He took a step towards me. I still held up my left hand. The moonlight caught on the diamond, and caused it to sparkle crazily.

“Jess,” Rob said in a cautious voice. “What are you doing? Seriously.”

“Seriously?” I shook my head. “I really don’t know.” Because I really didn’t. All I knew was that my throat was dry as sand and that my heart was doing crazy things inside my chest. I think it might have been a jig. “But you’re like the hundredth person to ask me that today. Do you want it back?”

“If you’re not gonna marry me,” Rob said. He seemed confused. I didn’t blame him. “Then, yeah, I want it back.”

“What if I am?” I asked him, though it was kind of hard to talk, considering the fact that I couldn’t seem to breathe anymore.

“Am what?”

Then Rob took a step forward that brought him out from beneath the shadow of the porch roof. And even though his back was still to the moon, I could see his eyes.

“Jess,” he said in a warning tone.

Which is when I took the deepest breath I could—considering I couldn’t seem to inhale at all—reached out to grab a fistful of his shirt, dragged him the two-step space between us, and said, my face just a few inches below his, “Rob. Will you marry me?”

He looked down at me expressionlessly. “You,” he said, “are insane.”

“I mean it,” I said. Amazingly, the second the words were out of my mouth, the crazy banging in my ears stopped. And I could breathe. I could actually breathe. “I’ve been an idiot. I had a lot of crap to deal with. And I think I’m done dealing with it now. Almost all of it, anyway. Obviously I still have to finish school—and so do you—and all of that. But when we’re done with school, I think we should do it.”

Rob looked about as serious as I’d ever seen him look. “What about your mom?” he asked.

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m over eighteen,” I pointed out. “Besides, she’ll come around. So, are you in?”

I will admit, it wasn’t exactly easy to breathe while I was waiting for his reply. In fact, it was impossible.

So it was a good thing he said, “I’m in,” before I ran out of oxygen and collapsed right there onto the porch.

I grinned up at him. “Good,” I said.

And then, just like that, we were kissing.

Well, okay, maybe not just like that. I might have had something to do with it, by standing up on my tiptoes and throwing my arms around his neck.

I am definitely responsible for what happened next, which was that I grabbed another handful of his shirt and started leading him to the front door.

“Jess.” Rob was grinning. Even in the shadow of the porch roof, I could see his smile. “What are you doing?”

“Shhhh,” I said. “Follow me. And be quiet or you’ll wake them.”

“Jess.” Rob let himself be led inside as far as the foyer before he put on the brakes. “Come on,” he whispered, as Chigger came over from the couch to give him a few desultory licks before retiring again. “This isn’t right.”

“No one’ll ever know,” I assured him. “You can sneak out before they wake up. Besides,” I added, “it’s all right.We’re engaged .”

Which is how Rob got to see my room that night for the first time. And a lot more than just my room, actually.

Twenty

He woke up before I did.

“Jess,” he was whispering, when I opened my eyes to find the gray light of dawn turning my bedroom walls pink. Also to find Rob putting his shirt back on, a sight truly worth waking up so early for. “I’m gonna go.”

“Don’t,” I said, throwing my arms around his waist. I’d apparently missed the putting back on of the jeans. Too bad.

“I have to,” he said, laughingly prying my arms off him. “What if your parents wake up? Is that really how you want them finding out about us?”

Flopping disgruntledly back against the pillows, I said, “I guess not. Still. What are you doing later?”

“Seeing you,” Rob said as he sat down on my window seat to tug on his motorcycle boots. It was extremely odd to see Rob Wilkins in my bedroom at all.

But it was especially weird to see him sitting on the lace-covered pillows with which my mom had decorated the built-in window seat beneath my bay windows. It was sort of like seeing Batman shopping for shampoo at the drugstore, or something. Just completely out of place.

“I have to go to the garage for a while,” Rob said after he’d gotten both shoes on, and stood up. “Want to come over and grab some lunch around noon?”

“I could bring you lunch,” I said. “I could make some sandwiches and cupcakes or something.”

Rob looked at me. “Did you just say you’d make cupcakes?”

“Yeah,” I said apologetically. “I don’t know what came over me. Since that would so never happen.”

“I’m sure if you did make cupcakes someday,” Rob said chivalrously, “they’d be delicious.”

“No, they wouldn’t.”

“Well, no, you’re probably right. Still. It was a nice thought.”

“I’ll just see you at noon,” I said. And rolled out of bed. “Here, let me walk you out.”

Rob tried to argue with me, that he could find his own way downstairs. But I didn’t want to run the risk of him running into one of my parents alone. I didn’t want him calling off the engagement after only six hours.

But I managed to get him out of the house safely. The only person in the house besides us who was up was Chigger, and he just checked us for food. Not finding any, he went back to the couch.

I stood on the porch in the cool morning air. Even though it was so early, I wasn’t a bit tired. That’s because I’d slept like a log for a change.

“Where’s your truck?” I asked when I’d looked around and seen only a nondescript sedan and—hilariously—a Trans Am parked on the street.

“I parked around the corner,” Rob admitted with a sheepish smile, before kissing me good-bye. “I didn’t want to arouse the suspicions of your neighbors.”

“You’re such a gentleman,” I said. He’d started down the porch steps, but I held on to one of his hands. “Hey, Rob?”

“What?”

“Did my dad buy my bike from you? Blue Beauty, I mean?”

Rob’s grin was crooked. “Yeah. He asked me what kind of bike I thought you’d like, and…well, I had that one picked out for you a long time before he asked. Let’s put it that way.”

“I knew it,” I said, my heart feeling as if it were about to bubble over with joy. “Bye.”

“Bye.”

He seemed to be having trouble containing the bubbling over of his own heart—at least if the way he smiled at me was any indication. I had never seen him look so happy.

Then he left, hurrying down the street to get his truck. I stood and watched him disappear around the corner. In fact, that’s why I didn’t notice the driver’s door to the Trans Am parked across the street had opened. Because I was too busy watching Rob disappear around the corner.

Which is why I didn’t realize Randy Whitehead Junior was coming towards me until he was halfway across the yard.

“Randy,” I said when I finally noticed him. “When’d you make bail?”

Seriously it didn’t even occur to me to be scared. That’s how giddy I still was from everything that had happened during the night.

Even when Randy didn’t say anything—just kept coming towards me with a very intent expression on that weaselly looking face, hovering beneath his hundred-dollar haircut—it didn’t seem weird. I just assumed he hadn’t heard me.

“What are you doing here, Randy?” I asked him. “You come to apologize?”

But when he climbed the steps up to where I was standing in two long strides, then seized me by the throat with one hand, throwing me back against the screen door, I realized he hadn’t actually come over to apologize.

“You,” he pressed his cheek against mine to whisper into my ear, “have ruined my life.”

I tried to scream. I really did. But his hand was crushing my larynx. I couldn’t even breathe, let alone utter a sound.

I would like to add that Randy? He smelled extremely ripe, a combination of body odor, Calvin For Men, and what I was pretty sure was tequila. My eyes started to water, and not just from lack of oxygen, either.

“I wasn’t hurting anybody,” he hissed raggedly in my ear. “Those girls wanted it. Theywanted it. And now my mom says I’m a disgrace, and my dad says—you know what my dad says?”

I was clawing at his hands, trying to get them off my neck. I’d tried kicking him, but being barefoot, I didn’t seem to be doing much damage. I tried kneeing him in the groin, but he kept moving out of the way. It was hard to get much leverage, anyway, considering the fact that he was holding me a couple of inches off the ground.

“My dad says if I kill you, to keep you from telling my mom about Eric, he might even forgive me for being such a screwup someday.” Randy’s breath was as ripe as the rest of him. It had been a while since he’d hit the mints. “So that’s why I’m here. I was hoping you’d come out of the house and get on that bike of yours, and I could just wait till no one else was around, and knock you off it and into a ditch or something. But you know what? I like this better. Because take a look. No one else is around. Just you. And me.”

It was hard to tell, over the roaring in my ears. But I thought I could hear Chigger barking. Yes. Chigger was definitely barking. And hurling himself angrily against the screen door, right behind. I could feel his claws. That ought to wake Mom and Dad up.Good boy, Chigger. Good boy.

“I’ll tell you what, though,” Randy said. “I’ll let you go if you tellme who Eric is. Because I really, really want to know.”

And he loosened his hold on my throat—just a little—so that I could tell him. I choked down a lungful of air. And croaked, “Bite me.”