"You're such a buzz kill."

"She can't help having to work, Darcy," Dex says. Maybe he says it because she often calls him a buzz kill too. Then again, maybe he just wants me to leave for the same reasons I want to go.

After lunch I pack up my things and go into the den, where everyone is lazing around, watching television.

"Can someone give me a lift to the jitney?" I ask, expecting Darcy, Hillary, or Marcus to volunteer.

But Dex reacts first. "I'll take you," he says. "I want to go to the store anyway."

I say good-bye to everyone, and Marcus squeezes my shoulder and says he'll give me a call next week.

Then Dex and I are off. Alone for four miles.

"Did you have a nice weekend?" he asks me as we are backing out of the driveway. Gone is any trace of the banter that surfaced right after the Incident. And he, like Darcy, has stopped inquiring about Marcus, perhaps because it is fairly evident that we have become some kind of item.

"Yeah, it was nice," I say. "Did you?"

"Sure," he says. "Very nice."

After a brief silence, we talk about work and mutual friends from law school, stuff we talked about before the Incident. Things seem normal again, or as normal as they can be after a mistake like ours.

We arrive at the jitney stop early. Dex pulls into the parking lot, turns in his seat, and studies me with his green eyes in a way that makes me look away. He asks what I am doing on Tuesday night.

I think I know what he's asking, but am not sure, so I babble. "Work. The usual. I have a deposition on Friday and haven't even started preparing for it. The only thing I have on my outline is 'Can you spell your last name for the court reporter?' and 'Are you on any medications that might impede your ability to answer questions at this deposition?'" I laugh nervously.

His face stays serious. He clearly has no interest in my deposition. "Look, I want to see you, Rachel. I'm coming over at eight. On Tuesday."

And the way he says it-as a statement rather than a question-makes my stomach hurt. It isn't really the stomach pain I have before a blind date. It isn't the nervousness before a final exam. It isn't the "I'm going to get busted for doing something" feeling. And it isn't the dizzy sensation that accompanies a crush on a guy when he just acknowledged your presence with a smile or casual h.e.l.lo. It is something else. It is a familiar ache, but I can't quite place it.

My smile fades to match his serious face. I would like to say that his request surprised me, caught me off guard, but I think part of me expected this, even hoped for it, when Dex offered to drive me. I don't ask why he wants to see me or what he wants to talk about. I don't say that I have to work or that it's not a good idea. I just nod. "Okay."

I tell myself that the only reason I agree to see him is that we have to finish sorting out what happened between us. And therefore, I am not committing a further wrong against Darcy; I'm simply trying to fix the damage already done. And I tell myself that if I do, in fact, actually want to see Dex for other reasons, it's only because I miss my friend. I think back to my birthday, our time in 7B before we hooked up, remembering how much I enjoyed his solo company, how much I enjoyed Dex removed from Darcy's demands. I miss his friendship. I only want to talk to him. That is all.

The bus arrives and people start to file onto it. I slide out of the car without another word between us.

As I settle down in a window seat behind a perky blonde talking way too loudly on her cell phone, I suddenly know what it is in my stomach. It is the same way I felt after s.e.x with Nate in those final days before he dumped me for the tree-hugging guitar player. It is a mixture of genuine emotion for another person and fear. Fear of losing something. I know at this moment that by allowing Dex to come over, I am risking something. Risking friendship, risking my heart.

The girl keeps talking, overusing the words "incredible" and "amazing" to describe her "woefully abbreviated" weekend. She reports that she has a "vicious migraine" from "bingeing big time" at the "fab party." I want to tell her that if she takes her volume down a notch, her headache might subside. I close my eyes, hoping that her phone battery is low. But I know that even if she stops her high-pitched chatter, there is no way I am going to be able to sleep with this feeling growing inside me. It is good and bad at the same time, like drinking too much Starbucks coffee. It is both exciting and scary, like waiting for a wave to crash over your head. Something is coming, and I am doing nothing to stop it.

It is Tuesday night, twenty minutes before eight. I am home. I have not heard from Dex all day so I a.s.sume we are still on. I floss and brush my teeth. I light a candle in the kitchen in case there is a lingering aroma of the Thai food I ordered the evening before for my solo Memorial Day dinner. I change out of my suit, put on black lacy underwear-even though I know, know, know that nothing is going to happen-jeans, and a T-shirt. I apply a touch of blush and some lip gloss. I look casual and comfortable, the opposite of how I feel.

At exactly eight, Eddie, who is subbing for Jose, rings my buzzer. "You have company," he bellows.

"Thanks, Eddie. Send him up."

Seconds later Dex appears in my doorway in a dark suit with faint gray pinstripes, a blue shirt, and a red tie.

"Your doorman was smirking at me," he says, as he steps into my apartment and tentatively looks around as if this were his first visit.

"Impossible," I say. "That's in your head."

"It's not in my head. I know a smirk when I see one."

"That's not Jose. Wrong doorman. Eddie's on tonight. You have a guilty conscience."

"I told you already. I don't feel that guilty about what we did." He looks steadily into my eyes.

I feel myself being sucked into his gaze, losing my resolve to be a good person, a good friend. I look away nervously, ask if he wants something to drink. He says a gla.s.s of water would be fine. No ice. I am out of bottled water so I run the tap until the water comes out cool. I fill a gla.s.s for each of us and join him on my couch.

He takes several big gulps and then puts his gla.s.s down on a coaster on my coffee table. I sip from my gla.s.s. I can feel him staring at me, but I don't look back. I keep my eyes straight ahead, where my bed is situatedthe scene of the Incident. I need to get a proper one-bedroom or at least a screen to separate my sleeping alcove from the rest of the apartment.

"Rachel," he says. "Look at me."

I glance at him and then down at my coffee table.

He puts his hand on my chin and turns my face toward his.

I feel myself blush but don't move away. "What?" I release a nervous laugh. He doesn't change expression.

"Rachel."

"What?"

"We have a problem."

"We do?"

"A major problem."

He leans forward, his left arm draped along the back of the sofa. He kisses me softly and then more urgently. I taste cinnamon. I think of the tin of cinnamon Altoids that he had with him all weekend. I kiss him back.

And if I thought Marcus was a good kisser, or Nate before him, or anyone else for that matter, I thought wrong. In comparison, everyone else was merely competent. This kiss from Dex makes the room spin. And this time, it's not from booze. This kiss is like the kiss I have read about a million times, seen in the movies. The one I wasn't sure existed in real life. I have never felt this way before. Fireworks and all. Just like Bobby Brady and Millicent.

We kiss for a long, long time. Not breaking away once. Not even shifting positions on my couch even though we are at an unnatural distance for such an intense kiss. I can't speak for him, but I know why I don't move. I don't want it to end, don't want the next awkward stage to come, where we might ask the questions about what we are doing. I don't want to talk about Darcy, to even hear her name. She has nothing to do with this moment. Nothing. This kiss stands on its own. It is removed from time or circ.u.mstance or their September wedding. That is what I try to tell myself. When Dex finally breaks away, it is only to move closer to me and put his arms around me and whisper into my ear, "I can't stop thinking about you."

I can't stop either.

But I can control what I'm doing. There is emotion, and then there is what you do about it. I pull away, but not too far away, and shake my head.

"What?" he asks gently, his arm partially around me.

"We shouldn't be doing this," I say. It is a watered-down protest, but at least it is something.

Darcy can be annoying, controlling, and exasperating, but she is my friend. I am a good friend. A good person. This isn't who I am. I must stop. I won't know myself if I don't stop.

Yet I don't move away. Instead, I wait to be convinced otherwise, hoping he will talk me into it. And sure enough: "Yes. We should," he says. Dex's words are sure. No second-guessing, doubts, worry. He holds my face in his hands and stares intently into my eyes. "We have to."

There is nothing slick in his words, only sincerity. He is my friend, the friend I knew and cared for before Darcy ever met him. Why didn't I recognize my feelings sooner? Why had I put Darcy's interests ahead of my own? Dex leans in and kisses me again, softly but with a sense of absolute certainty.

But it's wrong, I silently protest, knowing that I am too late, that I have already surrendered. We have crossed a new line together. Because even though we have already slept together, that didn't really count. We were drunk, reckless. Nothing really happened until this kiss today. Nothing that couldn't have been stuffed into a closet, confused with a dream, maybe even forgotten altogether.

That is all changed now. For better or worse.

I have always done my best thinking in the shower. The night is for worrying, dwelling, a.n.a.lyzing. But in the morning, under the hot water, I see things clearly. So as I lather my hair, inhaling my grapefruit-scented shampoo, I pare everything down to the essential truth: what Dex and I are doing is wrong.

We kissed for a long time last night, and then he held me for even longer, few words pa.s.sing between us. My heart thumped against his as I told myself that by not escalating the physical part we had scored a victory of sorts. But this morning, I know it was still wrong. Just plain wrong. I must stop. I will stop. Starting now.

When I was little, I used to count to three in my head when I wanted to give myself a fresh start. I'd catch myself biting my nails, jerk my fingers out of my mouth, and count. One. Two. Three. Go. Then I had a clean slate. From that point forward I was no longer a nail-biter. I used this tactic with many bad habits. So on a count of three, I will shake the Dex habit. I will be a good friend again. I will erase everything, fix it all.

I count to three slowly and then use the visualization technique that Brandon told me he used during baseball season. He said he would picture his bat striking the ball, hear it crack, see the dust fly as he slid safely into home base. He focused only on his good plays and not the times he screwed up.

So I do this. I focus on my friendship with Darcy, rather than my feelings for Dex. I make a video in my head, filling it with scenes of Darcy and me. I see us hunkered down in her bed during an elementary-school sleepover. We are discussing our plans for the future, how many kids we will have, what we will name them. I see Darcy, ten years old, propped up on her elbows, pinkies in her mouth, explaining that if you have three kids, the middle one should be a different s.e.x from the others so everyone has something special. As if you can control such things.

I picture us in the halls at Naperville High, pa.s.sing notes between cla.s.ses. Her notes, folded in intricate shapes, like origami, were so much more entertaining than Annalise's notes, which simply reported how bored she was in cla.s.s. Darcy's were chock-full of interesting observations about cla.s.smates and snide remarks about teachers. And little games for me to play. She'd put quotes down the left-hand side of the page and people's names on the right for me to match. I'd crack up as I drew a line from, say, "Nice brights, buddy" to Annalise's father, who made that comment every time drivers forgot to turn off their high beams. She was funny. Sometimes cutting, even downright mean. But that only made her funnier.

I rinse my hair and remember something else, a memory that has not surfaced before. It is like finding a photograph of yourself that you never knew was taken. Darcy and I were freshmen, standing beside our locker after school. Becky Zurich, one of the most popular girls in the senior cla.s.s (but not the nice kind of popular, more the mean, feared variety) walked by us with her boyfriend, Paul Kinser. With her virtually nonexistent chin and way-too-thin lips, she really wasn't pretty at all, although at the time she somehow convinced a lot of people, including me, that she was. So when Paul and Becky pa.s.sed us, I looked at them, because they were popular seniors, and I was impressed, or at the very least, curious. I'm sure I wanted to hear what they were talking about so that I could glean some insight into being eighteen (so old!) and cool. I think it was only a casual glance in their direction, but maybe it was a stare.

In any case, Becky gave me an exaggerated stare back, making her eyes pop out like a cartoon. She followed this with a hyenalike, lip-curling sneer and said, "What're you lookin' at?"

Then Paul chimed in with "Catching flies?" (I'm sure dating Becky made Paul meaner, or maybe he just figured out that being mean earned him action later.) Sure enough, my mouth was wide open. I snapped it shut, mortified. Becky laughed, proud to have shamed a freshman. She then reapplied her pink frosted lipstick, inserted a fresh piece of Big Red into her mean little mouth, and made one final face at me for good measure.

Darcy had been shuffling through books in our locker but clearly caught the gist of the exchange. She spun and eyed the pair with revulsion, a look she had practiced and mastered. She then imitated Becky's shrill laughter, craning her neck unnaturally backward and rolling in her lips to make them invisible. She was hideous-and looked exactly like Becky in midchortle.

I stifled a smile while Becky looked momentarily stunned. She then gathered herself, took a step toward Darcy, and spat out the word "b.i.t.c.h." Darcy was unflinching as she stared right back at the senior duo and said, "It's better than being an ugly b.i.t.c.h. Wouldn't you agree, Paul?"

It was Becky's turn to stare, mouth agape, at her newly discovered adversary. And before she could formulate a comeback, Darcy threw in another insult for good measure. "And by the way, Becky, that lipstick you're wearing? It's so last year."

Everything about that moment is suddenly in sharp focus. I can see our locker decorated with pictures of Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing. I can smell that distinct, starchy, meat-based odor of the nearby cafeteria. And I can hear Darcy's voice, forceful and confident. Of course, Paul had no response to Darcy's question, as it was clear to all four of us that Darcy was right-she was the prettier of the two. And in high school that sometimes gives you the last word, even if you are a freshman. Becky and Paul scurried off and Darcy just kept talking to me about whatever it was we had been talking about, as if Becky and Paul were totally insignificant. Which they were. It just took a lot to realize that at fourteen.

I turn off the water, wrap a towel around my body and another over my head. I will call Dexter as soon as I get to work. I will tell him that it has to stop. This time I really mean it. He is marrying Darcy, and I am the maid of honor. We both love her. Yes, she has flaws. She can be spoiled, self-centered, and bossy, but she can also be loyal and kind and wildly fun. And she is the closest thing to a sister that I will ever have.

During my commute, I practice what I will say to Dex, even talking out loud at one point on the subway. When I finally arrive at work, I have my speech so memorized that it no longer sounds scripted. I've inserted the proper pauses into my Declaration of Mind-set and Future Intent. I am ready.

Just as I am about to make the phone call, I notice that I have an e-mail from Dex. I open it, expecting him to have reached the same conclusion. The subject line reads "You."

You are an amazing person, and I don't know where the feelings that you give me came from. What I do know is that I am completely and utterly into you and I want time to freeze so I can be with you all the time and not have to think of anything else at all. I like literally everything about you, including the way your face shows everything you're thinking and especially the way it looks when we are together and your hair is back and your eyes are closed and your lips are open just a little bit. Okay. That's all I wanted to say. Delete this.

I am breathless, dizzy. n.o.body has ever written words like this to me. I read it again, absorbing every word. / like literally everything about you too, I think.

And just like that, my resolve is gone again. How can I end something that I have never experienced before? Something I have been waiting for my whole life? n.o.body before Dex could make me feel this way, and what if I never find it again? What if this is it?

My phone rings. I answer it thinking it could be Dex, hoping it's not Darcy. I can't talk to her right now. I can't think about her right now. I am buzzing from my electronic love letter.

"Cheers, baby."

It is Ethan, calling from England, where he has lived for the past two years. I am so happy to hear his voice. He has a smiling voice, always sounding like he's on the verge of laughter. Most things about Ethan are just as they were in the fifth grade. He is still compa.s.sionate, still has cherub cheeks that turn pink in the cold. But the voice is newer. It came in high school-with p.u.b.erty-long after friendship had replaced my schoolgirl crush.

"Hi, Ethan!"

"What's the statute of limitations on wishing someone a happy birthday?" he asks. Ever since I went to law school, he loves throwing out legal terms, often with a twist. "Strawberry tort" is his favorite.

I laugh. "Don't worry about it. It was only my thirtieth."

"Do you hate me? You should have called and reminded me. I feel like an absolute a.s.s, after eighteen years of never forgetting. s.h.i.t. My mind is going and I'm still in my twenties-not to rub it in."

"You forgot my twenty-seventh too," I interrupt him.

"I did?"

"Yeah."

"I don't think I did."

"Yeah-you were with Bran-"

"Stop. Don't say that name. You're right. I forgot your twenty-seventh. That makes this infraction somehow less egregious, right? I didn't break a streak... So how is it?" He whistles. "Can't believe you're thirty. You should still be fourteen. Do you feel older? Wiser? More worldly? What did you do on the big night?" He fires off his questions in his frenetic, attention-deficit-disorder way.

"It's the same. I'm the same," I lie. "Nothing's changed."

"Really?" he says. It is like him to ask the follow-up. It's as if he knows that I am holding back.

I pause, my mind racing. Do I tell? Not tell? What will he think of me?

What will he say? Ethan and I have remained close since high school, although our contact is sporadic. But whenever we do talk, we pick up where we left off. He would make a good confidant in this emerging saga. Ethan knows all the major players. And more important, he knows what it's like to screw up.

Things started out right for him. He did well on the SATs, graduated as our salutatorian, and was voted most likely to succeed, picked over Amy Choi, our valedictorian, who was too quiet and mousy to win votes for anything. He went to Stanford, and after graduation took a job at an investment bank even though he majored in art history and had no interest in finance. He instantly despised everything about the banking culture. He said pulling all-nighters was unnatural, and realized that he preferred sleep to money. So he traded his suits in for fleece and spent the next several years drifting up and down the West Coast snapping pictures of lakes and trees, gathering friends along the way. He took writing cla.s.ses, art cla.s.ses, photography cla.s.ses, funded by the odd bartending job and summers in Alaska's fisheries.

That's where he met Brandi-"Brandi with an /'" as I called her before I realized that he genuinely liked her, and that she wasn't just a fling. A few months into their romance, Brandi got pregnant (insisting she was part of that woefully unlucky .05 percent on birth-control pills, although I had my doubts). She said that abortion was out of the question, so Ethan did what he thought to be the right thing and married her at City Hall in downtown Seattle. They sent out homemade marriage announcements featuring a black-and-white photo of the two hiking. Darcy made fun of Brandi's way-too-short-and-tight jean shorts. "Who the h.e.l.l hikes in Daisy Dukes?" she said. But Ethan seemed happy enough.

And that summer, Brandi gave birth to a baby boy... an adorable, bouncing Eskimo baby boy with eyes that turned coal black almost immediately. Brandi, with blue eyes that matched Ethan's, begged for forgiveness. Ethan promptly had the marriage annulled, and Brandi moved back to Alaska, probably to track down her native lover.

I think Brandi soured Ethan on the whole fresh-air, live-off-the-land kind of life. Or maybe he just wanted something new. Because he moved to London, where he writes for a magazine and is working on a book about London architecture, an interest he didn't acquire until he landed on British soil. But that's how Ethan is. He figures things out along the way, always ready to back up and start over, never bowing to pressure or expectations. I wish I could be more like him.

"So what did you do for your birthday?" Ethan asks.

I shut my office door and blurt it out. "Darcy had a surprise party for me, I got wasted, and hooked up with Dex."