Before she can answer I’m already turning away. I don’t want this to become a fight again. I don’t know how much time I have left until Zane leaves his house, and if he does that while I’m still in view, it won’t just be my mom who knows about what happened between us.
I almost run across the yard, to the woods that border the property line. For a second, as soon as I’m in the cooler air and dimmer light of the woods, I feel like I might actually get lost.
And then I find the trail that my dad and Zane’s dad cut out and tamped down, and it’s like I’m fourteen again, the age I was when I still went to visit the treehouse regularly. Before I got too wrapped up in studying and being a straight-A student to spend as much time outside climbing trees. My heart’s beating faster because I don’t know what Zane and I are actually going to talk about. But I know we’re going to talk.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
ZANE LEWIS
I check myself in the mirror. Between our fight the day before, the sex we had before that and the dinner to come, I have no real clue what Harper and I are going to talk about. There’s too much ground to cover.
But I know we have to do something. Her mom knows about us fooling around in the yard, but she doesn’t know about the sex, and she definitely doesn’t know about the fight. If things get too tense at the dinner party later, a lot of stuff could come out that would screw everything up, and I feel like I kind of owe it to my parents not to be the cause of that.
I head downstairs. Dad is sitting in the living room, watching something about how aliens were responsible for all the things the ancient civilizations did.
“Hey, where you headed, Zane?”
I stop short and shrug off the question. “Just going for a walk in the woods,” I say.
“Have you given any thought to what we talked about yesterday?” Dad looks at me intently and I shrug again, feeling nervous.
“I’ve been letting it soak in,” I say.
“I wanted to talk to you. Before you head out,” Dad says.
I raise an eyebrow. “It was good advice. I don’t see why you need to add to it now,” I tell him.
“I had a chat with Nadine this morning.”
Months of grueling basic training is the only reason I can keep my face from showing how much I’m dreading what else Dad might say next.
“Don’t you have a chat with Nadine most mornings?”
“Zane, sit down.”
I want to say that I don’t have time, but I know if I don’t Dad is going to come up with some reason to detain me, or he’ll get Mom in the room, or something like that.
“I need to head out, actually,” I begin to say.
“You’re going to meet up with Harper, aren’t you?” Dad keeps his eyes on my face and after a moment, I nod.
“Yes,” I admit.
“When we had our talk yesterday, I had to wonder who it was you were talking about, someone you’d known for a while, who you didn’t think about ‘that way’ and all that,” Dad says.
“I never said who it was,” I point out.
“There aren’t that many single girls from your high school still in town, or in town right now,” Dad tells me.
I cringe. I probably should have thought of that, but I’d been too occupied with making sure he wouldn’t immediately guess it was Harper.
“Right,” I say.
“So when Nadine told me that she caught the two of you, I put two and two together,” Dad says.
“So does that change what you told me yesterday?” I just want to get this conversation over with as quickly as possible.
Harper is definitely at the treehouse by now, wondering when I’ll show up.
“I want to clarify one thing for you,” Dad tells me.
“Go ahead,” I say with a nod I’m pretty sure I won’t like it, but I owe it to my dad to hear him out, and I don’t have to follow his advice.
“You’ve got this going on, whatever it is, and I’m not going to speculate until you’re ready to tell me, and you’ve got the thing with the army going on,” Dad says.
“Right,” I say, and I nod, gesturing for him to continue.
“My advice to you for what it’s worth, on both of those issues, is this. If you’re actually in love with Harper, then you should see where it goes, and maybe consider re-joining the civilian world if it looks serious. But if it’s not going to go anywhere, and you already know that, then you need to make a clean break and you need to re-enlist so you’re not going to end up running into her again.”
I look at Dad for a while after his little speech, and I have to admit, the advice makes a lot of sense. There’s just one problem with it.