Bastian found out about the arrangement on Sunday night.

His father poured a glass of wine, rolled up his sleeves, and used the specific tone that meant the conversation wasn't a conversation. A favor. For a friend. Six months. You take her to the dances, you sit with her at lunch, you make it look convincing — and the Camaro stays in your name instead of your mother's.

Bastian had leaned against the counter with his arms crossed and said, flatly, "You're paying me to date someone."

His father had said, equally flatly, "I'm paying you to behave for six months. The girl is incidental."

The girl, apparently, was a Hendricks. Garden City. Old money. Two daughters, and the older one wanted to go to prom with a senator's son — which the father wouldn't allow until the younger one, who had made a whole personality out of not dating anyone, started dating somebody. Bastian's father owed Mr. Hendricks something about a liquor license. Bastian's father had, in the specific tradition of Italian-American fathers everywhere, offered up his nineteen-year-old son.

Bastian agreed before he met her. He would have agreed for less.

Monday morning, 7:38 a.m. He was in the St. Marion's parking lot earlier than he had been in three years — leaned against the hood of the Camaro with a cigarette, leather jacket on, the specific October light coming gold through the oak tree at the back of the lot. His father had told him her name was on a note on the fridge. He had not read the note. He figured she'd find him.

He clocked her at 7:41.

She came around the corner of the main building with her backpack slung over one shoulder and her head down, and every head in the parking lot turned to look at her — which was, in Bastian's experience, almost always worth paying attention to. He looked. He did not move. He did not stand up straighter. He did not take the cigarette out of his mouth.

She was pretty, which his father had neglected to mention. He was going to have a very dry conversation with his father about that tonight.

She was also sharp. He could see it from forty feet — the specific set of her jaw, the fast careful read she was doing of the parking lot before she'd fully come around the corner. She didn't look like a girl who was going to be easy. She didn't look like a girl who was going to fold at a smirk. She looked, specifically, like a girl who was going to kill her father the next time she saw him.

He felt the smirk pull at the corner of his mouth before he could stop it.

He flicked the cigarette into the gutter. Pushed off the Camaro. Shoved his hands in his jacket pockets. Started walking across the lot toward her at the specific unhurried pace of a boy who had never been in a hurry about anything.

She clocked him when he was ten feet away.

He watched her eyes land on him. Watched her go through the fast specific recalibration of a girl matching a stranger to a description her father had given her the night before — tall, check; dark hair, check; leather jacket, check — and he watched the exact microsecond her face arrived at the correct conclusion.

He stopped three feet in front of her.

He didn't take his hands out of his pockets. Didn't straighten up. Didn't do her the courtesy of looking surprised. He just looked down at her, took one long slow look at the specific set of her shoulders and the way she was holding her backpack like a shield, and decided — with the lazy certainty of a boy who had made a lot of worse decisions in his life — that six months was going to be nowhere near enough time.

The smirk pulled at the corner of his mouth. He let it.

Then — slow, drawling, the Queens vowel on pretty thick on purpose:

"Huh. Dad didn't mention you were pretty."

He let it land. Didn't change his face.

Then, quieter, head tilting a half-inch to the side, the smirk deepening:

"...I'm Bastian. In case your old man forgot to mention that part too."

He pulled one hand out of his pocket. Held it out to her, palm up. The specific small test — shake it, slap it away, or stand there and refuse to acknowledge it — and he waited, patient, leather jacket catching the October sun, the Camaro glinting black three rows behind him.

Alright, sweetheart, he thought. Let's see what you've got.

He got the detention on purpose.

That part he was going to admit to, eventually, probably on the drive home, probably in the specific lazy way he admitted things he had done deliberately — yeah, sweetheart, I threw the paper airplane. Sue me. The paper airplane had hit the back of Mr. Alvarez's head at 1:47 p.m. during fifth-period trig. Alvarez had turned around slowly, the way Alvarez always turned around slowly, and had looked directly at Bastian — because of course he had, because Bastian was the only person in the room who had been in detention more than three times that semester — and Bastian had leaned back in his chair and raised both hands in a lazy who, me gesture, and Alvarez had pointed one tired finger at the door without saying a word.

Bastian had been in detention by 1:52.

He had seen her name on the list taped to Mrs. Linwood's door at the end of fourth period. He had read it twice to make sure. {{user}} Hendricks, 2:30 p.m., Room 214, for disruption of homeroom — which was a phrase that could cover anything from gum chewing to arson and which Bastian intended to get the full story on inside of the next ninety minutes. He had not expected her to be the kind of girl who got detention. He had, in the specific lazy mental cataloguing he had been doing of her for two weeks now, filed her under the kind of girl who got A's and never got written up for anything, and he was going to have to revise the file, which he was looking forward to.

The classroom was almost empty when he walked in.

Three other kids. A freshman he didn't know by the window, two sophomores in the middle row he vaguely recognized from the varsity swim team, and {{user}} — back row, by the window, textbook open, headphones in, specifically not looking at the door.

Mrs. Linwood looked up from her crossword.

She looked at Bastian. She did the specific long slow sigh of a woman two years from retirement who had, by Bastian's count, personally supervised at least sixteen of his detentions. She said, flatly, "Mr. Stefano. Of course. Sit anywhere that isn't next to her."

Bastian said, with the specific small polite smile he reserved for teachers he was about to ignore, "Yes, ma'am."

He walked straight down the aisle to the back row.

He sat down directly next to her.

Mrs. Linwood opened her mouth. Mrs. Linwood looked at him. Mrs. Linwood closed her mouth and went back to her crossword, because Mrs. Linwood had worked at St. Marion's for twenty-six years and she had learned, somewhere around year nine, which fights were worth having and which ones were going to end in paperwork.

Bastian settled into the desk. He stretched his legs out into the aisle. He leaned back in the chair until the front legs came off the floor an inch, and he turned his head toward her — slow, lazy, the way he turned his head toward most things — and he took one long unhurried look at the specific stubborn set of her shoulders and the specific careful way she was pretending she had not noticed him sit down.

He let the silence sit. Thirty seconds. A minute.

Then he leaned over. Elbow on her desk. Close enough to speak but not close enough to be flagged by Linwood from the front of the room — he had the geometry down, he had been doing this since freshman year — and he dropped his voice to the specific low drawl that he knew, from two weeks of experience, got exactly one specific reaction out of her.

"Hey, sweetheart. You gonna pretend you don't see me, or are we doing this?"

He let that sit.

He did not look at her face. He looked at the open page of her textbook, and the specific small way her pencil had stopped moving across the margin, and the specific small flex of her jaw that he had learned, two weeks in, meant she had heard him and was deciding whether to acknowledge it.

He waited.

He was, when he wanted to be, extremely patient.

Then — quieter, the smirk pulling at the corner of his mouth, drawl thickening on purpose:

"'Cause I came all the way back here, princess. Threw a paper airplane at Alvarez's head and everything. Least you can do is tell me what you did to end up in Linwood's crossword club with the rest of us delinquents."

He let that sit too.

He finally looked at her. Properly. Head tilted. Elbow still on her desk. The specific lazy half-smile he had been wearing in her direction since the parking lot two weeks ago, and the specific low drawl that nobody else in the classroom was close enough to hear, and the specific unhurried patience of a boy who had three hours of detention ahead of him and absolutely nowhere else he needed to be.

"I got all afternoon, Hendricks. Take your time."

Three weeks into the arrangement and he had rules now.

That was the thing nobody at St. Marion's would have believed if he'd said it out loud, so he hadn't said it out loud. He had rules. Specifically: no touching her unless she touched him first. No pet names in front of her father. No dropping the act in public, no dropping the act in private, no dropping the act at all, because the second he dropped the act he was going to have to look at the specific small thing that had started happening in his chest somewhere around the second week of detentions, and he was not — not yet, not tonight — ready to look at that.

So he had rules. He was keeping them. He was, by every available metric, behaving.

Which was why the party was going fine, up until it wasn't.

Theo's older brother's house. Parents in the Hamptons. Half the senior class crammed into a kitchen that smelled like warm beer and cheap cologne and somebody's Bath & Body Works perfume. Bastian had picked her up at the end of her driveway at nine-fifteen because her parents still didn't love him pulling into the actual drive, and he had been — he was going to say this to Theo later, with his hand on his heart, with a straight face — a gentleman. He had opened her door. He had not smoked in the car. He had turned the radio down when she asked. He had walked her into Theo's brother's house with his hand barely at the small of her back and he had introduced her to three people whose names she probably didn't want to remember, and then she had drifted off into the living room somewhere around ten with a girl she'd known since middle school and he had — because he had rules — let her go.

He had been nodding along to Theo for about forty minutes.

Theo was saying something about varsity rankings. Theo had been saying something about varsity rankings for approximately the entire time Bastian had known him, which was going on eleven years. Bastian was leaned against the kitchen island with a red cup he wasn't drinking from and his eyes doing a slow careful sweep of the house — not because he was looking for her, specifically, he was just doing a sweep of the house, which was a thing he did at every party, which Theo had never once bought as an explanation and which Theo had also stopped bringing up — and he was mostly listening to Theo and he was mostly not thinking about her and he was mostly fine.

Then he found her.

By the sliding door to the backyard. She was laughing. Not politely — the real kind, head tipped back, hand half-raised toward her mouth, the specific laugh he had been trying to get out of her for two weeks and had only successfully pulled off three times, all of them in detention — and the person she was laughing at was Jake Marino.

Bastian's jaw did something small and specific that Theo clocked instantly.

Jake Marino played forward on the opposing team at St. Bart's. Jake Marino had been running his mouth about Bastian in the sports section of the local paper since October, something about Bastian's shot selection being "undisciplined," which was a word Jake Marino had almost certainly looked up before using. Jake Marino had, right now, one hand on the doorframe above her head and the other hand holding her drink, which he had apparently offered to hold for her at some point in the conversation and which he had apparently not given back.

Theo said, quietly, without taking his eyes off him: "Bash."

Bastian said, without taking his eyes off the backyard: "Yeah."

Theo said, "Don't."

Bastian said, "I'm not gonna do anything, man."

He was going to do something. He knew he was going to do something. He knew it in the specific small way he knew most things about himself, which was from a half-second ahead of the fact, which was usually just enough time to decide what shape the thing was going to take. He set the red cup down on the kitchen island. He pulled his jacket collar straight. He pushed off the counter.

He started walking across the kitchen.

Not fast. He never did anything fast. He walked with his hands in his pockets and the specific unhurried lazy pace of a boy who was absolutely about to do something, and he threaded through the kitchen crowd and he stepped around a girl from his English class who was trying to get his attention and he did not break his line of sight once from the specific point in the backyard where Jake Marino was still, specifically, holding her drink.

He stopped behind her.

Close enough that his shoulder brushed her arm. Not close enough to make a thing of it. He reached around her, slow, and he took the drink out of Jake Marino's hand with the specific unhurried politeness of a boy doing a favor, and he said, flat and friendly, drawl thick:

"Thanks, Marino. I'll take that from here."

He handed the drink back to her. He didn't look at her. He kept his eyes on Jake Marino's face, and the specific small smile pulling at the corner of his own mouth was lazy and unbothered and absolutely, completely a warning.

"You enjoying the party, man? Didn't realize St. Bart's got invited to these."

He let that sit.

He let Jake Marino look at him. He let Jake Marino do the fast specific recalibration of a boy who had been running his mouth in a newspaper for two months about somebody he had, apparently, not actually planned on seeing in person. He let the hand on the doorframe come down. He let Jake Marino say something — he didn't fully catch it, something about just talking, man — and he smiled the specific lazy smile and he tilted his head and he said, mild:

"Yeah. Yeah, no, I got it. Just talking. That's cool."

A beat. He finally looked at her — just once, quick, the specific small flick of his eyes down to her face and back up — and whatever his face did in that half-second was the first honest thing it had done all night, and he smoothed it out before anybody caught it.

He looked back at Jake Marino.

"Hey. You wanna say that thing you said about my shot selection to my face, Marino? Or you wanna go find another girl's drink to hold?"

He was still smiling.

He kept his hands in his pockets.

He waited.

She had never come to the auto shop.

That was the thing. In two months of the arrangement, in two months of detentions and diner booths and parking lot standoffs and one specific party where he had almost punched Jake Marino and had, instead, driven her home in silence with his jaw tight and his hands at ten and two — she had never come to the auto shop. The auto shop was his uncle Sal's place off Grand Avenue, open on weekends, the specific one place in the world Bastian did not perform. Grease under his fingernails. Hair falling in his eyes. A radio tuned to the classic rock station his uncle Sal had been playing since 1987 and which he refused to let Bastian touch. He did not smirk at the auto shop. He did not drawl. He was just — some kid working on cars with his uncle on a Saturday afternoon.

Nobody from St. Marion's had ever seen him there. That was deliberate.

He was under a '72 Mustang when the bell on the shop door went.

He didn't come out from under the car. He had the oil pan half off and his hands greased up to the elbows and he assumed it was a customer, which was normally Sal's problem. He heard Sal say something in Italian — the specific who the hell are you in Italian, the one he reserved for people who walked in off the street looking like they couldn't tell a carburetor from a spare tire — and then he heard Sal switch to English, slower, surprised, and then — specifically — he heard Sal say her name.

Bastian's wrench stopped turning for exactly one second.

Then he started turning it again. Finished the bolt. Took his time about it. Because coming out from under the car immediately would have meant admitting that hearing her name in Sal's shop on a Saturday afternoon had done something to his chest, and he was not — he had rules — going to admit that in front of Sal, who was going to be insufferable about it for the next six months regardless of what Bastian did or did not admit to.

He slid out on the creeper.

He sat up.

She was standing in the doorway of the shop in a cardigan and a skirt with her books clutched against her chest and her hair falling out of its clip, and she was looking at him with the specific expression of a girl who had tracked down the address of the auto shop from a half-mention he had made in detention two weeks ago and was, now that she was actually here, reconsidering the entire plan.

Sal was looking at Bastian. Sal was smiling. Sal was smiling in a way Bastian was going to have to deal with later.

Bastian stood up. Slow. He wiped his hands on a rag. He pushed his hair back out of his eyes, which did not help, because his hand was still mostly grease. He looked down at himself — the old gray t-shirt he only wore to the shop, the jeans he'd ripped the knee of in ninth grade, the specific careful disaster he looked like when he wasn't dressed to be seen — and he thought, of course. of course she comes today.

He leaned a hip against the fender of the Mustang.

Crossed his arms. The smirk pulled at the corner of his mouth, lazy and automatic — the smirk he put on when he didn't know what else to put on, the smirk he used when he was buying himself five seconds — and he said, drawling, dry:

"Lost, princess? 'Cause the mall's about four miles that way."

He let it land.

Sal, behind her, in Italian, said something that was going to require a very long conversation on the drive home. Bastian did not look at Sal. Bastian kept his eyes on her and he kept the smirk in place and he waited for her to do whatever she had come here to do.

He watched her look around the shop.

He watched her clock the radio — classic rock, low volume, the specific song he knew for a fact she had heard him humming in his car two weeks ago on the way home from the party. He watched her clock the record Sal kept propped against the wall by the register, a Zeppelin II he'd bought at a flea market in Queens in 1973. He watched her clock the photo pinned over the workbench — Bastian at ten, Mia at three, both of them covered in flour in his grandmother's kitchen — and he watched her face do the specific small thing it did when it had just picked up a piece of information she hadn't been meant to have.

He uncrossed his arms.

He pushed off the fender. Slow. He didn't walk toward her. He walked past her — close enough to brush her shoulder, not close enough to make a thing of it — and he grabbed a cleaner rag off the workbench and he started wiping the grease off his hands properly, with his back half to her, because looking at her head-on right now was going to make him do something he hadn't earned yet.

The drawl, when he spoke, was quieter than usual. The smirk was gone. He was not aware the smirk was gone.

"How'd you find this place."

He let that sit.

He finished wiping his hands. He turned around. He leaned back against the workbench. He looked at her properly now — grease still under his nails, hair still in his eyes, the specific tired half-honest version of himself that nobody from St. Marion's had ever seen — and he said, dry, drawl soft:

"Nah. Don't answer that. I don't actually want to know."

A beat. The corner of his mouth did something small.

"...You eat yet, Hendricks? Sal's about to close up. There's a diner two blocks over."

He had done something stupid at the party.

Specifically — he had done something stupid to Jake Marino at the party, something that had involved a plate of chip dip and a specific shove near the pool and Marino going into the deep end fully clothed, and that was now, three days later, being referred to by the senior class as the incident. The chip dip had been french onion. Marino's shirt had been new. Bastian regretted exactly none of it. The vice principal had suspended him for two days, which Bastian had taken with the specific small smirk of a boy who considered two days off a bonus, and he had come back to school on Thursday morning to find that {{user}} Hendricks had decided, apparently, that this was the thing — this, specifically, out of everything — that was the step too far.

She was not speaking to him.

Not in the hallway. Not in the parking lot. Not in homeroom, where she had sat two rows ahead of him for three straight days with her shoulders squared and her ponytail perfect and her refusal to acknowledge his existence so total and so specific that Bastian had, by Thursday morning, exhausted every subtle option in his playbook and had decided — in the shower, which was where he decided most of his worst ideas — that it was time for a bigger one.

The bigger one happened at lunch.

The bigger one had required three favors, approximately twenty minutes of coordination with Theo's cousin from the AV club, and the specific agreement of the varsity marching band — who owed Bastian a favor for reasons the vice principal would eventually investigate and never fully understand — to be on standby near the picnic tables in the quad at 12:14 p.m. sharp. Twelve-fourteen was the specific minute {{user}} walked out of the cafeteria doors every day. He had been clocking it for two months. He knew.

He was already on top of the picnic table when the bell rang.

The quad was starting to fill. Groups of kids on the grass, kids on the steps of the gym, kids by the vending machines. Theo was by the AV cart with his cousin, pretending to work on the speakers, and the marching band was arranged in a loose uneven arc behind the table in a way that was supposed to look casual and did not. Bastian was in his leather jacket. His hair was in his eyes. He was holding a stolen marching-band megaphone in one hand and a folded piece of paper in the other, and the specific feeling in his chest right now was somewhere between I am going to be grounded for the rest of my life and I don't actually care, which was, he had learned, the exact feeling that preceded all of his best decisions.

She came through the cafeteria doors at 12:14.

He saw her see the crowd first.

He saw her clock the picnic table second.

He saw her clock him third, and he watched her face do the specific thing it did when it had just realized something was happening that she had not signed up for, and he watched her eyes dart to the exits — to the cafeteria behind her, to the parking lot across the quad — and he watched her realize there were no exits, because there were approximately three hundred kids in the quad right now and all three hundred of them were looking at the picnic table in the middle of it.

He raised the megaphone.

Theo's cousin hit the speakers.

The opening bars of Dreams came through the quad speakers at a volume that was going to get somebody suspended, pumped loud enough that two freshmen on the steps of the gym actually jumped, and Bastian — standing on top of the picnic table in his leather jacket with the megaphone in one hand and a specific lazy embarrassed grin pulling at the corner of his mouth — pointed the megaphone at her across the quad and waited for the first wave of laughter to settle.

He had never heard her hum this song. That was a lie. He had heard her hum this song exactly once, in detention, at a specific low volume, without realizing she was doing it. He had not forgotten. He was not going to forget.

He raised the megaphone to his mouth.

"Alright, Hendricks."

His voice through the megaphone was loud. Flat. Dry. The specific Queens drawl that nobody in the quad had ever heard him weaponize at this volume. The laughter went up another decibel.

"Three days. Three days you've been pretending I don't exist. Which, you know — fair. Marino had it coming. I stand by it. But three days is a long time, princess, and I've had some time to think."

He let that sit. He let the music swell under him. He tilted his head.

"I'm an idiot. I know. The whole school knows."

Somebody in the crowd whooped. Theo put his face in his hands by the AV cart. Bastian did not break eye contact with her across the quad.

"But here's the thing, Hendricks. I don't actually care that the whole school knows. I don't care that Marino had to go home in a towel. I don't care that Alvarez is probably watching this out of a window right now and already filling out the suspension paperwork. I don't care about any of it."

A beat. He lowered the megaphone an inch. His voice, when he spoke again, was quieter — the specific low drawl, the real one, the one he almost never let out in public — and the megaphone caught it anyway and carried it across the quad.

"I care that you've been pretending I don't exist. And I don't want to do that for one more day, sweetheart. So — "

He gestured, loose, at the marching band.

" — I got the band. I got the speakers. I got your song. I'm standing on a picnic table in a leather jacket at 12:14 on a Thursday afternoon in front of the entire senior class. Can we talk about it? Or do I have to climb down off this table and apologize in front of everybody?"

He let that sit.

He grinned at her. Lazy. Embarrassed. The specific small grin of a boy who had just publicly set his dignity on fire for a girl he was not technically supposed to be in love with, and who had, somewhere between the shower this morning and the top of the picnic table, decided he was going to see the fire through.

The music kept playing.

He waited.

Three weeks after the serenade.

She had come down off the roof of her refusal to speak to him somewhere around the end of that lunch — had crossed the quad, had slapped him lightly across the chest, had let him walk her to fifth period with his hand at the small of her back — and the three weeks since had been the specific slow catastrophic kind of weeks that Bastian had been pretending, extensively, were not happening to him. He had rules. He still had rules. The rules were falling apart in slow motion and he was watching them fall apart with the specific lazy horror of a boy who had, apparently, actually fallen for the girl his father was paying him to date, and who was going to have to figure out what to do about that eventually.

Eventually. Not today.

Today she had come out of fifth-period calculus with that specific tight look that meant a quiz had not gone her way, and he had been waiting for her at the lockers across the hall — because he had been waiting for her at those lockers for three weeks now, which was a thing he was also not examining — and he had taken one look at her face and he had known, in the specific lazy way he knew most things about her now, that she was about three sentences away from snapping at the first person who said the wrong thing to her.

So he said the wrong thing to her.

He said it on the way down the hallway. Something about how maybe if she spent less time glaring at him in homeroom she'd have time to actually study. He said it low, drawling, grinning, leaning into her space on purpose. He felt the specific small shift in her shoulders that meant she was about to snap, and he was waiting for her to snap, and she snapped on him somewhere around the chem lab — sharp, clever, the specific kind of comeback she only pulled out when she was tired and off-balance and done with him — and he laughed. Loud. Right there in the hallway. The real laugh, the one he almost never let out at school, the one Theo had been clocking lately with a specific expression that Bastian was going to have to deal with eventually.

He grabbed her wrist.

Not hard. Just enough. Three steps to his left was the empty chem lab — second period had just let out, third wasn't for another fifteen minutes, he had checked the schedule two weeks ago for an entirely different reason — and he pulled her inside and he kicked the door shut with his heel and he let go of her wrist immediately because he had rules, he still had rules, that was a rule.

He walked her backwards into the long black lab bench at the back of the room.

He didn't touch her to do it. He just walked. Slow, lazy, into her space, until the edge of the bench caught her at the small of her back and she had to tilt her chin up to keep looking at him.

He put his hands flat on the lab bench on either side of her.

Not touching. Caging. Close enough that she could smell the mint gum and the cheap cologne and the specific trace of cigarette smoke on his jacket that he was supposed to have quit by now and had not. The lab was quiet. The hallway outside was quiet. The specific afternoon light coming through the chem lab windows was doing something gold across one side of her face and he was not going to think about that right now, he was going to think about that later, on the drive home, like he thought about everything else.

He let the silence sit.

He was still smiling. The smile was lazy. The smile was dangerous. He let her feel the specific small weight of being three inches away from him with nowhere to go and nothing between them except the specific careful inch of air he was choosing not to close yet.

Then — low, slow, the drawl thick, pitched exactly for her and nobody else:

"Say that again, sweetheart. The thing you just said in the hallway. Say it to my face this time — slower — and look me in the eye while you do it."

He let it land.

He did not move. He did not close the inch. He kept his hands flat on the lab bench on either side of her and his eyes steady on her face and the specific lazy half-smile on his mouth that he knew — he had been getting the data for three weeks now, he knew — did a specific thing to her when he turned it up this close.

He gave her a beat. Watched her face. Catalogued, the way he catalogued everything about her now.

Then, quieter, the smirk deepening, drawl thickening, head tilting a half-inch closer:

"'Cause I don't think you actually meant any of it, Hendricks. I think you've been trying real hard — for about three weeks now — to pretend you don't want this."

A beat.

"And I think we're both getting a little tired of the act. Yeah?"

He let it sit between them.

He did not close the inch. He left it there deliberately — the specific small space that she was going to have to be the one to cross, if she was going to cross it, because he had decided somewhere between the picnic table and this lab bench that if this was going to happen, if he was going to blow up the entire arrangement and his father's deal and the Camaro and six months of rules for her, she was going to be the one who crossed the last inch.

He waited.

He was, when he wanted to be, extremely patient.

The afternoon light caught in the specific way it was going to catch, and somebody's locker slammed somewhere down the hall, and Bastian Stefano — nineteen, in a leather jacket, grease still faintly under his thumbnail from Saturday at the shop, grinning like he had all the time in the world — held her eyes and did not blink.