Then—almost as if I were made of eggshells—he lowered his mouth to mine and just rested it there. I didn’t know what to do next, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care if we just stayed like that all night and never even moved our mouths, it was everything.

His lips closed over mine and I could kind of feel his hand shaking. I did what he was doing and started to move my lips like he was. I felt the tip of his tongue brush across my lips once and I thought my eyes were about to roll back in my head. He did it again, and then a third time, so I finally did it, too. When our tongues touched for the first time, I kind of smiled a little, because I’d thought about my first kiss a lot. Where it would be, who it would be with. Never in a million years did I imagine it would feel like this.

He pushed me on my back and pressed his hand against my cheek and kept kissing me. It just got better and better as I grew more comfortable. My favorite moment was when he pulled back for a second and looked down at me, then came back even harder.

I don’t know how long we kissed. A long time. So long, my mouth started to hurt and my eyes couldn’t stay open. When we fell asleep, I’m pretty sure his mouth was still touching mine.

We didn’t talk about Boston again.

I still don’t know if he’s leaving.

—Lily

Wow.

Wow.

I close the journal and look over at Lily. She wrote our first kiss with so much detail, it makes me feel inferior to my teenage self.

Did it actually happen that way?

I remember that night, but I was a hell of a lot more nervous than Lily described me to be. It’s funny how, when you’re a teenager, you think you’re the only inexperienced, nervous human on the planet. You think almost every other teenager has life figured out way better than you do, but it isn’t that way at all. We were both scared. And infatuated. And in love.

I had fallen in love with her long before our first kiss, though. I loved her more than I had ever loved anyone before that moment. I think I loved her more than I’ve ever loved anyone after that moment.

I think I still might.

There’s so much Lily doesn’t know about that part of my life. So much I want to tell her now that I’ve read her version of some of our time together. It’s obvious she has no clue how instrumental she was in my life back then. At a time when everyone was turning their backs to me, Lily was the only one who stepped up.

She’s still sound asleep, so I pull out my phone and open a blank note. I start typing, detailing what my life was like before she entered it. I don’t mean to write as much as I do, but I guess I have a lot I want to say to her.

It’s another twenty minutes before I finally finish typing everything, and another five minutes before Lily finally begins to rouse.

I set my phone in the cupholder, unsure if I’m going to allow her to read what I just wrote. I might wait a few days. A few weeks. She wants to take things slow, and I’m not sure what I said toward the end of that letter matches her idea of “slow.”

Her hand goes up, and she scratches her head. She’s facing the window, so I don’t see her face when her eyes open, but I can tell when she’s awake because she sits straight up. She stares out her window for a beat, then swings her head in my direction. A few strands of hair are stuck to her cheek.

I’m leaning against my door, watching her casually, as if this is completely normal first-date behavior.

“Atlas.” She says my name like it’s an apology and a question at the same time.

“It’s okay. You were tired.”

She grabs her phone and looks at the time. “Oh my God.” She leans forward, pressing her elbows into her thighs and her face into her palms. “I can’t believe this.”

“Lily, it’s fine. Really.” I hold up the journal. “You kept me company.”

She eyes the journal and then groans. “This is mortifying.”

I toss the journal into the backseat. “I personally found it enlightening.”

Lily hits me playfully on my shoulder. “Stop laughing. I feel too bad for it to be funny.”

“Don’t feel bad, you’re exhausted. And probably hungry. We could grab a burger on the drive back.”

Lily falls dramatically against her seat. “Let the fancy chef take the girl for fast food since she slept through her date. Why not?” She flips the visor down and notices the hair stuck to her cheek. “Wow, I am such a mom. Is this our last date? It is. Did I ruin this already? I wouldn’t blame you.”

I put the car in reverse. “Not even close after everything I just read. Not sure anything could top this date.”

“You have very low standards, Atlas.”

I find her self-deprecation adorably attractive. “I have a question about your journal.”

“What?” She’s wiping away a smear of mascara. Everything about her seems so defeated now that she thinks she ruined our date. I can’t stop smiling, though.

“The night of our first kiss… did you put the blankets in the washer on purpose? Was that a trick to get me to sleep in your bed?”

She scrunches up her nose. “You read that far?”

“You were asleep for a long time.”

She contemplates my question, and then nods an admission. “I wanted you to be my first kiss back then, and that wouldn’t have happened if you kept sleeping on the floor.”

She’s probably right about that. And it worked.

It’s still working, because reading her description of our first kiss brought back every feeling she pulled out of me that night. She could sleep the entire way back home, and I’d still think this was the best date I’ve ever been on.

Chapter Twelve Lily

“I can’t believe you let me sleep for that long.” It’s been ten minutes, and my stomach is still rolling from embarrassment. “Did you finish reading the whole journal?”

“I stopped after I read about our first kiss.”

That’s good. That’s not too embarrassing. But if he would have read about the first time we had sex while I was sleeping in the seat next to him, I’m not sure I could have recovered.

“This is so not fair,” I mutter. “You have to do something mortifying so the scales even out, because right now I feel like I’ve completely ruined our night.”

Atlas laughs. “You think me doing something to mortify myself will make you feel better about tonight?”

I nod. “Yes, that’s the law of the universe. Eye for an eye, humiliation for humiliation.”

Atlas taps his thumb on his steering wheel as he massages his jaw with his free hand. Then he nudges his head toward his phone, which is sitting in the cupholder. “Open the Notes app on my phone. Read the first one.”

Oh, wow. I was kidding, but I snatch up his phone so fast. “What’s your password?”

“Nine five nine five.”

I enter the numbers and then glance over his home screen while I have it open. Every app is tucked neatly into a folder. He has zero unread texts and one unread email. “You’re a neat freak. Who has one unread email?”