The brash laughter from downstairs now that the boys have all come inside echoes through the high-ceilinged foyer and practically beats down Lucas’s mom’s door. I’ve been ready for almost an hour, but in that time, I’ve doubted every square inch of myself at least twice. Mostly, that I’m wearing a very short dress with nothing underneath. I’ve kept this secret from Abby; some moments are meant to be special and only shared between Lucas and me. Knowing he can touch me with one flit of my dress is one of those kinds of things.

  My hair is pulled up into a loose ponytail that Abby curled into spirals that fall down my shoulders and back. The dress I bought is strapless with a back that scoops clear to the spot where my spine curves inward at my lower back. The amount of fabric that covers my ass is minimal, so my dancing tonight will not be bold and big. It’s fine, though, because I intend on remaining in Lucas’s arms most of the night.

  “Here,” Abby says, stepping behind me and dusting my shoulders and chest with a little bit of glitter. I barely recognize myself in the mirror, the gawky alt girl with long, dark hair almost looks like a princess. It’s probably the glitter.

  “He’s going to lose his mind,” she says, dropping her chin to my shoulder. I peek at her, looking away from our reflection and toward my friend who has always thought I’m beautiful. She holds her hand out and snaps a photo of the two of us together, and my smile stretches wider.

  “For once, you caught a moment of me in a good mood,” I say, laughing.

  “Well, there was bound to be one,” she says, snapping one more photo as I roll my eyes at her lame joke.

  “And . . . there she is,” she teases.

  I reach for her phone in playful retaliation, but before I can catch her, there’s a soft knock at the door. Lucas’s mom slips in and holds her palms to her face. She shakes her head at the sight of the four of us, all done up as if we’re heading to a royal ball.

  “So, this is what it’s like to have daughters,” she says, genuine awe in her expression. I reach for her hand and squeeze it the moment she gives it to me. I still haven’t let Lucas read the letter she wrote me after everything went down, but he knows she gave it to me. She spent two pages apologizing for believing I could be anything other than someone special. I cried when I read it, not realizing how much it hurt to have her think poorly of me because of something she believed my mom did. Her list of my best qualities was exhaustive, but it was also deeply personal and purposeful. She wasn’t generic about a single thing, and described moments when Lucas and I were together as kids. She credited me for him finally finding his own voice, but I don’t know that I did anything other than rip the tape from his mouth. Lucas was already near to breaking free of his father’s expectations. All I did was give him a tiny shove.

  “The guys are ready, ladies,” she says, pausing at the door and lining us up to walk down one at a time. I know my mom’s drill, and we will be repeating this sequence about eight more times to make sure she gets the perfect shot. But this first time will be the one that counts the most for me. It will be the first time Lucas looks up and sees me as more than the girl next door. A sexy, mature, driven and confident almost eighteen-year-old is about to walk down the steps and take his hand. I’ll know exactly what our immediate future holds by that initial reaction. I’m ready for it.

  Abby walks down the steps first, and we all giggle at the cat calls and whistles the boys deliver down below. We decided to go together as a group tonight since Lucas and I are the only real couple, but I know for a fact Tory sees Abby with the same colored glasses Lucas does me. He’s just not quite ready to grow up and admit it.

  Lola and Naomi go next, and I watch through the cracked doorway as they stop to pose on nearly every step. My mom is hysterical with laughter, but deep down, she actually thinks some of the poses they strike might work for commercial purposes. Her business hat is never far away.

  My heart beats wildly the farther down the steps the girls go, and when the eyes staring from below all dart up to the doorway I’m hiding behind, my palms begin to sweat.

  “I’m nervous,” I whisper, giggling for Lucas’s mom.

  “You’re stunning,” she says. Without giving me more time to panic, she pushes the door open and steps back so I’m the only thing there for Lucas to see. He came dressed as promised, his straight black pants, dark gray V-neck sweater, crisp white shirt, and black tie. The preppy look may very well only work on him for me. It does work, though. It works without exception, and it works quickly. My insides shift from being anxious to being amorous. I step onto the landing, wrap my hand around the railing, and look down on the blue eyes peering up.

  “You are beautiful,” Lucas mouths, and my mouth stretches into a smile, the satin feeling of the deep red color on my lips making it easy to shine with happiness. He moves forward, away from the seven other guys here with him, and as I take the stairs one at a time, praying I don’t fall in these shoes that are way too high for my novice feet to navigate in, he climbs to meet me.

  My mother’s cameras click rapidly, and as silly as I thought she was with some of this, I’m glad she’s capturing this moment. If Lucas never looks up at me again, I’ll always have the way he’s looking at me now.

  With only three steps left between us, Lucas takes one final stride, clearing them all until we share the same stair. He stands close, his hands bracing my elbows as I hold on to his biceps, not towering over me as he usually does thanks to the stupid amount of height added by my shoes.

  “Look who’s all grown up,” he says through a playful smirk. His eyes are crystal waters against the dark gray of his sweater. I breathe in his scent and instantly am drunk on the warm vanilla and burning wood notes. Lucas takes advantage of my liquid state by tipping up my chin and possessively dropping his mouth on mine. His hand snakes around my back, landing low enough for his fingers to dip inside the fabric that drapes above my ass. He leans me back, and someone in the room whistles. I blush from being the center of attention, but I’m also rushed with heat from his touch.

  I lean all of my weight into his strong hand as he holds me perilously over the cascading stairs, tethering us to gravity with his other hand on the banister. When he pulls away, I smile against his lips, happy to etch this moment in stone. One more heartbeat, though, makes it another milestone in my life.

  “I love you, too,” he says, his lips playfully brushing against the nape of my neck. He raises me and our gazes lock, his serious despite the flirtatious lilt of his lips, which are a little pink from my lip stick.

  “I love you,” I mouth, knowing nobody below can see me. His cheek indents briefly, a hint of his dimple appearing like a sign to let me know he read my lips . . . just as he heard me slip up and say those words before, way too early.

  As I predict, my mom, the consummate professional, makes us repeat every single thing we do three more times, then she spends an hour taking shots of couples and groups on the stairs and in front of her plain backdrop. Before she shuts down her lights, though, I make her do one thing she hates but will thank me for down the road.

  I drag my resistant mother outside to stand with me in front of our middle-finger garage door, and we stand together, embracing, her in her ripped jeans and Tommy sweatshirt and me in my two-hundred-dollar cocktail dress that my mom said I deserved despite my argument that it cost too much.

  I had prepared Lucas’s mom for the job, and from the digital proofs I checked on my mom’s laptop, I’d say she came through beautifully. I will take that image of her and me together with me everywhere I go, and no matter how much life changes, my relationship with her will be my one true constant. My rock. That paint will soon be covered up, but the badass who did it? She’s forever.

  I expect attention when Lucas and I finally walk into the homecoming dance. Not because of the rumors swirling about everything that went down, but because of the epic performance he had on the field last night. His dad still showed up for the game, though his mother sat with us while his dad stood alone down by the fence. He didn’t leave, because as broken as his relationship with his son is, he can’t give up the high he gets from watching him do things he never could. Lucas is gifted on the field. He also happens to have a gifted mind, and for the boy I love, that’s far more inspiring.

  A few players stop us as we make our way toward the dance floor, handshakes and bro hugs take place with me at Lucas’s side. But when the first slow song begins to play, everything—and everyone else—disappears. I find a home against Lucas’s chest, and I intend on staying here until he takes me somewhere to be alone. The sensual touch of his hand on my bare back keeps my nerves firing no matter how slow or soft the song is we dance to, and I know we’ve been indulged when the DJ announces one more before he turns things up a notch. I don’t quite expect this, though.

  To most people in the room, this isn’t a slow song. In fact, judging by the sneers and jokes, most people don’t even know what this song is. But I know. Hayden D’Angelo knows. And now his twin knows, too.

  “Did you set this up?” I say, leaning back and quirking a brow as “Midnight Hour” transforms our high school gym into a time machine right back to the nineteen-sixties.

  “I thought you did!” Lucas laughs, flattening his hand on his chest and crossing his heart.

  I narrow my eyes in thought, and scan the room in search of my suspect, but I don’t have to look far. Tory leans proudly with his right elbow on the tower speaker near the DJ booth. He blows on his fingertips then runs them down the length of his lapel like a regular fucking Sinatra. My, I have taught him well.

  The dance floor clears for the most part, but Lucas and I stay there for the entire song, singing along with the chorus, showcasing the worst of our vocal talents. When the DJ breaks through the end of the song asking the homecoming royalty court to step forward, I peel back so Lucas can join the other seniors standing near the platform set up under the basketball scoreboard. He instead slides back and out of the way with me, letting the twins and that guy Cannon walk up on their own. It’s glaringly obvious he’s not where he should be as three guys stand to the right of our principal and four girls stand to his left. Even more obvious is the disdain on Ava’s face as she stares across the half court at me. There was a time when that small, insignificant action of hers would make me feel incredibly small, but tonight, it only serves as a source of amusement.

  “She could not possibly hate me more,” I say. Lucas bends his head down and claps through the reading of the nominees for king, including himself.

  “Ava?” he questions.

  I punch out a short laugh. “Yeah. She hasn’t really bothered me since the whole spray paint and black eye incidents. What’s weird, though, is I don’t get why she hated me so much when you were dating her.”

  Lucas’s eyes glimmer in his gaze, and a smirk paints his lips.

  “Oh, I know why,” he says, standing tall and not filling in the details just to torture me.

  I clap through the list of queen nominees but keep my skeptical eyes on my boyfriend, my stare penetrating his ability to ignore it.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he says, turning to the side to kiss the top of my head. I look up and meet his smile.

  “But you’re probably gonna win,” I say.

  “I don’t really give a shit,” he responds.

  I give him side eyes for a moment, but it’s easy to see he’s telling the truth. I take his waiting hand and we weave through the crowd, having only stayed for four songs. They announce Ava’s name behind us as we let the gym doors fall closed. It’s a perfect way to leave her, on top of her completely irrelevant and fake mountain. It doesn’t change the question I’m still dying to know the answer to, though. I hold my tongue until we get to Lucas’s truck, patient a few minutes longer than I expect because Lucas quickly discovers I followed through with my promise in wearing this dress.

  I sit sideways in his passenger seat with him standing between my legs. My body satiated from his touch, I peel away from our kiss and reach up to grab the knot of his tie. I tug it forcefully, and he grins.

  “Tell me, Lucas Fuller. Why does Ava Pryor hate me so much?”

  I may never be prepared for his answer.

  “Because when she told me she was in love with me at her eighth grade birthday party I told her I was in love with you. And deep down, she knows I never stopped.”

  Epilogue

  It’s strange to contemplate where we all started the year—where Lucas and I started the year. There was a time when I dreaded this day . . . graduation. I was so deep in my own head that I thought the day would come and go without things like parties, or friends. Certainly not boyfriends. And yet somehow, I’m in a world where I have all three.

  In six hours, I’ll walk across a stage and be handed a ticket to my future. That future isn’t as dim as I fear it would be, either. My mom is an inspiration. She believes in her work, and she works hard. That hard work has turned a solo photography business into something that not only pays the bills but also afforded her to tuck away enough for me to go to Indiana East. It’s not Notre Dame or Ball State, but it is away from home, and an adventure. And it has a really great liberal arts program, so maybe I’ll be able to figure out what the hell I want to be when I grow up.

  Grow up.

  It’s funny to look back and remember those words Abby said to me when the year began: that we’ve all grown up. She was right. In many ways, we have. But we’ve also got a lot of growing left to do. I hope somehow we’re lucky enough to still be together at the end . . . all of us.

  Lucas leaves after summer for MIT. He’s going to love it there, and I’m all right with that because I know he loves me too. I might lose him for a little while to that great big world he’s going to experience. But his roots will always be here, on some tree-lined street about an hour from a big city, where a pair of driveways brought us together when we were young.

  I trust him enough to know he’ll always come back to me in one form or another, and we will always be in love, even if it’s only first love. I can’t help but believe there’s a chance that me and him? We might be the real deal. The forever, and the always.

  “Are you sure you aren’t peeking?” Lucas shouts. He left me here at the bottom of his driveway about ten minutes ago with this stupid tie wrapped around my face. He tied it snug, so not only can I not see, I might actually be blind. He said he has a graduation gift for me that requires a little maneuvering. I’m nervous about what that means.

  “I promise!” I shout back.

  “Okay, you’ll know when to pull off the blindfold,” he says. I shake my head because I have no idea what that could possibly mean, but trust . . . I trust him. So, here goes nothing.

  At first, all I hear is the slamming of a car door. I lose count how many seconds pass before another noise touches my ears, but when it does, yeah . . . he’s right. It’s time to pull off the blindfold.

  “No fucking way!”

  My dad’s impossible project, the piece of junk I assumed my mom finally had hauled away, is backing out of Lucas Fuller’s garage. On its own. Nobody is pushing it. It’s being driven.

  The rumble is like honey to the ears, and even though the body is in desperate need of a paint job, the form . . . my God, the form of that vehicle is sexy.

  “I can’t believe you got the Buick running!” I shout so he hears me over the deep growl spilling from the engine.

  Lucas hops out, leaving the door open behind him. The seats are still torn, but the dash looks new, and the steering wheel is in the right position with a leather wrap around it. I palm my face and stare in shock as I walk closer, sitting inside briefly so I can touch everything. I step back out, closing the door behind me, and put my hands right back on my cheeks, tears forming in my eyes.

  “I figured what good is an MIT degree if I can’t get my girl a car to drive to college in,” he says with a casual shrug. He acts as if this is no big deal but I know what shape that car was in. It was a shell. A ghost. He brought it back from the dead. And he did it for me.

  I leap at him in an instant, arms wrapping around his neck as he catches me at the waist and swings me in a circle, my dress and graduation gown flowing around my body.

  “You like it?” He dips his chin as he sets me on my feet and I step up on my toes to kiss him.

  “I could not love a single thing more,” I say, the smile on my mouth aching as it stabs into my cheeks. This is what happiness is.

  “I feel really bad,” I say with a soft laugh.

  His brow dents.

  “Because I didn’t get you anything that big,” I say, glancing over my shoulder to take in the car still rumbling out its sweet sounding idle behind me. I bite my bottom lip and turn my gaze back to him, a little excited because while I didn’t get him a car, I did get him something he’ll like.

  “That’s a fairly sinister grin you’ve got there, June Mabee.” His eyes lower and one brow lifts.

  I let him stew with his thoughts and fantasies for a few seconds, then I tug his hands into mine and lead him backward toward the back seat of the car that is now mine. He follows willingly as I open the door and get in. He drops a knee on the seat between my legs and I slide until my back is pressed against the opposite window. He’s wearing his dress shirt and dark gray pants, a black tie, and silver cufflinks on his rolled-up sleeves. I’m going to enjoy messing up his look later, but for right now, I feel he might just deserve a preview.

  I let the sides of my graduation gown fall open and slowly unbutton the front of my dress one button at a time. My mom and his mom are picking up food. My dad won’t show up until the ceremony, and his dad might not show up at all. We have a small moment alone to make a memory, and what I bought for him is meant to make an impression.

  As my dress falls open, the thin white lace over my breasts and the matching panties come into view, and Lucas’s gaze scorches its way down my body. He leans forward without hesitation, and I open my legs to make room for him to completely crawl inside. When he shuts the heavy door behind him, I decide his pressed shirt doesn’t have to be perfect to walk across a stage, and maybe it’s all right if he gets a little messy now.