Across the gymnasium at 9:20 p.m., Marcus Webb had the particular grin he got when he'd decided to push something and had had just enough to drink to go through with it.
"Rowe."
Calder looked up from his beer. "What."
"You ever plan on doing something about-" Marcus waved his hand vaguely toward the rest of the room, "-you know. Before you leave for Yale."
"Before I leave for Yale what."
"Come on."
Flynn moved immediately, putting his can down and angling his body. "Marcus. Drop it."
"I'm just saying." Marcus was grinning wider now. "He's going in two months. He should know what he's getting into."
Calder said, flatly: "I know what I'm getting into."
He didn't elaborate. He made the mistake of not elaborating, which Marcus's entire table read as an answer, and within eight minutes everyone at Table Three understood the specific nature of the gap in Calder Rowe's experience. Flynn sat back with his jaw tight. Theo Horst's eyebrows went up in genuine delight. The two lacrosse guys exchanged a look that Calder would have liked to be able to un-see.
"First kiss?" Theo said. "Even first-"
"Leave it," Flynn said sharply.
But the damage was already happening, and Calder sat with his face completely still and his jaw one notch tighter and listened to all six of them catalog experiences he didn't have, and he felt something he wasn't used to feeling: genuine, furious embarrassment.
Not about the fact itself. He'd made a series of non-choices, and he didn't regret them - he'd had other priorities, or at least that's what he'd told himself. He was embarrassed because he'd let it become a table conversation. Because he'd been too surprised by the directness of the question to redirect it in time. Because Flynn, who should have ended it faster, had sat there and let it run.
He was Calder Rowe. He had never scored below a 97 on anything that could be graded. He had won the state debate championship at sixteen and again at seventeen. He had read more case law in high school than most people did in law school, because his family expected it and he had decided early to exceed expectations rather than simply meet them.
He had never kissed anyone.
He could fix that. Tonight, specifically, that could be fixed. Not for the right reasons - he knew the reasons were wrong - but the outcome would be the same and in ten years none of this would matter and Marcus Webb would be someone he occasionally saw at alumni events and exchanged the minimum required words with.
He drained his beer and said nothing. He signaled for another.
At 11:40, Flynn went to find Abby from the swim team, and Calder was left standing at the edge of the room with a warm beer and the earlier conversation still turning low in his chest, and he decided to move. Not toward anything specific. Just to stop standing still.
He cut around the dance floor, side-stepped a collision, and almost walked directly into someone coming from the other direction.
Sloane Mercer.
She had been doing so well at not looking obvious about where she was going.
And then she'd looked up and he was right there, close enough that she could see the slight imperfection in his collar and the way one side of his hair had fallen forward.
Her plan dissolved. Every version of the approach she'd practiced in her head evaporated completely.
She stopped. He stopped.
The clock clicked to 11:58.
Across the room, a cluster of people near the DJ booth had started a countdown - ragged, enthusiastic, not everyone joining in. Twelve, eleven, ten.
She looked at him. He was looking back with that expression she'd never been able to read from across a room - alert and waiting and paying attention.
She had one second to decide. She took it.
"I've wanted to kiss you for two years," she said. "Can I?"
The countdown hit eight.
He stared at her. She watched him process it. She watched the moment he believed her.
"Yeah," he said. "Okay."
She went up on her toes and kissed him.
It was fast. Closed-mouth, brief, her hand pressing flat against his chest because she needed something solid to hold onto, and the room erupted around them at zero, people cheering, music spiking, and for one second he just stood there and let it happen.
Then his hands came up and grabbed the back of her head and he kissed her back.
She hadn't planned for that.
He kissed her like he'd been thinking about the mechanics and had decided to commit - tilting her head, pressing harder, and she lost the thread of everything practical she'd been thinking. The cup slipped from her other hand. She grabbed his lapels instead. He kissed her like it was a decision he'd made and wasn't walking back from, and she kissed him back because she'd been carrying this for two years and the night was offering her the door and she was walking through it.
When they separated, both of them were breathing wrong for what had technically been one kiss.
Sloane looked up at him. His eyes were dark and he was looking at her with something she didn't know how to name - not the expression she'd expected from someone she'd thought of as unreachable.
She heard herself say: "The nurse's office. Three halls down. Someone propped the door earlier."
That was not the plan. The plan had been: one kiss, goodbye.
He said: "Okay."