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“It’s not a situation I ever imagined myself in,” she says, her own breath still coming a little heavy. There’s a naked bulb at the top of the staircase and enough light reaches us that I can see her breasts going up and down, the ridge of her bra pressing against them.

“Well, imagine it,” I say, pulling my eyes back up to her face, which is flushed and happy. I made it that way, and that’s enough to keep my gaze from wandering.

“Okay, when?”

“There’s a home game next week. Maybe after that?”

She nods, her cheek going up and down on my chest. And that little bit of friction gets me riled again, that and the fact that six months ago if you would’ve told me that a girl agreeing to meet my parents would give me a boner from hell, I would’ve punched you in the face. But if Alex is willing to do that, Alex who still pieces together her sentences very carefully even when we’re alone, it means she’s taking this as seriously as I am.

And that’s fucking hot.

Once I asked my dad how you know when you’re in love. He said you just know, and that if you have to ask the question then you haven’t been in love yet. And he’s right. Because there aren’t words for this. No combination of letters could ever represent what she is to me.

But the flip side is that now I worry about losing her. I worry that I’m going to screw it up, that the Jack who was in the woods the night they found Anna’s body is going to reassert himself. That guy was nowhere near classy enough to be with Alex. She is refining me every day, changing me from the person I was into someone better. And I need to be good enough.

Because I’m Alex Craft’s boyfriend.

33. JACK

Having Alex in my shitty truck doesn’t make me feel good.

When we run we’re on the same level; when we end up at parties together we know we’re going to find our own corner eventually. We expect to hear from each other every night, each of us checking our phones to see if we missed that moment somehow. But a real date hasn’t happened yet, and there’s a reason for that.

I can’t afford Alex Craft.

Hell, I can’t afford any girlfriend, but there’s an unspoken agreement that Branley pays my way wherever we go, and I’ve always managed to string other girls along until I’m bored with them as a hookup and cut them loose. With Alex it’s different because I want to take her out on a real date and my big mouth made that happen before my wallet filled me in on how skinny it is.

The truth is we’re in my busted-ass truck and she somehow blends in completely yet looks like a million bucks at the same time, and we’re headed toward a burger joint because it’s either that or a sit-down place the next town over and I don’t have enough gas to get us there. And after we’ve plowed through our five-dollar burger plates I’m going to have to ask her to pay for it, because I am a fucking loser and she’d be flat-out within her rights to call me that.

So that’s what I’m thinking about as I pull into the restaurant on our first real date—what a fucking loser I am.

We walk into the place and my mood drops even further because Brian Spurlani yells my name from the back kitchen when he spots us. Three years ago Brian was everything I wanted to be. He was a senior when I came in as a freshman, football two-a-days kicking my ass in ninety-degree weather. We’d lose five pounds in the morning, put it back on when we went home to eat lunch, then lose another seven in the evening. We smelled like ass sweat and our faces were permanently broken out but Brian kept our heads on straight, putting out fires before fights broke out, telling the guys who were about to pass out that they could make it five more steps. And then the five more after that.

Brian is truly a good guy. That’s why it kills me a little bit when he comes out of the kitchen to talk to us while we eat and he’s wearing a hairnet.

“Hey, man,” he says, flipping a chair around backward to sit at the end of our table. “What’s up?”

“Just out grabbing something to eat,” I say. “Brian, this is Alex.”

“Hi,” Alex says, and he looks her up and down.

“Alex Craft? I knew your sister. What happened to her was bullshit.”

Alex smiles. “Possibly the best description I’ve heard.”

And while she doesn’t seem to care that it came up, I hate that Anna is the first thing everybody thinks of when they see Alex, whether it comes out of their mouth or not. Like when people run into me and all they want to talk about is the winning streak of whatever sports season it is, like I’m destined to be only a stat record in their head. Always winning but never moving on. Stuck in this town forever and hauled out in twenty years to hand off a basketball or a football to the kid who breaks my school record, and then that’s it. I’m done. Washed up. I’ll be like Brian, who is sitting here smiling at me, his pores full of grill grease.

“Didn’t you go to Fairmont to play ball?” I ask, and his smile falters a little.

“More like went to Fairmont to ride the bench,” he says. “That and play tackle dummy. Tore my ACL when some big asshole hit me and that was it. Came home over Christmas break and got Tammy pregnant, so . . .” He holds his hands up, like he was totally innocent of any involvement. “So that was that.”

I put down my burger, what I have eaten a lead ball in my stomach as I think of all the times Branley was in too much of a hurry and I was too horny to bother with a condom.

“But I’m going back,” Brian says, his tone too hopeful, like the way you sound when you talk about your dreams, not your actual plans. “Once little Becca gets into kindergarten, we won’t have to pay for day care, and that money can go to Daddy getting his degree.”

“Yeah, man, cool,” I say, but I know as well as he does that money is going toward putting in a second bathroom, or paying for the next baby.

“So.” Brian’s eyes wander to Alex. “I heard somebody fucked up Ray Parsons’s face—that was you, right?”