"Hi."

Time stopped. It was two years ago at Cornell, glasses and all. I could have happily lived under that table, half-bent over, with Dylan's face an inch away. But the professor probably would have noticed. The other teams definitely would have. He straightened, and after a second, I did too, back up into the harsh, fluorescent light of the classroom, where there was schoolwork and students and Dylan had a girlfriend and I wasn't interested anyway.

He angled his laptop screen at me and tapped my notebook. I looked over and there, between the equations and lecture notes, was a single line of text, all on its own.

Don't run away from me.

I caught my breath. Then, I bent my head over my paper, my dark hair falling forward as I scribbled my own secret note.

I'm right here.

I looked over at his screen.

If there's something wrong, I want you to tell me. We're not 18 anymore. If you can't do this, tell me now. It's better to quit now than get into it and risk our chances at the end.

Well, that stung. Humiliated, I felt a flush stealing up from my collar toward my cheeks. So now Dylan thought I was the girl who couldn't keep her hormones under wraps long enough to do a project with him. I bent my head over my notebook once more, the strokes of my pen strong and black.

I can do it. And YOU can stop inviting me to spend the night in your bed.

I sat back and tapped the paper, and then when I was sure he'd read it, I drew a thick black line across the words, scribbling them out. I didn't need that kind of note in my records. I looked up at him. He was staring at me, his expression impossible to divine underneath the glint of his glasses. I gave him a smug little smirk and returned my attention to the professor. Round to Tess McMann. I might have acted like a scorned ex last night, but he'd started it. "Friends" was one thing, but we weren't so buddy-buddy that I could just sleep at his place.

When class ended, I started gathering up my things without looking at him.

"Are you working all weekend?" Dylan asked, his tone as casual as if nothing at all had transpired.

"Pretty much," I said. "But if you want to find a time to meet and do work, I can probably arrange something."

"No need," he said. "I was actually just making conversation. Wondered if you had any big plans."

I tossed my hair out of my face and turned to him. "Nope. Working. You?"

"I was going to go to the football game with some friends this weekend."

Oh right. Canton Football, where you didn't have to fight for your tickets months in advance the way you did at State. "Sounds fun."

"We may tailgate." He let the words hang there a minute. "Hannah's not coming."

I nodded. "Well, have fun. Think of me when you're out there and I'm stuck chopping lemons."

"Don't worry," he said. "I'll think of you."

"Hannah's not coming"? Sylvia repeated, incredulous. "He actually said that to you?"

"Yep," I said, blowing a strand of brown hair out of my face. We were doing prep work behind the bar at Verde before things got busy. Because so many students didn't have class on Fridays, Thursday nights in a college town could get just as wild as the weekend. "It's sketchy, right?"

She raised an eyebrow at me. A single eyebrow. I didn't know anyone who could do that except Sylvia, and she'd practiced for ages to get it right. She'd even put it on her audition sheets under "talents," along with crying on cue.

And I was glad she agreed with me that it was suspicious. First Dylan had invited me to stay at his place and now he was inviting me to social events when he knew his girlfriend wouldn't be there? I knew this game. I was born because of this game.

I just never suspected Dylan would be anything like my father.

"It's definitely sketchy," she said. "Especially after him exaggerating his sexual history and what that other girl in your class said about him going after fresh meat..."

Annabel, on waitress duty, swung by the bar with a drink order. "What's up, ladies?"

While Sylvia got started on Annabel's martinis, I filled her in on the latest with Dylan.

"I don't know," she said when I finished. "I wouldn't be so quick to condemn him."

"You're a softie," said Sylvia, stringing olives on toothpicks.

"Let's just analyze what's going on here before we jump to any conclusions," Annabel said. "You know this guy, and he's never been a jerk before, right?"

"She knew him," Sylvia corrected, popping the lid on her shaker. "Two years ago. And now he's all Hottie McHotHot. That changes a guy."

Well, I'd always kind of thought he was Hottie McHotHot. Or at least Cutie McCuteCute.

Annabel ignored her sister and starting ticking off her arguments on her fingers. "He thought you were ill and he offered to give up his room, not share it with you. There's a difference. Maybe he was just sincerely worried about you driving home by yourself. Also, he knows that you're new at Canton and might not have made a lot of friends yet. So he invited you to a group tailgate. Group." She glared at Sylvia. "I think he's just trying to be nice."

"Then why would he stress that his girlfriend wouldn't be present?" Sylvia pointed out.

"Well, he already knows that Tess feels uncomfortable around her because of that whole 'they once slept together' thing. Maybe it was just his way of saying, 'Come hang out with my friends. You won't even have to deal with the girlfriend weirdness.'"

Sylvia poured the martinis into Annabel's waiting glasses. "Maybe it was his way of saying, 'Come give me a little somethin' somethin' on the side.'"

Annabel rolled her eyes and went off to deliver the drinks. But she'd given me a lot to think about. The Warren sisters didn't know it, but I was all too familiar with the ways and habits of wandering men. My dad never invited my mother out with his usual social circle. They did have "friends" they saw when they went on trips together, other men and their mistresses who all had as much to lose if they weren't discreet about their secret lives. She never went to dinner with him in this town. Too much chance of being discovered.

"I honestly don't know how she does it," Sylvia grumbled beside me as I poured glasses of pinot grigio for a group of girls at the end of the bar. "I don't know anyone who's been screwed over as thoroughly by men as Annabel, and yet she always wants to think the best of them."

"Maybe because of Milo," I suggested. "He's going to be a man someday and she wants to make sure he's one of the good ones."

"He'd better be, or I'll wring his neck."

I smiled at my friend. "Well, at least you're admitting there is such a thing as a good man."

"Milo isn't a man yet," she said. "We'll see in ten years."

Annabel had indeed been screwed over. Her first boyfriend, Mark, had been a thief and a thug and probably some other things I wasn't entirely sure about yet. He was in jail now, thank goodness, but back in the day he'd managed to hurt Annabel quite a bit, both before and after getting her pregnant. When she'd refused to abort the pregnancy, her parents had kicked her out of the house. When she'd asked Mark's dad for help, he'd called her a lying whore and insisted she take a paternity test before she "ruined" his son's life. That was rich. When Milo was about six months old, Mark had gotten arrested after breaking into his neighbor's house and, after he'd gone to jail, the whole question of him paying child support had become moot, anyway. I thought Milo was better off without his father in his life. If there was one man I'd prefer not to influence any future generations, it was Mark.

At yet Annabel had never lost her faith in humanity. Milo was her shining light. It was her sister Sylvia who had grown cynical. If I thought I'd made men a low priority on my life list, it was nothing compared to the "stay off my lawn" attitude of my best friend.

Then again, Sylvia's motto was "guilty until proven innocent." She hated everyone until she knew they were on her side, and those who'd made the cut were few and far between.

As the night continued, I found I didn't have much time to talk further with my friends about the situation, though since pouring beers wasn't exactly taxing my mental capacity, there was plenty of time to think about it. And of course, the stuff I was thinking about wasn't exactly the kind of thing I could share with the Warrens. Sylvia believed there was a type of guy who cheated and a type of guy who didn't, and maybe she was right. But maybe it was more than that. Maybe there was a type of woman that you cheated with, too. Women like my mother, who let out some kind of special pheromone only cheating guys could sense that said, "Yeah, I'll put up with this bullshit. Let's have at it."

And maybe I was that type of woman too.

Either way, I was not skipping out on work Saturday to attend the football game with Dylan and his buddies-and not Hannah. Instead I tried very hard to figure out the exact proportions of the amaretto sours that the sorority girls at table thirty-five were throwing back like Kool-Aid. Maybe it was the biochemist in me, but I preferred tending bar to being a waitress. Or at least, the part of tending bar that didn't require me talking to the patrons.

"Hey, sweetheart," a voice drifted above the din. "You there. Miss?"

Slowly it dawned on me that I was being called. I turned to see a young guy waving some cash over the bar. "Yes?"

"Three drafts for me and my friends."

I got the beers and brought them over. There were three men and two women, some with Canton T-shirts on, crowding the barstools in that corner.

"Finally, some service!" one of the girls said. "Do you do amaretto sours?"

"It's a specialty," I said, smiling as I grabbed the amaretto and sour mix from the rail and started mixing.

The guy who'd first called to me watched me shaking the girls' drinks. Well, to be frank, he watched my breasts bouncing.

"Would you like to start a tab?" I asked him.

"As long as it means you're the bartender on call, sweetheart."

I forced a smile and took his credit card. The name on the card read Todd J. Hamilton Jr. Todd here had a dad who loved him so much that he gave him the same exact name. Must be nice. I didn't even have my dad's last name.

The next time I made it around to that side of the bar, Todd and friends had been joined by a third woman, who'd clearly found the Verde barstool unacceptable, since she'd taken up a position on Todd's lap. As she ordered her amaretto sour, Todd didn't look at me. Not even at my breasts.

Girlfriend. Figured.

The night continued, and so did the steady orders of draft beers, G&Ts, and amaretto sours from the group in the corner of the bar. At some point, the ladies departed, leaving the gentlemen drinking on their own. As I fulfilled the latest round of orders, Todd grinned at me.

"What's your name, sweetheart?"

"Tess," I said and handed him his beer.

"Tess," he said, and it sounded like a hiss. "What are you doing after your shift?"

"Going home to study." I kept my expression open and cheerful, the pro bartender standard of, "I want a tip, but we're not really friends."

Confusion crossed his face. "You're not at Canton." It was a statement.

"Yes, actually. Just transferred in." I kept the same lightness in my tone, but there was no point in lying, right?

"Oh." He still sounded baffled. "Congratulations."

"Thanks." I left and found Sylvia across the bar. "Guy was shocked I went to Canton."

"Of course he was," she replied. "We're the help, don't you know. Not equals. Not human."

Todd caught my attention again. "You know," he slurred as I came near. "Since you're a Canton student, maybe you'd like to come back to our frat house after this. We're throwing a little party. Just very close friends."

"I'm not your very close friend," I said lightly, pouring him another beer.

He grabbed my hand as I passed the beer to him. "Not yet, sweetheart."

I jerked away. "Didn't your girlfriend leave, like, five seconds ago?"

"Eh," he said with a shrug. "She's not my girlfriend."

"Oh?" I crossed my arms. "What would she say about that if I asked her?"

His expression turned hard. "Jeez, you're uptight. I clearly had you pegged wrong. You look like the kind of girl who likes to have fun."

If he'd slapped me across the face, it couldn't have hurt more. And five minutes later, when they closed out their tab through Sylvia and she brought me the little black pleather bill folder, I wasn't surprised to see Bitch! written on the tip line.

"Assholes," Sylvia said. "Their loss, though. They can't act like this and expect us not to spit in their drinks next time."

I nodded and closed out the tab.

"Fuck 'em," she went on. "Jackass guys think any waitress is fair game. And if you don't drop to your knees and blow them right there, they act as if you're the one out of line. It's a professional hazard. You have to ignore them."

"They don't bother me," I said. And it was pretty much the truth. Being hit on and screwed over for tips was annoying, but part of the landscape. It wasn't that.

You look like the kind of girl...

To Todd and his friends, I looked like the kind of girl who'd go home with a guy after watching him spend the evening with his girlfriend. The kind of girl who didn't care that he'd made a commitment to someone else, someone who trusted him not to pick up waitresses after their shifts at bars. The kind of girl my mother was.

Were they right?

NINE.

I was still pondering the question the next morning as I got ready for my 9:00 a.m. lab, still weighing it in my mind as I drove to school and entered the building. I had a hard time picturing anyone treating Hannah the way Todd J. Hamilton Jr. had treated me last night. Was there some tattoo on my forehead, visible only to assholes, that said, "This one's fair game"?

Had it always been that way? I wasn't much of an English student, but I'd read Jane Austen in high school, just like everyone else. In Pride and Prejudice, all my classmates had swooned over the love story of Mr. Darcy and Lizzie Bennet, but I'd been fascinated by the response to Mr. Wickham, who'd tried to seduce several of the characters. It wasn't a part my teachers had ever stressed in class, but I'd never been able to get it out of my mind. With the rich Georgiana Darcy-Mr. Darcy's sister-and later with the heiress Mary King of Meryton, he'd sought to marry them. But with Lizzie's flirty younger sister Lydia, who had no money, he'd just run off, content to get the sex and leave her and her entire family ruined. Later, Lizzie's uncle had reported that Wickham had still hoped to marry a rich girl, despite the fact that he'd been "living in sin" with Lydia. I'd always wondered what would have happened if Mr. Darcy hadn't stepped in and forced the marriage. Would Lydia have spent the rest of her life in secret, raising Wickham's bastard children while he married some fine lady?

If there was an invisible tattoo for girls like us, Lydia Bennet had it, too.

I was able to put the thoughts aside as I finished my lab work for the week, but my mood was charcoal gray. It must have shown on my face, too, because I exited the lab, hardly seeing where I was going, and ran smack into Dylan.

"Whoa, there," he said, steadying me. "Everything okay?"

"Fine," I grumbled. "I'm just in a rush. My shift starts at ten thirty..."

"Oh, right. How's the restaurant biz?"

I rolled my eyes. "Eh. Had some jerks in my section last night."