“Shit.” He tips his face up to look at me. “Are you hungry?”

“Since I met you,” I say, “constantly.”

We spend the day in a dreamy daze. We drink our tea and coffee on the rug in front of the open windows, sunshine on our faces. When we finish, we make refills and do it again.

For lunch, we walk down the street to a sandwich shop, eat on a bench by the bike trail. Everything feels impossibly normal, easy between us.

We go to Miles’s favorite walk-up soft-serve place and get ice cream covered in roughly chopped candy bars, eat it as we wander to his truck. We drive to the Sunday farmers’ market and buy what we need to make cauliflower tacos. Or what he needs, rather, because I have no idea what I’m doing, just following his directions while a very sad but hauntingly beautiful Glen Campbell song plays on his Bluetooth speaker, the windows still open, a breeze rustling through the apartment.

After we eat, he pulls me into his lap at the kitchen table and kisses me like he’s in no rush, like we have all the time in the world.

And it feels true. Like there is no world, no passing time.

“Want to sleep over?” he teases, brushing his nose against mine.

“Am I invited?” I ask.

“Open invitation,” he says. “Anytime you want.”

In his room, we tangle in his woodsmoke-scented sheets, hands in hair, nails raving over skin. When he pushes into me at last, I accidentally gasp “wow,” a new-to-me reaction to sex I expect to make him laugh.

Miles just nods as if agreeing, sneaks a hand under my neck, and kisses me again, so tenderly I could almost cry.

Then I’m a little bit worried I actually am going to cry, which is also a new experience, but my heart just feels so raw.

Like the whole day is catching up to me, or the last four months, or maybe longer. Decades of feeling braced against the world, and now I can’t find that sensation, the layer between me and everyone else, and it’s terrifying and freeing and intense.

We move slowly, heavily, and every time one of us reaches a tipping point, we turn. Rearrange. Find new ways to hold each other, to move together. Lying on our sides, him behind me, his arm draped over my hip and his hand tucked between my thighs, he murmurs my name, like it’s an exclamation, the sound you make after a perfect sip of wine.

I knew being with him like this would be good, and fun, and maybe even funny, but I’m surprised how my chest keeps twinging like my feelings have too much weight, and my rib cage might crack under them. I keep catching myself just before the words can tip over my lips: I love you.

It’s too soon. It’s too complicated. For once, I don’t want to be anywhere but in this moment, not thinking about what it all means or where it might go, and he makes that easy, this sunlit man.

Miles kisses my shoulder, my neck, my jaw as the intensity builds. He notices when I start to lose control, to move faster. He holds my hips tight and bucks to meet me hard and deep, and I’ve never felt anything quite like this before.

Like there’s no boundary between us, like he’s in my mind and heart and soul, and I want to keep him there even as I know this moment can’t last.

We’re cresting, and when we do, we’ll float back down into reality, into our two separate bodies.

But right now, he’s entirely mine and I’m his.

In the night I get up to pee, and when I come back, Miles is splayed out in the middle of the bed, arm outstretched like he’d been reaching for me in his sleep.

Seeing him there, lit by the moon, sends a crushing tenderness through me.

I tiptoe through the chilly room, climb into bed as gracefully as I can, but he still wakes enough to sleepily drape an arm around my waist and haul me into the warm nook of his body. “You were gone,” he murmurs.

“Now I’m back,” I whisper.

With a low, drowsy hum, he kisses my shoulder, and drifts back to sleep.

30

MONDAY, AUGUST 5TH

12 DAYS UNTIL THE READ-A-THON

In the morning, I don’t wake Miles.

As much as I would like to spend the morning making out, we were up late, and I’ll see him when he picks me up from work anyway. He’d texted Katya last night to see if she wanted his shift, and she’d replied not at all but I need money so I’ll take it, and so we’d decided to get dinner and drive up to a dark sky park.

While I’m dressing, I spot the note from Dad sitting on my dresser. When I was younger, I would’ve read it over and over, scouring for proof that he loved me, or clues about what I’d done to drive him off. Today, I just toss it into the trash on my way out.

I feel like Belle in the beginning of Beauty and the Beast, walking around with a shit-eating grin, greeting everyone like it’s the first day of the rest of my life. I’d be less obvious wearing an I’ve Had Great Sex sandwich board.

I stop at Fika for tea and order Ashleigh a latte too. When Jonah hands it back to me, a realization hits like a gong, reverberating through my bones.

Ashleigh.

I was supposed to paint with Ashleigh.

On my way out the door, I open my calendar and scan for her birthday.

Only, I never added Ashleigh’s birthday to my calendar. I’ve barely added anything in weeks, just like the whiteboard’s gone to the wayside.

An icy fist presses against the bottom of my stomach. It was this past Saturday, I’m positive.

She called in sick, I remember then, which triggers another nauseating lurch in my gut. She was sick on her birthday and I didn’t even check in on her.

How could I forget about her? How could I let this happen?

I practically run the rest of the way to work and get there right as Ashleigh’s locking her hatchback.

As I jog toward her, something flashes in her eyes, too quickly to read, and my heart turns over painfully as her expression settles back into neutrality.

I come to a stop, choke out, “Hey.”

When she doesn’t say anything, I hold her coffee out to her. She looks at it, her hand tightening on her purse strap for a second, before grudgingly accepting it.

“I’m so sorry,” I blurt out. “About Saturday. I just—my dad was in town, and then he left really abruptly, and I was completely distracted and Miles and I—god, I’m really sorry.”

She snorts, shakes her head. “You know,” she says. “It was your idea to do something for my birthday. You insisted. And weirdly, you even got me excited about it.”