“River, you get more handsome every minute. The girls must be falling over themselves for you.”
I managed a smile. “Good to see you, Dazia. Thanks for coming.”
“You can’t keep me away.” She sat on the bed and touched Mom’s cheek. “How are we feeling, love. Not so hot?”
“Bye, Mom,” I said.
“Bye, honey,” Mom said. “Have fun tonight.”
I went out and sagged against the wall outside the bedroom door. Keeping Mom’s promise felt impossible. My own grief was a chasm that if I fell into it, I’d keep falling and never come back out. I had to be strong. Not just for my dad and sister, but for myself. So I didn’t break apart into a million pieces.
At ten p.m., I drove to the Seabright neighborhood and parked alongside the Parish’s huge Craftsman. I came around to the side gate, then froze to see an elderly woman leaving the guesthouse. The woman patted Holden’s cheek, then turned and went back to the main house. Holden watched her go, then touched his fingers where her hand had been.
My heart swelled at the sight. Whoever that woman was, I loved her already.
Holden caught sight of me and waved. A few minutes later, he met me at my truck.
“Who was that?” I asked as he climbed into the cab. “Is there something you need to tell me?”
He gave me a pointed look. “Is this you being cute?”
“Yes,” I said with a small laugh and kissed him. “But for real, who was she?”
“Beatriz Alves. She’s my aunt and uncle’s caretaker, but…”
“She’s your friend.”
He nodded. “On the nights you ditch me to hang out with the Neanderthal Squad, we have movie night.”
“Does she know about me?”
“Yes.” Holden glanced at me with rare vulnerability in his eyes. “Sometimes things feel so good with you, it starts to feel surreal. I had to tell someone to make it more solid. I hope that’s okay.”
“Yeah, it’s okay,” I said quietly.
Our secrecy was wearing on him. Because of course it was. It was wearing on me too, breaking me down slowly, like the ocean taking more and more of the shore with every receding wave.
“Well?” Holden said, recovering his sarcastic tone. “Are we going to see a bunch of rocks fall from the sky or what?”
I drove up through the Pogonip Forest, up a winding road, higher and higher until the tree line broke. We parked at a clearing and I breathed thanks that no one else had the idea to come up here.
I set out a blanket on the bed of my truck, and Holden and I lay on our backs under a dark blue sky, glittering with stars. It took only a few minutes before the first meteor streaked across the sky, a silver ball leaving a trail of sparks until it burned out.
“Not bad, right?” I asked.
“It’s better than watching a bunch of old guys ogle old cars.”
I started to retort but the meteors were shooting above us, one after the other. We both shut up and just watched as the universe threw its own fireworks show, raining light across the black backdrop. From our vantage, with no one around, it was easy to imagine that they were just for Holden and me.
I turned to look at him and watched the lights flare in his eyes, his sharp exterior soft with the beauty of it.
“Can I ask you something?”
Holden raised his brows. “Sounds serious.”
“What was your first time like?” I shifted on the blanket. “I mean, you don’t have to tell me. If you don’t want to.”
“I don’t mind. It wasn’t exactly earth-shattering, and yet it was completely earth-shattering, all things considered.”
I tried to ignore the jealousy that bit at me. “What do you mean?”
“It was at prep school. I was fifteen. He was seventeen. The act itself wasn’t anything to write home about. Rougher than I’d have preferred.” He quickly shook his head at my hissed intake of breath. “That was due to our inexperience more than anything else. Though truthfully, I wasn’t in a healthy headspace to ask for anything different, and I wasn’t going to stop anyway. The ultimate rebellion against my parents. But the joke was on me.”
“What happened?”
“My partner—we’ll call him Blake because that’s his name—thought it would be fun to film it. Being the dumbass that I was, I agreed and thought nothing more about it. But since that first sexual experience was less than satisfying, I branched out. Saw other people. And by see, I mean I fucked my way through the gay population at that school and a few students who were on the fence, to boot. Blake became upset and showed our video to some friends. They showed their friends…” Holden rolled a finger in the air. “It went viral, jumping from one phone to another until our entire floor was infected.”
My teeth ground together. My hand found Holden’s and held on while the meteors streaked across the black sky.
“The director of the school got wind of it. He hauled us to his office, and both sets of parents were there. The biggest scandal in the school’s one hundred and thirty-years. I doubted that, but my parents certainly agreed. Charles and Estelle Parish handled it in true rich-person fashion—threatening to sue the school into oblivion if word got out. They confiscated every phone, made everyone sign NDAs, paid off anyone who’d seen it, and pulled me out of the school. For a few precious days, it was the greatest thing to ever happen to me.”
My brows furrowed. “How?”
Holden
