“Suze,” he said, playing with my hair again. His breath tickled my cheek. “How else am I going to get you to talk to me? You’ve got this totally mistaken impression of me. You think I’m some kind of bad guy. And I’m not. I’m really not. I’m…well, I’m a lot like you, actually.”

“Somehow, I seriously doubt that,” I said. His proximity was making it difficult to talk. And not because he was scaring me. He still scared me, but in a different way now.

“It’s true,” he said. “I mean, we actually have a lot in common. Not just the mediator thing, either. I think our philosophy of life is the same. Well, except for the whole part where you want to help people. But that’s just guilt. In every other way, you and I are identical. I mean, we’re both cynical and mistrustful of others. Almost to the point of being misanthropic, I would go so far to say. We’re old souls, Suze. We’ve both been around the block before. Nothing surprises us, and nothing impresses us. At least—” his ice-blue gaze bore into mine “—nothing until now. In my case, anyway.”

“That may very well be, Paul,” I said, as patronizingly as I was able—which wasn’t very, I’m afraid, because his closeness was making it very difficult to breathe. “The only problem is, the person I mistrust most in the world? That’d be you.”

“I don’t know why,” Paul said. “When we’re clearly meant for each other. I mean, just because you met Jesse first—”

“Don’t.” The word burst from me like an explosion. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand hearing his name…not from those lips. “Paul, I’m warning you—”

Paul laid a single finger over my mouth.

“Shhh,” he said. “Don’t say things you’ll only regret later.”

“I am not going to regret saying this,” I said, my lips moving against his finger. “You—”

“You don’t mean it,” Paul said confidently, sliding his finger from my mouth, over the curve of my chin, and down the side of my neck. “You’re just scared. Scared to admit your true feelings. Scared to admit that I might know a few things you and wise old Gandalf, aka Father Dominic, might not. Scared to admit I might be right, and that you aren’t as completely committed to your precious Jesse as you’d like to think. Come on, ’fess up. You felt something when I kissed you the other day. Don’t deny it.”

Felt something the other day? I was feeling something now, and all he was doing was running the tip of his finger down my neck. It wasn’t right that this guy I hated—and I did hate him, I did—could make me feel this way…

…while the guy I loved could make me feel like such absolute—

Paul was leaning so close to me now, his chest brushed the front of my sweater.

“You want to try it again?” he asked. His mouth moved until it was only about an inch from mine. “A little experiment?”

I don’t know why I didn’t let him. Kiss me again, I mean. I wanted him to. There wasn’t a nerve in my body that didn’t want him to. After being dissed so hard back there in Father Dom’s office, it would have been nice to know someone—anyone—wanted me. Even a guy of whom I’d once been deathly afraid.

Maybe there was a part of me that still feared him. Or what he could do to me. Maybe that was what was making my heart beat so fast.

Whatever it was, I didn’t let him kiss me. I couldn’t. Not then. And not there. I craned my neck trying to keep my mouth out of his reach.

“Let’s not,” I said tensely. “I am having a very bad day, Paul. I would really appreciate it if you would back off—”

On the words back off, I laid both hands on his chest and shoved him away from me as hard as I could.

Paul, not expecting this, staggered backward.

“Whoa,” he said, when he’d regained his balance—and his composure. “What’s the matter with you, anyway?”

“Nothing,” I said, twisting his handkerchief in my fingers. “I just…I just got some bad news, is all.”

“Oh, yeah?” This had clearly been the wrong thing to say to Paul, since now he looked positively intrigued, which meant he might never go away. “Like what? Rico Suave dump you?”

The sound that came out of me when he said that was a cross between a gasp and a sob. I don’t know where it came from. It seemed to have been ripped from my chest by some unseen force. It startled Paul almost as much as it did me.

“Whoa,” he said again, this time in a different tone. “Sorry. I…Did he? Did he really?”

I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak. I wished Paul would go away—shut up and go away. But he seemed incapable of doing either.

“I kind of thought,” he said, “that there might be trouble in paradise when he never showed up to kick my ass after, you know, what happened at my house.”

I managed to find my voice. It sounded ragged, but at least it worked. “I don’t need Jesse,” I said, “to fight my battles for me.”

“You mean you didn’t tell him,” Paul said. “About you and me, I mean.”

When I looked away, he said, “It has to be that. You didn’t tell him. Unless you did tell him, and he just doesn’t care. Is that it, Suze?”

“I have to get to class,” I said, and turned around hastily to do just that.

Only Paul’s voice stopped me.

“Question is, why didn’t you tell him? Could it be because maybe, deep down, you’re afraid to? Because maybe, deep down, you felt something…something you don’t want to admit, even to yourself?”

I spun around.

“Or maybe,” I said, “deep down, I didn’t want a murder on my hands. Did you ever think about that, Paul? Because Jesse already doesn’t like you very much. If I told him what you did to me—or tried to do to me, anyway—he’d kill you.”

This was, as I knew only too well, a complete fabrication. But Paul didn’t know that.

Still, he didn’t take it the way I’d meant him to.

“See,” Paul said with a grin. “You must like me a little, or you’d have gone ahead and let him.”

I started to say something, realized the futility of it all, and spun around again to leave.