He sighed and kissed my bare shoulder. “I will always love her, Lia. Of course I will. Forever. But I love her like I love her. And I love you like I love you.”

I laughed out loud. “Parker Thaysden, you do not love me.” But I knew he did.

He nodded at me very seriously. “Oh yes, I do. Of course I do. I have for…” He looked up to the ceiling like he was calculating. “Seventeen years.”

I couldn’t help but smile. “That’s all?”

He nodded. “You remember that AP World History project we got assigned to do together? The one where we had to write the song?”

Parker had been so off-the-charts smart that he was in my history class his freshman year. (By his junior year, he was mainly in the library, racking up college credits in online courses.) We had written a rousing rendition of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” about Russian history.

I smirked. “Well, of course. I can see how you fell in love with me then. Stalin could make anyone hot.”

He shook his head. “It wasn’t then. I mean, don’t get me wrong, sitting on the floor of your playroom getting to breathe your air for hours was the coolest thing that had ever happened to me. I told everyone I got to second base.”

I gasped in mock horror. “Do you have any idea how much that could have hurt my reputation? You were a freshman.”

He shrugged. “Yeah. But you got the last laugh. When Mason heard about it, he punched me in the face.”

I nodded knowingly. “I always wondered how someone as smart as you managed to open a door into your eye.”

“It was at that field party right after. Someone had set up that horrible karaoke machine, and when you got up there, you said, ‘I can’t sing this one without my buddy Parker.’ And we sang ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia,’ and when you said, ‘I done told you once, you son of a bitch, I’m the best there’s ever been,’ you touched the tip of my nose with the tip of your finger. It was nothing, but I knew then that you would always be the one that got away.”

I remembered that night vaguely. The Smirnoff Ice and keg beer, and Parker, who didn’t even have his license, was the one to drive my car home, to get us in the house without a word of complaint. How many times had he come to my rescue, really?

God, that story was so sweet. It warmed all those soft spots around my heart and my belly. I smiled at him in the dark and then leaned my head over onto his shoulder. “The one that got away, huh? I didn’t get that far.”

He pulled me toward him and kissed one cheek and then the other. “I’ll give you time, Liabelle. I’ll let you think this through and get to a night when the moon isn’t so full and I’m not so damn handsome.” He paused to flash me a smile. “But these last few months with you, all of that has come flooding back. I’ve realized that I’ll be okay. I’ll be able to move on and have a life. With you.”