“Sorry, buddy, did I hurt you?” Jay asks softly.

“Not at all, buddy,” Tom retorts, massaging his hand. “How do you know Daisy?”

“We’ve been friends a long time. Knew each other as kids. I guess you could say we were childhood sweethearts.”

My face burns.

“Is that so?” Tom sneers. “I dated Daisy for seven years. We had some really good times.” He waggles his eyebrows.

“Okay, we’re done here. Enjoy the party, you guys.” I hustle Jay past the group and down the hall.

“Be a good girl, Daisy,” Tom responds, and anger flushes hot through my body. I hate that phrase of his. So condescending. So annoying. So fucking misogynistic.

Once we’re clear of them, Jay pulls me toward a large door fitted with a keypad. “Hestia, unlock Dance Room Three,” he says, and the door unlatches with a faint whirr.

“Is that your AI? Hestia?”

“Yes.”

“Nice name. Way classier than ours.”

“What’s yours?”

“Serenity.”

“Of course it is.” He chuckles. “I remember how much your parents loved that show. Here, I’ll give you access, so the house will obey you, too.” He presses the screen a few times, navigating through the menu, and then the house records a sample of my voice.

He’s being impulsive, trusting me with control of his home. Has he given any other girls access? Or do I get special treatment as his childhood sweetheart? The thought of those words being repeated mockingly by Myrtle’s stupid bubble-gum lips and Tom’s sneering mouth makes me so mad I can hardly stand it.

“Now that’s done. You’re one of the admins.” Jay rubs his hands together and grins at me. “Ready to see what’s in here?”

“I can’t wait.” My response is only half-genuine, but Jay doesn’t seem to notice.

He ushers me into a ballroom, smaller and less modern than the main dance hall. With its glossy floor, rich wallpaper, and creamy crown molding, the room feels like something out of a bygone era. Two big chandeliers twinkle from the ceiling, dripping frosty crystals. With the door closed behind us, the sounds of the party are muffled to a mere whisper. It’s a relief to be somewhere so quiet, the eye in the middle of a hurricane.

Jay steps over to a big record player and begins shuffling through the shelves of albums beside it.

“Why’d you tell Tom that? About us being childhood sweethearts?” My cheeks are still burning.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” He examines a record without looking at me.

His response unspools a chain of memories: golden summer days spent side by side, shooting down sun-hot slides at the playground or riding shabby skateboards through empty parking lots; chilly winter afternoons huddled on my living room couch, doing our homework while our toes touched under a blanket; meals shared with my family because his dad was in jail and his mother was passed out in their apartment. A thousand cords of friendship woven together, long before the day his fingertips grazed my bare shoulder, when he looked at me with a new softness and I felt the tingle of something awakening inside me.

After that kaleidoscopic shift, even our tiniest touches were bathed in rosy color. Jay’s hand in mine was the most exciting thing I’d ever felt. His lips on my cheek set my heart pounding. We spent three blissful, innocent months that way, until my dad came home with the news of his new job and our impending move.

The baby romance between Jay and me was private and precious. Not something for Tom to sneer at.

“I didn’t want everyone to know about it,” I whisper. “And they will. Tom and Myrtle will tell everyone, and they’ll make fun—”

“Let them.”

“You shouldn’t have said anything.”

Jay has the record poised over the platter, but at that, he glances up. “You’re ashamed of me.”

“I’m not.”

“Good.” He settles the record into place. “I’ve worked hard to make sure you wouldn’t have to be. I’ve made myself important. Powerful. No gossip of theirs can shake what I’ve built.”

“That’s not what I—I wouldn’t ever be ashamed of you, even without all this. You’re my oldest friend, Jay.”

His gaze cuts me open. “So if I’d wandered up this mountain and climbed the fence into your beautiful wealthy community and come to you in my ragged clothes, without a dollar to my name, you’d have been just as glad to see me?”

“Yes! Seriously, Jay? You really think I’m that mercenary?”

“I think you live a different life now. And I’ve done what I needed to do to carve my own place in it.” He poises the spindle on the record, and music unfurls, a sweeping melody. “Would you like to dance?”

With the wine-colored shirt and gold jacket, he looks like a beautiful prince, brown-eyed and earnest, blending perfectly into the vintage ambiance of this elegant room. I’m still upset—maybe at him, or Tom, or both—but the music is luring me, softening me. I drift toward him, and he clasps my fingers and slips his other hand under my arm, his palm resting on my shoulder blade.

We’ve danced before, he and I. Silly, wild dances at my house, where we imitated the moves in music videos until we collapsed on the carpet, our stomachs aching with laughter. But we’ve never danced like this. Just the two of us, with romantic music swirling our insides, under the heavy awareness of what it means that he’s here, on Glassy Mountain, in this house.

He’s here for me. That’s pretty fucking clear. And as much as I care about him, as flattered as I am, there’s a magnificence to the gesture that overwhelms me.

“Do you know the fox-trot?” Jay asks. “Cody taught me. I’m pretty good.”

“Mom made us all take ballroom dancing lessons as soon as we moved up here,” I tell him. “I think she expected us to be attending a lot of very fancy parties. She had possibly been watching too many old episodes of Dancing with the Stars at the time.”

He laughs, sweeping me into the long, swift strides of the dance. “I’ve always loved your mom. I’d like to see her, and your dad too.”

“You will. I told them you’re here. They were…surprised.”

“And full of questions, I imagine.”

“Uh-huh,” I say vaguely. A scent twirls past my nose as we move—the sharp, sweet edge of alcohol. “Do you drink now?” I don’t mean it to sound judgmental, but it does.

“No.” He tilts his head with a light frown of confusion; then his brow clears. “Ah, the champagne. One of the girls I was hanging out with—Sloane—rubbed champagne into my hair when I told her I didn’t drink. She said something about getting me drunk via osmosis.”

“I do not think that word means what she thinks it means,” I say in my best imitation of Inigo Montoya, and he laughs. I forgot how delicious his laugh is—bright and boyish, with a slight hoarseness that’s just plain sexy.

“Princess Bride quotes, nice.” He twirls me expertly, and I manage to follow the move semi-gracefully.

“Though maybe she did know what it means. Osmosis isn’t just movement of a solvent through a semipermeable membrane,” I murmur. “It can also be a slow assimilation of attitudes or ideas, sometimes without the awareness that you’re changing.”

Jay ducks a little closer as we continue to step—slow, slow, quick-quick. “I love your brain.”

He used to tell me that often, even when my grades weren’t great, when my parents’ faces expressed their concern about my abilities and my future. I couldn’t explain to Mom and Dad how my brain picks and chooses what it remembers. They don’t understand how I can recall certain concepts in vivid detail and let others slip away completely, even if I’ve studied them. It’s a quirk that yields some unfortunate test grades and a less-than-stellar college transcript.

But Jay always loved my funky, unpredictable brain, and his familiar words nestle in my heart. At least his opinion of me hasn’t changed. But he’s different, intangibly and irrevocably so, and it makes me sad.