She tried to keep her smugness in place but it slipped. “I just want to know what’s so wrong with me. What about me screams bad kisser?”

He frowned and took a step forward. “Hey. Stop that. Nothing is wrong with you. You’re just pretty and confident. Guys are intimidated.”

She snorted to hide the fact that her eyes were welling with tears. It was all so embarrassing.

“He likes Paige better,” she said, hating the wobble in her voice.

“Idiot,” he said firmly. “Forget him. Find someone better for your first kiss.”

“But you said first kisses suck. Why would I want to inflict something crappy on someone good?”

He laughed and threw up his hands in exasperation. “You’re impossible to talk to. What do you want me to say here?”

“Nothing,” she said, pushing her hands into her hair and tugging at her ponytail in frustration. “I’m sorry I’m in a bad mood.”

His eyes softened just a little as he studied her. “Once you get the first kiss over with, you’ll stop being weird?”

She lifted her shoulders. “Sure. Until I start obsessing over the second one.”

Reece rolled his eyes then took a step toward her. “Don’t tell your brother, okay?”

She frowned. “Tell him what?”

He swallowed and then put both big hands on her shoulders, moving even closer. “And definitely don’t tell your parents.”

Then he dipped his head, and before she could register what was happening, before she could absorb the fact that Reece Sullivan was about to kiss her, his lips pressed against hers.

He didn’t linger, but neither did he pull back right away. His mouth stayed on hers just long enough for her to register the kiss, and then he stepped back, and shoved his hands in his pockets.

She stared at him in mute shock, and he looked everywhere in her room before finally meeting her eyes with an almost defiant look in his. “Okay? Now will you come down to dinner?”

Lucy nodded even though she was pretty positive that she wouldn’t be able to eat a single thing.

Reece had been wrong.

First kisses were absolutely what they were cracked up to be.

Chapter 5

Lucy

“You’re being weird.”

I shove at the suitcase I’d just loaded, but it doesn’t budge far enough for me to close the trunk. “You’ve been saying that all morning,” I mutter.

“Because you’ve been weird all morning,” my sister says, joining me in trying to move my suitcase. Only she weighs all of, like, a hundred pounds, and the thing doesn’t budge. Not with the other suitcases, moving boxes, and general amount of crap I have already stuffed in there.

I stand back up and blow out an irritated breath, pulling the hair tie from my wrist and twisting my hair into a messy bun. “I guess it’s just hitting me that I’m really doing this. I’m moving to another state. Another time zone.”

Brandi turns, leaning against the suitcase protruding from the trunk, and crosses her long, skinny arms as she studies me. “Nah.”

“What do you mean ‘nah’?”

“You’re all on edge because you’re about to spend two weeks with Reece. In a car. Just the two of you.”

Just the sound of his name sends something through me. I bite my lip and resist the urge to pull my phone out of my back pocket and check the time. We’d agreed to be on the road by seven A.M., so he should be here any time.

“I still can’t believe he agreed to this after what went down between you.”

I narrow my eyes. Brandi is the only one—and I mean the only one—who knows about our history, and only because at the time Reece and I had been doing whatever we were doing, she was fourteen to my eighteen, which is just about the most annoying, prying age in the history of adolescent females.

Although I suppose in some ways, it worked in my favor that she was the one who had caught us kissing once. My brother would have beat the crap out of his friend. My parents would have been…I don’t know…I think their brains would have exploded.

But Brandi had been in ninth grade when she’d walked in on us, and though she’d been wide-eyed and shocked, she’d also been totally eager to keep a secret “just between us sisters.” I’m pretty sure the sheer drama of it had fueled her for most of high school.

Six years later, she’s kept my secret, although I’m almost wishing she hadn’t. Maybe if the fam knew about just who and what Reece actually was, they wouldn’t have come up with this ridiculous plan.

“You could have warned me, you know?” I mutter.

“There wasn’t time. Truthfully I didn’t know what they were planning until the day of. I mean, I knew they were giving Reece the car, but I didn’t know that he was headed to California or that your car had bit the dust.”

“Well it’s not like you needed enough time to send a freaking telegram. A quick text, ‘Hey, sis, Mom and Dad are going to try to send you and the biggest dick on the planet on a two-week expedition together,’ would have been great.”

Brandi looks away, and I narrow my eyes.

“Tell me,” I say.

She shrugs and looks back. “I don’t know, I guess I just thought…maybe it’ll be good for you guys. Work things out. Nothing’s been the same since whatever it was went down with you two.”

Now it’s my turn to look away. Brandi knows that Reece and I were together, but doesn’t know why we broke up. That’s one piece of the puzzle that nobody knows.