We explore each other with closed eyes and held breath for several minutes, and when I can’t handle not tasting him anymore, I shift and glance up to find his hungry eyes waiting for my kiss to hit his lips. My mouth reaches for his, and he grinds against me, touching me roughly, just how I need it. Henry’s teeth drag across my bottom lip, and the feel of it makes me whimper.

  And then he pushes one finger inside. The stretch is surprisingly easy, and he touches me deeper than I thought he’d be able to, his hand moving slowly at first, but picking up speed as something between my legs begins to build.

  I feel Henry grow thicker under my touch, so I begin to squeeze and run my hand up and down him faster. His breath matches my movement, and mine copies his. Our lips gasp between kisses, and when the feeling inside my body becomes too much to hold onto, I let out a very loud “ahh” and shivers run through my body. Henry’s hips work against my hand, and I close my legs around his touch on me, squeezing him to me and not wanting to let him go. His release comes a breath later.

  My body feels worn, but every nerve ending is teeming with satisfaction. Henry’s mouth curls into a crooked smile as his hand leaves my body and drags up to the center of his chest.

  “Well…shit.” He laughs once, almost surprised. “I did not expect any of that.”

  He cracks one eye open, and I blush now that he’s looking at me—after…that. He grins, and his eyes laugh at my reaction.

  “Lily Ames, that was amazing.”

  I bunch my lips, not having anything to compare it too, but also still pulsing below.

  “Yeah?” I ask.

  He chuckles and pulls me into his embrace, rolling me so I’m lying on top of him, our open pants pressed together by two warm bodies, still throbbing and hot. Henry lifts his hips, and I can’t help but do the same, still wanting more pressure.

  “You want more?” his brow lifts, and I nod and close my eyes, letting him slide his hands down my hips to my ass. He spends the next fifteen minutes pulling me into him and kissing me through what becomes my second and third orgasms…ever.

  Henry left about thirty minutes before Collin got home. I cleaned my room, even going so far as to dust, as if somehow that would erase any clues Collin might have about Henry being here and what went down.

  I can’t make eye contact with him, and it’s because he’s my parent figure, though I can’t seem to call him dad yet. I think maybe he would like me to, though. Or uncle, maybe. I might try that first, but not until this summer ends. Not until I can look him in the eyes either.

  Traffic is in our favor, and we get to O’Hare shortly after Henry and Elena have arrived. I know I’ll have to see her now, so I prepare myself for all of the snarky, hateful things she’s no doubt going to say to me. Our last exchange was at Henry’s first race. I still don’t think Ms. Manning has fully forgiven me for telling her secret. I confessed to her immediately, seeking her out to tell her what I had done, even though Henry offered to say it was him.

  She understood because she understands Elena, but I still think she was hurt.

  “I’m going to have to circle, I think. Unless you want me to park and come in with you?” Collin almost seems like he wants to. I’m not sure I want my almost-uncle-not-quite-dad watching my mushy goodbye though.

  “Maybe just hang out in the cellphone lot.” My voice is definitively sad now. This is really happening.

  Collin stretches his arm behind my seat, then squeezes my neck in sympathy.

  “All right then,” he says, slowing to the curb. He bought the car when Alice left. He said he wanted a way to get to me if I needed him. It barely runs, but it’s gotten me this far, and so has Collin.

  I get out quickly, maybe so I don’t change my mind. I toyed with the fantasy that if I didn’t show up, he wouldn’t leave. That would be selfish, though, and I’ve decided I’m not a minion. I put others first—maybe more than I should sometimes.

  My hands are fists at my sides, and I keep slapping them at my thighs with every step I take, like I’m physically trying to ground myself. I think maybe I’m trying to keep from fainting.

  Even in the crowd of travelers all wheeling in various directions, I find him. He’s changed. He’s wearing a fitted, gray suit. His hands are in his pockets as he pivots and his head turns from side to side; he lifts up on his toes, looking out toward the other set of doors.

  He’s searching for me.

  Elena spots me first, but promptly busies herself by pretending to read something important on her phone. She’s dressed to match him. Long gray slacks that swing across the marble floor and a slim jacket that flairs at her waist, longer in the back. She’s wearing her black-rimmed glasses today. She does this when she wants to look especially powerful.

  Henry makes a final turn, looking behind him to where I am, finally. A sad smile mixes with the relief on his face, and he takes long strides to get to me in a hurry. His hands cup my face at first contact, and he kisses me as if we’re saying hello instead of goodbye.

  “Missed you,” he hums against my lips.

  “Mmmm,” I say.

  I force a smile on my mouth for his benefit, but he sees through the thin veil. He runs the pad of his thumb over my bottom lip and taps there in the center a few times.

  “I know this is really sucky,” he says.

  “Super sucky,” I add.

  He laughs silently as his eyes sweep closed. He breathes out and opens them back on me.

  “You can’t go past security.” He sighs hard enough that his shoulders rise and fall sharply.

  “I know,” I say.

  We both wish I could. We both wish for a lot of things. Mostly, I wish for the next ten months to fly by. I also wish for Elena to get abducted by aliens. And then I wish terrible acne on Stella. Not all of my wishes are of good character. I wish them just the same.

  “I want to show you something,” he says, that goofy smirk tainting his bluff. He’s up to something, and he is always bad at hiding it when he is.

  He rushes back to where his bags are sitting, stacked at the seats next to Elena. I start to walk over to him, but he hurries back, probably knowing I’d rather not have her ears on our conversation.

  Henry hands me a leather-bound book with a ribbon cutting through the middle. I open to that page, but it’s blank, so I sift through the pages backward until I get to the very beginning and recognize the sharp lines of his cursive handwriting.

  HENRY’S NOTEBOOK ABOUT NOT TALKING TO ANY OTHER GIRL BESIDES LILY, UNLESS SHE’S A TEACHER, OR IF I’M BEING SUPER RUDE LIKE IGNORING A QUESTION FOR DIRECTIONS. I CAN ALSO SAY THANK YOU WHEN A GIRL BRINGS ME A BEER. OR NO BEER? CUZ IT’S GERMANY, SO IF NO BEER THEN

  I giggle and close the cover on his sweet book, handing it back to him but holding on while he brings it to his chest.

  “Beer, but only if your drunk lips won’t accidentally fall into someone else’s.”

  He spreads his fingers out over the book as I let go, and closes his eyes.

  “I solemnly swear. No drunk lips on anyone’s but yours,” he says, leaning forward just enough to hold my bottom lip between both of his.

  Elena clears her throat loudly, and Henry pulls away, glancing over his shoulder to where she stands and literally taps on the face of her watch.

  “Yeah,” he sighs, turning back to face me.

  I stare into his eyes and try not to cry. This is so much harder than I thought it would be. My heart is slapping at my insides. Henry leans into me, bending his head down until our foreheads touch. My eyes close.

  “I’ll call you as soon as I land. And I’ll send letters. Maybe I’ll teach you German. Oh! And make sure someone records your showcase for me when school starts up. And..and…if you do go into Satis to practice, maybe play something for me. We can figure out the times and stuff…”

  “Henry!” Elena’s patience is thin. I hate her so much.

  “I’ll probably do nothing but play the piano until you get back,” I say, whimpering out a sad laugh.

  Henry rests his right hand along my cheek and strokes my skin lightly with his thumb.

  “Nah. You won’t,” he says. I flit my eyes up to meet his gaze, a serious note to his expression. His mouth pulls in tight, almost as if he’s resolved to this. I wish I could get there. “You’ll move on. At least a little. You’ll have fun with Nicki and the girls. And maybe you guys sneak out at the bonfire in my honor. Celebrate your birthday, too. Celebrate big! Seventeen. You are going to wreck that number. It won’t know how to be anything but you.”

  I shake a little with a sob, but run my arm over my face and turn it into laughter as best I can.

  “Seventeen, huh?”

  “Yeah,” he says, pulling me into his arms for one final squeeze. I grip fistfuls of his jacket, no doubt wrinkling it in my grasp. If I could hold on tighter, I would. Henry’s arms wrap around my entire body, then his hand moves to the back of my head and he holds me against his chest, dipping his chin just enough to kiss the top of my head.

  “See you soon,” he says, letting go all at once and walking away.

  I don’t chase after him. I want to, but I let him go. He turns back to look at me, and his eyes don’t leave me while he gathers up his carry-on bags and stands straight while Elena fixes his tie and flattens the spots I left behind in his coat.

  She pats his chest, the most affectionate thing she’s ever really done to him, and then with a small nod to me, he turns and walks through the security line, getting cleared through pre-check quickly and disappearing behind a pain of clouded glass.

  “Shit,” I mutter to myself, tucking my hand into the sleeve of my thin jacket and wiping away the tears that replace themselves the moment I remove them.

  My chest is heavy, breath not coming as easily as I would like, so before I make myself sick, I turn to walk back out to the curb. I text Collin while I walk, and he tells me to give him five minutes. I find a small concrete bench right outside the east departures door, and I slide back until my shoulder blades hit the wall and I can fold my legs in front of me.

  Elena, though, gives me no time to recover. She takes a seat next to me, the skirting of her jacket brushing against my bare knee. I didn’t really think she would just leave without stopping to gloat. I see her driver parked up ahead, standing outside of the black Lincoln Town Car. Nobody even bothers to tell him to move. Elena even has the TSA forewarned.

  “Oh, dear. I hate that you’re so sad,” she says.

  “I’m fine,” I fire back, looking the other direction.

  She doesn’t hear me, or she doesn’t care.

  “It was always going to be like this. You know that Henry is just something more than you and I are. You see that, don’t you?”

  I blink away angry tears and keep my gaze away from her as I remain wordless.

  “He is exactly as I hoped he would be. Nobody will ever break Henry’s heart—he will leave behind the heartbroken, and he’ll rule this world because of it. I made sure that he wouldn’t suffer from my biggest flaw.”

  I laugh out loud at her absurd lecture, but I don’t turn her direction. I won’t give her that satisfaction.

  “Henry won’t ever love anyone more than himself. And I know you think he loves you, but that’s only because you’re young, and because there are things he doesn’t know.”

  My jaw stiffens at her clue. It’s threatening and calculated.

  I turn just enough to be able to regard her from my periphery. She tucks her Coach bag high on her lap, flipping it on its side so she can fan her well-manicured hands over the expensive leather.

  “I’m going to tell you something, and you are going to have to make a very difficult decision.”

  My eyes freeze in their open position. I still manage to keep myself from looking at her fully. My fists tighten and I push my nails into my palms.

  “I know Rebecca has told you about how in love I once was with Mischa. I won’t deny it—falling for him was my greatest weakness, and when he chose her it absolutely devastated me.”

  I breathe in as quietly as I can, my entire body on edge in anticipation of where this is going.

  “What she didn’t tell you, because she’s not aware of it herself, is that Mischa was once very much in love with me, too. Men are so weak sometimes…”

  My mouth begins to fall open, so I bite my tongue with my back teeth to keep myself from blatantly showing the shock that is starting to overcome me.

  “He was not so faithful,” she says.

  And I know…

  “And we were not always careful,” she continues.

  I know. I know. I know!

  “I ended it the moment I got pregnant, and I left the baby in the care of the Catholic Sisters of St. Agatha. I was a driven woman ready to lead her father’s company into the twenty-first century. I was not suited for motherhood.”

  “You still aren’t,” I blurt out, my chest heaving with the flooding of truths. Elena is laying down her hand, and she’s been holding onto aces.

  “I don’t understand why Henry likes you with that acid tongue of yours. So hostile,” she says, her voice thick with its own venom only delivered in the calm slither she prefers.

  “Why would you do that? Why would you abandon him only to adopt him again and ruin his life with your…with your twisted games?” I can’t help but turn to look at her now. I back away to the farthest end of the bench, and a few people nearby have started to pay attention to our conversation because my voice is so loud.

  Elena stands and holds her lips tight, that dreadful smile lingering, but not fully spreading its wings. She reaches into her purse and pulls out a photo, then hands it to me. It’s of her, a much-younger her, with a newborn infant held to her chest. I can tell by the look in that woman’s eyes that she’s going to ruin things for this baby.

  “You’re sick!” I stand and search the roadway behind me, begging to see Collin’s car nearing me. It’s nothing but a congested line of taxis and shuttle vans, all maneuvering around her parked limo that gets a pass.

  “Henry is never coming back from Germany,” she says. My breath comes in sharp and fast, and my mouth opens in protest, but she holds her palm out and talks over me before I can make sense.

  “He’s not, Lily. Because before he comes home, I’m going to tell him the truth. I’m going to tell Henry that I am his mother, and that Mischa is his father.”

  “He will hate you! More than he already hates you!” I growl.

  “Yes,” she says, eyes smug as she pulls her glasses from her face and switches them out for her sunglasses in her purse. “He will hate me so much that he will want to disown this entire life. He will be surrounded with walls and defenses that will make him indestructible. It’s the one thing I knew I could do for him—take away this weakness.”

  “I won’t let that happen.” The words simmer with my anger, my promise just floating in this standoff and space between us.

  “But you have no way to win,” she says. There isn’t a hint of a smile anywhere near her lips. Her face is just matter of fact. “Even your heaving bosom won’t be enough to draw him back.”

  I shiver and sneer my nose. Alice told her how she found us on the roof.

  “He won’t let that happen,” I say.

  She shakes her head.

  “You have a choice now, Lily.”

  I hate the way she says my name.

  Don’t say my name!

  “You can live with the secret, which one day he will know you kept from him, or you can tell him before I do. Either way, he will resent you. He won’t be able to help it.”

  I pull my phone from my pocket, silently praying that it’s not as late as I think it is. I’ll just call him before he boards, or I’ll text him. I’ll get to him—have him paged from inside if I have to.

  But I won’t.

  Two minutes. I missed Henry’s takeoff time by two minutes. Elena wouldn’t have told me all of this now if she thought there was a way I could stop it. She waited just long enough.

  “He won’t run away. I believe in him,” I say, meeting the reflection of myself in her sunglasses with a glare of my own.

  “Well then, you are weaker than I ever was,” she says, turning and walking straight to her car with heavy steps that clap against the dirty ground.

  Collin pulls up just as the limo drives away, and I find myself unable to breathe. I rush to his car and collapse into him from the passenger seat, heavy tears blinding me and panicked breath unable to regulate itself.

  Thinking I’m just distraught, Collin shifts into park and embraces me, smoothing my hair away from a tear-stained face. And in this one terrible moment, Collin has become my dad.

  CHAPTER 19

  JUNIOR YEAR

  Henry doesn’t hate me.

  I also think that perhaps Elena was right and he’s never coming home.

  She took home away, in one clean sever. She made him in her image without any say from anyone. And she gave me no choice but to wield the knife.

  By the time I could get the words out of my mouth in a remotely understandable form, Elena was home and Collin and I had been parked in the cellphone lot at O’Hare for an hour. Collin was livid when he finally understood the details. He threatened Elena, first with violence, then with a lawsuit.

  I sat in the car while he pounded on her door in the rain, and then I sat at our kitchen table while he berated her with phone call after phone call calling her a child abuser for the manipulation she put me through.

  Her only response was to fire Alice, which made Collin’s ex-wife and my ex-fake-mom-cousin-aunt begin pounding on our door until neighbors called the police to deal with a “domestic situation.”

  They were both arrested, and I was driven in the back of a police car to the Southern District Precinct, where I sat for two hours until police could “sort things out.”