“It sounds more like she’s just worried about you, which is kind of nice? And she’s right about the long-term thing.”

My stomach drops. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, how is this going to work? I’m tired of lying already. You know we have to tell Vera, and who knows how that will go.”

I bolt up. “My parents will flip; you know how they feel about your family. They probably won’t even let me hang out with you anymore, and they definitely won’t let you in the store.”

“It’d be okay,” he says, running his hand up my arm. “We’d make it work. As long as I have you, I don’t care.”

“Ridley, think. If they don’t let you in the store, and your dad finds out, he’s going to send you back to Seattle. And then what? I have to stay here. You’d be out there alone, and . . .”

His face falls. “Shit, I wasn’t thinking about Seattle.”

“Yeah, shit. You can’t go back there.”

He shoves off the bed and starts pacing around my room. I try to pull him back down, but he shifts his arm away and bites his thumbnail, squeezing his eyes shut. “I’m so fucked.”

“You’re not. You’re not,” I say, trying to calm him down. “We’ll figure it out.”

“How?” He raises his arms and drops them before dragging his hands over his face. “I almost lost you because of lies, and now the only way to be with you is to lie even more? I am so sick of pretending to be something I’m not. I’ve been doing it my whole life!”

“Ridley,” I say, and this time he lets me pull him down. He sits at the edge of my bed, shaking his head. “This is different. We’re just buying ourselves some time. It’s just temporary.”

He shoves his fist against his thigh, hanging his head before looking back up at me. “You promise?”

I smooth out his hands and pull them into my lap. “In a couple months, it’ll be fine. We can tell my parents the truth, and it’ll be okay. And if it’s not, it won’t matter, because I’ll be in Boston for the summer program, and you’ll be eighteen and your dad can’t make you go anywhere. We’ll have the whole summer together. And by the time we get back, everything will have blown over. It’ll work out.”

He looks down at where our hands meet. “If you say so.”

“It’s the only way,” I say, because I’ve thought through ten thousand options already, and this is the only one that didn’t seem doomed from the start. My phone buzzes then, an incoming call.

“You should get that.”