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Koda is about eight feet away, and he stops. You can see him get it. His face does a whole thing, and then he backs away like a guy backing away from a fence with a dog behind it.

Paige turns back around. “Where’d he go?”

“He left.”

“He left?”

“He heard you say no,” Kenzie says.

“Fucking bastard.”

I look at Kenzie and don’t ask.

For the next forty-five minutes, Paige narrates everything. Koda is in the kitchen. Koda is talking to people. Koda is laughing. Koda is playing a game at the kitchen table with a ping-pong ball, and a girl is standing near that table, not with him, in no way with him, just a girl who exists in the same kitchen, and Paige watches him like a hawk.

“He’s having a jolly good time, isn’t he?”

“Good for him,” Kenzie says.

“Whose side are you on?”

“Yours. Obviously. I’m just saying you told him not to come over.”

“I didn’t tell him to go stand over there and have fun.”

I laugh. “You’re being insane.”

“I’m so much worse than insane, Kylie,” Paige says, and drinks the rest of my drink, and goes to the bathroom with Bianca.

Kenzie leans over. “She waited outside his building for like an hour on Thursday. That’s all I know. That’s all I’m saying.” Then Paige is back, and she’s completely fine. She’s having a great time, she doesn’t care at all, and every ten seconds, her eyes go to the kitchen door.

I last until one-thirty. Nash is in the back hall by the stairs with Rafe and two guys I don’t know, leaning on the wall with one foot up on the baseboard, and he watches me the whole way over.

“Are you going to say hi to me?” I ask.

Nash glances at me. “I did.”

“You nodded at me.” I almost laugh. “That’s not saying hi.”

“It worked. You saw it.”

One of the guys snorts into his cup.

“Nobody asked you,” Nash says, and the three of them drift away, and he’s staring at me.

Up close, he looks wrecked. There’s a mark under his eye that wasn’t there yesterday, his hair has gone wavy from drying wrong, and he’s got the thing where you’ve been awake too long and stop blinking as much.

“You’re being weird tonight,” I tell him.

“I played a hockey game.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I’ve been up since six.”

“You always wake up at six.”

He doesn’t laugh, but something happens at the corner of his mouth, and it’s enough that I move in and take the cup out of his hand and drink what’s in it. Water. Obviously. “Gross. Where’s the alcohol?”