There was hunger there. Desperation—that hot, green liquid that slithered into your soul when you watched something that was yours be admired by others.

And so, I continued to slip into her room every night. I got it. She needed time. Time? I had plenty.

I’d decided to show her I wasn’t some kind of obsessed stalker. That I was capable of moving on. To bring the point home, I’d stopped ignoring other girls’ advances. I’d started dating, texting back, and flirting.

I stayed closest to her, keeping my alliance firmly with the girl next door. But I also had a chain of girlfriends who came and went—a revolving door of glossy-lipped beauties who wore the right brands and said the right things. I paraded them around school and brought them over for family BBQs, expecting Luna to ease back into our friendship now that I wasn’t trying to suck her face every time she looked my way.

Ironically, that’s what brought on kiss number three.

Kiss Numero Tres happened when she was seventeen and I was sixteen. I call it The Kiss of Death, because the damage it inflicted on our relationship was huge. Even now, a year and a half later, I was still dealing with the echoes of its destruction. For instance, Luna before kiss number three would have told me she was coming to Vaughn’s party. Luna after kiss number three barely communicated with me about what she was doing or where she was going. We were still hanging out most days, but it had turned into a bad habit more than anything else.

Back to that kiss. I was fooling around with a girl named Noei at the time. But I’d still cleared the day for Luna’s seventeenth birthday. I’d bought us tickets to a museum, even though the carnival was in town, because Luna hated carnivals—and zoos, and Seaworld, and anyplace where animals were captured for human entertainment. I’d had it all planned out. Luna was a vegetarian, and a vegan curry place had opened in downtown Todos Santos, right across from the museum. I’d bought her a bunch of weird-ass shit from Brandy Melville and had a seahorse tattoo inked on my spine, hoping she’d get the underlying message: that she was my backbone.

Luna loved seahorses with a passion. They were her favorite animals—something about the male seahorse being the one to give birth… Mom gave me so much shit before she signed the consent for the tattoo, but she’d known it was a part of a bigger plan, so she’d let it slide.

And if that wasn’t enough, I’d made Luna seventeen different birthday cards, all the while trying to downplay my excitement that we were spending the entire day together.

The day had been pretty perfect, as far as birthdays go. So perfect, in fact, that when I dropped Luna back at her door, she’d taken my face between her palms and smiled up at me. I’d stared at her like an idiot, thinking, Should I or shouldn’t I?

Darkness had washed over our street. Our families had been inside, probably eating dinner. No one could see us—not that anyone would have cared. It wasn’t a secret I’d chop heads and bring down the sun for Luna Rexroth.

Still, I’d kept on staring at her, searching for the okay in her face. By that time, I was pretty damn good at recognizing the okay in girls’ eyes when I looked at them. But not with Luna, apparently. Every time her eyes said yes, the rest of her said no. I’d decided this time I needed more affirmation before I fucked everything up and earned an unfriendly visit to my house from Trent Rexroth, Luna’s dad, with his even unfriendlier baseball bat.

She’d pressed my hand over her heart through her shirt. It was beating so fast, I’d thought she needed me to squeeze it back into her chest. My fingers had involuntarily twitched against the swell of her breast. The hint of a puckered nipple under my palm had almost made my knees buckle.

Luna had worn thin sports bras. You noticed those things about a girl when you hung out with her all the time. My brain had short-circuited, refusing to come up with words to describe what was happening inside my body. I mean…

My.

Hand.

Was.

On.

Her.

Breast.

Why’d it feel so fantastic? In my mind, we were already fucking three times a day at that point. My morning jerk-off in the shower before practice, the rub-in after I got back from practice in the afternoon, and of course, the whack before bedtime to take the edge off prior to slipping through her window. I’d imagined us doing filthy things I was pretty sure Luna would never even think about, let alone do.

Meanwhile, in real life, I’d just nearly come from touching her tit. I’d been worried for my man card. Also: for my sanity when it came to this girl.