“She hit the guy over the head with some heirloom lamp and put him in the hospital. I guess he’s the son of someone pretty important. When Kori’s father found out what happened, he was pissed. Not at the kid, but at Kori. The whole thing put some big land deal in jeopardy. So to smooth things over with the guy, her father chose to believe their side of the story—that Kori had attacked the kid for no reason. He sent her to brat camp to prove it.”

“Shit,” I said, knowing that the asshole kid must’ve been Chelsea’s older brother. He was now at Harvard. It explained why she and Chelsea stopped being friends. But I couldn’t understand how Kori’s family could’ve turned on her like that. Her own father.

All these years Kori had put up with my father fetish, she listened to me ramble and drone on and never once told me what really happened with hers. She kept it all locked away, hidden from me. Never choosing truth.

And now I understood about all the crazy things Kori did. Kyle was wrong, it wasn’t because she thought it was cool; it was because it kept her from feeling the pain, the same way screaming while skinny-dipping in the freezing reservoir did.

“Look, there’s a reason I’m telling you this now. I pushed you away for two reasons. One was because I’m on probation, and you’re very illegal to have around that way. And the other—”

“Was Kori,” I said, cutting him off. “I know. I just forgot for a minute. But I get it now, why you look at me the way you do. I’m sorry I put you in an awkward position …”

“It’s okay. I know that if everything in your life was going great, you wouldn’t have shown up on my doorstep tonight. You wouldn’t have offered to have sex with me, no strings attached. You wouldn’t be pretending to be something you aren’t. And I just didn’t want history to repeat itself.”

“By history you mean Kori?”

“Kori wanted her first time to be her decision. On her own terms.”

“Oh,” I said, just to say something. “And you know this …”

“Because I was her first.” He reached out then, touching my arm in a painfully delicate way. “But I shouldn’t have. That’s why she wanted to forget me.”

I swallowed, pulled back from him. “I think you’d better explain.”