I roll onto my back, so Aiden isn’t looking over my shoulder, and I open the box.

Zander:

Are you drunk?

Where are you?

Drunk? I look at the text I sent him a few hours ago. Oh god. It’s missing two words, and three more are misspelled. I drunk-texted Zander. I reply, because I can’t have him blowing up my phone all night.

Olivia:

I’m camping. And no.

Zander:

Bullshit. You don’t camp.

Olivia:

No, WE don’t camp

I don’t know what has come over me, but I feel the uncontrollable urge to show Zander how little he knows about me. How everything he thinks he knows is wrong. I open my notes, and copy and paste all the little rants I’ve been saving. All of the snarky little jabs I convinced myself not to send.

The words form a giant bubble that snakes down page after page along my screen. Aiden clears his throat, and I shake off the urge to read through the message one more time before sending. My finger hovers and I do it. I hit send. There’s a sort of exhilaration that sweeps over me as my finger makes contact with that little blue button. And it’s immediately followed by an all-consuming wave of panic and regret. Oh my god. What did I do?

“Everything good?” Aiden asks.

My first thought is that he knows what I’ve done. That he read every word as I scrolled through. But he’s still lying on his back. No, it’s just what a nice guy says when you get an unexpected text at 2 a.m. Because this is when bad things happen. You lose fifty IQ points when the sun goes down; that’s when bad decisions happen. That’s what my mom said to me on my sixteenth birthday, when she was giving me an uncharacteristically motherly pep talk about keeping my pants on. She was barely older than that when she got pregnant, so the sentiment wasn’t lost on me. But I’m not her. She is right though—bad decisions happen when the sun goes down. Like that text.

“Yeah, everything’s fine.”

I stare at the screen a few minutes longer, but it’s just my message staring back at me. There’s no reply. And finally, it feels over.

Chapter

Sixteen

OLIVIA

Aiden still owes me night three of our epic art adventure, and no matter how much I beg, he won’t tell me what it is. Even though I take every opportunity to harass him about it.