And the truth is, I’m too tired to try to figure out what I want. It’s just easier to decide I want what my mom wants for me.

So that’s why. About Rob, I mean. That’s why I didn’t fight for him, for what we’d once had. I didn’t try to fix it. I was just too tired.

So I moved on.

Except that now here he was, a year later, standing in my doorway. He wasn’t keeping his part of the (unspoken) bargain.

And he definitely looked whole to me. MORE than whole, in fact. He looked every bit as good as he had that day after detention, when he’d offered me that ride home. Same pale blue eyes, so light, they’re almost gray. Same tousled dark hair, a little longer in back than my mom likes guys to wear their hair. Same jeans that fit like a glove, faded in all the right (or wrong, depending on how you want to look at it) places.

Seeing him, looking that good, standing outside my door, was a lot like getting…well, struck by lightning.

A sensation with which I am not unfamiliar, actually.

“Ask him if he can break a fifty,” Skip yelled, thinking it was the pizza guy.

“Make sure he remembered the hot-pepper flakes,” Ruth called from the kitchen, where she was taking down the plates. “They forgot last time.”

I just stood there, staring at him. It had been so long since I’d stood this close to him. And everything was flooding back—the way he’d smelled (like whatever laundry detergent his mom uses, coupled with soap and, more faintly, the stuff mechanics use to get the grease out from beneath their fingernails); the way he used to kiss me…one or two light kisses, not even directly centered on my mouth all the time, then one long, hard one, dead in the middle, that made me feel as if I were exploding; the way his body had felt, pressed up against mine, so long and hard and warm….

“This is a bad time,” Rob said. “You’ve got company. I can come back later.”