The last item on Sanj's California bucket list is the beach. It's too cold to swim, but he wants to be able to say he's seen the Pacific and I don't mind a lazy day of sunshine. Except, so far I've been thinking about tonight instead of relaxing. This won't exactly be my first date, and not even the first time Elle and I have hung out alone, but it'll definitely be the first time I've gone on a date with Elle. Assuming tonight is a date, of course. I'm reasonably confident it is, but confirmation from Elle would be good. And if we do agree, then what? I fly back to Boston tomorrow, so it's not like next weekend I can take her to dinner or show up for her soccer game. I want to do this right, I'm just not sure what that's going to mean. And screwing this up isn't an option, not when it's Elle.

But none of this is new—I spent several sleepless hours pondering these challenges while listening to Elle sleep when she visited, and then I kissed her anyway. We had a whole conversation that morning about why it shouldn't happen again, and then last night happened. Clearly we've changed our minds, so we're just going to have to find a way to make this work. I'll be back for Christmas, and that's barely a month. And maybe that's all we need to figure out right now—get through the next few weeks, and take it from there.

I'm jolted from my ridiculous middle school angst by a loud thud and a spray of sand hitting my legs. A volleyball just landed at my feet and I look up to find Tuppen staring at me with a smirk. Great, definitely someone I was hoping to deal with today.

"We need one more on our team. Get off your phone and come help."

I'm not sure helping Tuppen out is a priority of mine right now, but I'm not about to tell him why his gossip was unwelcome. And, maybe I can find out exactly what he saw—if he did recognize Elle and is holding back that detail for some reason, better to know that now and plan accordingly.

Sanj ends up joining us too, and the game provides a decent distraction from everything else on my mind. At least, until Tuppen decides he needs more gossip.

"So, who was she?" Tuppen asks as we take a break.

I ignore him, but he's as annoyingly persistent as ever.

"Come on, tell me."

"A girl."

Tuppen rolls his eyes. "That part I assumed. Anyone I know?"

Tuppen looks genuinely curious, so I'm inclined to believe he really didn't recognize Elle.

"Nope." I feel exactly zero guilt about the lie.

"What are you guys talking about?" Sanj asks.

I say "Nothing" at the same time Tuppen laughs "The girl he scored last night."

A crass exaggeration, but I'm not about to provide details.

"You had a date last night?" Sanj sounds confused.

"Not really."

"Not a date," Tuppen helpfully interrupts. "Just a Flynn party conquest."

As eagerly as he's begging to be punched, letting Tuppen believe whatever he wants means fewer inconvenient questions.

"Oh. I guess I really was wrong about that other girl." Sanj looks weirdly disappointed.

Tuppen's eyes gleam. "There's another girl? Figures."

"There. Is. No. Girl." I grit out.

"So who've you been texting all those times?" Sanj still sounds puzzled.

"A friend. Now, less gossip, more volleyball."

This is great. Now Sanj thinks I've been leading one girl on while making out with random girls at parties. I'd rather not have my roommate believing I'm a jerk, but explanations can't happen right now. At least Elle will be amused to hear I've been cheating on her with, well, her.

I get to Sal's way too early, like some kind of nervous wreck on his first-ever date, only to discover that Elle's running late. It seems Lee offered to keep her company when she announced she wasn't feeling well and bailed on movie night, so she had to convince him she'd be fine on her own. I'd say he has a sixth sense for getting in our way, but that's obviously not true, given how oblivious he was this morning.

I look up from my phone every time the door opens, and after several disappointments it's finally Elle. Elle in a dress that she definitely wasn't wearing this morning, so I'm not the only one who dressed up for this dinner that's very probably a date. The dress isn't particularly revealing, and yet there's something about the way it skims her curves that's incredibly distracting. There are a lot of things we've made more complicated by getting involved, but at least I can stop lying to myself about my attraction to Elle and enjoy it instead.

There's an uneasy silence after we sit down. Yeah, it's Elle and we've had dinner together a hundred times, sometimes in this exact restaurant, but never like this, never as a date. Elle seems more reserved than this morning as we make awkward small talk, and I wonder if something happened today to dim her usual cheer. I'm still wrestling with how to start the conversation when the waitress shows up to take our order, and by the time we've argued our way to a compromise on pizza toppings, the weirdness has worn off. Now that I'm with Elle, now that we're back to that easy teasing we always fall into, this afternoon's worries seem ridiculous. Whatever it is between us, it just works, and we don't need to figure out more than how to get through the next month. That's not any longer than between her October visit and now, and that clearly didn't deter us. So we'll keep trading texts, we'll add some calls, and soon enough I'll be back, for several weeks this time. We should get around to actually having that conversation at some point tonight, but things just seem simpler when Elle's around.

Elle's been ignoring her phone for most of dinner, but she checks it after hearing the annoyingly shrill alert Lee assigned himself. Her expression clouds as she reads the message and then taps out a quick reply, and there's something forced about the smile she gives me after setting the phone back down.

"What did Lee want?"

"Just checking on me, asking whether I was feeling any better." Elle's eyes are cast down, avoiding mine. "I hate lying to him," she finally adds, sighing.

I reach for her hand, squeezing it lightly. "I know. It'll be easier once we've told him."

Elle looks up sharply. "Told him what?"

"About this. So you won't need to lie any more."

Now Elle looks alarmed. "We can't tell Lee. Lee can never find out about this."

An uneasy feeling lodges in the pit of my stomach. "We can't sneak around forever—at some point we've got to tell him."

"But there's nothing to tell him. He doesn't need to know we made out."

And now that uneasy feeling has turned to lead.

"Is that all it is?"

Elle shrugs, still avoiding eye contact. "You're leaving tomorrow."

"Yeah, and coming back four weeks later."

"And then leaving again. Look, Noah, we don't need to make a big deal about this. We had fun, but we both know this can't work. We can't work."

Elle's words gut me, but at the same time... I don't believe them. I know her, and I know there's more she's not saying.

"Why not?" I challenge.

"You... want this to work?"

Elle sounds surprised, and that surprises me. I'd expected Elle to list all the same reasons why this can't work as in October, to tell me again why this is a bad idea, but I hadn't expected this uncertainty. Hadn't imagined she might not know I want this. But the confusion in her voice is genuine, and maybe it's my fault for not making my intentions clear enough.

"I'd like to give this a shot, yeah. And I know we said we shouldn't, when you visited, but we're not doing a great job of staying away from each other, are we?"

"Not so much," Elle admits, the twitch of her lips hinting at laughter.

"So if we're doing this, of course I want it to work." There's no way I'd have taken the gamble otherwise.

"But it can't." Elle stubbornly insists.

"You still haven't told me why."

"Because you're in college a million miles away."

"Three thousand. And planes exist."

"Because Lee would kill me."

"I don't care what Lee thinks. What do you want?"

"I want to not wreck things between us. To not make things weird forever."

"So we won't let it. Who says it has to end badly?"

"Because... you're you," Elle sighs, then winces. "I'm sorry, that sounded wrong. But... you know what I mean."

"No, I don't."

I'd be more offended by Elle's comment if I thought she were being honest. Something about her voice and her expression and her fidgeting tells me Elle's objecting because she thinks she should.

"You don't exactly have a great track record. Not that it's a bad record, really. It's just... no record. You don't date, Noah. You... hook up with girls at parties and then move on by the next weekend."

Hard to deny, but not relevant to this conversation. None of those girls were Elle. Besides, for the record and in my own defense, those girls all moved on by the next weekend, too.

"Maybe I just hadn't found a girl I wanted to date yet."

"We met seventeen years ago," Elle points out, eyebrows high.

"Yeah, but maybe I'm an idiot who hadn't realized which girl I wanted to date." Despite all those giant flashing signs I ignored. "Come on, you've said yourself what an idiot I am. Many times," I smile at her.

Elle stares at me, holding my gaze. I can't quite read her, but I'd like to believe it's hope I see flickering in her eyes.

But then she looks away. "Look, I'm sorry I said it was because of you—it's not. I don't think I can do this right now. Applications are due soon and I still can't decide where I want to go. Or what I want to study. Or how to make my essay sound less stupid. Or how to pay for college. And I never have any time to actually think about any of those, because school is crazy too. It's just... it's not a good time."

I probably shouldn't find Elle's answer encouraging, but I do.

"I don't know, sounds like the perfect time for a boyfriend that isn't around to distract you."

Elle startles, flashing me an exceedingly skeptical look, but she's also blushing hard. "Boyfriend?"

"I'm no expert, but I'm told that's the term for this." I smirk.

Maybe it's bold of me to assume, but if the point of this argument is this being real, then that seems like the right word.

But it doesn't seem to have been the right thing to say. Elle looks away again, staring at her hands as she shreds her napkin. It's a nervous habit of hers I know well, and it's not a good sign.

"You don't have to pretend like this is more than it is, Noah."

"Fine. You tell me what this is, then. Because we're clearly not on the same page."

I'm struggling to hold back my frustration. As much as I want to believe Elle's not telling me the whole story, that she wants this too, there's not much I can do if she refuses to admit it.

"It was... us having fun. Because we were curious, but not... anything serious. Not anything real. I mean, I know you—how you are with girls. I'm not naïve. I just figured, maybe if we got it out of our systems we'd stop being weird around each other. I didn't think—I wasn't expecting anything. I didn't think you were."

This is some kind of twisted prank the universe is playing on me, because apparently I just got played. By my own reputation.

"Do you actually believe that?"

Elle is silent a long time, continuing to avoid my eyes as she plays with her hair, twisting it tightly around one finger. Another familiar nervous habit, another sign of how uneasy she feels. I reach across the table for her other hand and I'm relieved when she laces her fingers through mine. I may not understand why she's so reluctant to acknowledge this wasn't meaningless, but at least I know she knows it.

"Come on, Elle. We both know it was more than that."

Elle stays quiet. I don't know if she realizes her thumb is tracing slow lines back and forth across the back of my hand, but I'm pretty sure that's a good sign.

"Can we... have this conversation at Christmas? When you're home again and we're both on break from school?" Elle finally answers.

"So we pretend nothing happened?"

"No, that's not what I meant. Not what I want. Look, I... I want this to be real, too. But I'm also so confused. I want us to have this conversation, I do, I just can't do it right now. Not when you're going to be gone tomorrow. So, I don't know, I guess I want to hit pause."

I'm still not sure I understand, but Elle wants this to be real—that's really all that matters.

"Okay."

"Okay?" Elle looks up with a mixture of surprise and relief.

"Yeah. We don't have to say what this is or isn't. We can just... leave things as they are."

"And not tell anyone?"

"Sure. If that's what you want." And for now it's what I want, too. We can't hide forever, but I don't need Lee meddling while I'm gone. Somehow I doubt his opinions will be helpful.

Elle nods, and I can see her relax. "Thank you," she adds. She's left her hand curled in mine, and the soft squeeze she gives me as she says it is all the reassurance I need about her feelings. I've got a month to prove to her that whatever this is, it's not going to disappear just because we're in different time zones. That's a challenge I can work with.

.