Frankie nodded, so he tossed it to her wordlessly. She tugged her wool cable knit over her head like it was a suit of armor; in fact, she’d worn it so often their senior year that Ezra sometimes joked it was a third wheel. Her parents had split up by then, and her mom tried to overcompensate for both the divorce and the wreckage of her junior year summer by sending enormous packages from the J.Crew catalog.