“Of course,” I say, and then she sits down and picks up the thread of Kenji and Todd’s conversation right where she left off. I’m disappointed and relieved all at once.
I spend the whole meal trying to keep a normal, serene expression on my face while my knee presses against Zoe’s under the table. I barely understand the conversation, anyway; missing ten days’ worth of inside jokes at summer stock is like being off the grid for months back in the real world, and I know it’ll be nearly impossible for me to catch up. But maybe I don’t need anyone else, now that I have Zoe.
Time passes so slowly, I’m sure something’s wrong with the Earth’s rotation, but Livvy finally stands and gathers her trash, and everyone else follows. “My head still hurts from last night,” she says. “I’m going to go lie flat on my back and watch 30 Rock. Anyone want to join me?” She eyes me sideways, clearly torn between politeness and a strong desire not to invite me up to her room. In the end, her loyalty is to Jessa.
“We’ll come,” Kenji says.
For a second I’m afraid Zoe’s about to say she wants to watch, too, but instead she says, “I’m actually gonna go to the practice rooms for a little while.” She turns to me. “Do you have time to play for me? You don’t have to, but—”
“Of course,” I say before she’s even done. “I mean, yeah, sure, I’m not doing anything.” Going to the practice room is a brilliant strategy—if anyone caught us on the way back to our room, they’d try to talk Zoe into joining the group, and then we’d be stuck in we’re-just-friends limbo for the rest of the evening. But no actor at Allerdale would ever try to talk someone out of rehearsing. This way, we can finally be alone.
Zoe and I practically run downstairs, and the second the practice room door shuts behind us, she has me pressed up against it. Her hands slip up the back of my shirt and then she’s kissing me, fast and eager, like she can’t get enough of me. “I’ve been thinking about this all day,” she murmurs against my mouth, and she doesn’t even give me time to respond before her lips are on mine again. I know I’m supposed to like this hungry urgency—I’ve been thinking about kissing her all day, too, and I love how totally focused on me she is. But this is way more intense than the slow, tentative way we touched last night, when everything was about closeness and warmth and the wonder of discovering each other for the first time. The way she’s kissing me now makes me feel totally out of control, like I’ve been thrown into the deep end of the pool after one swimming lesson.
I draw back a little. “Hey, slow down,” I say. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She giggles. “Sorry. I didn’t think I’d ever get to do this, and now that I can…” She trails off and shrugs, and the vulnerable way she’s biting her lip is so adorable that it makes me want to pull her close again.
“Why did you think that?” I ask. “I haven’t been able to get enough of you since the day we got here.”
“I thought maybe we were just going to be friends, though. It seemed like you were straight, and when I kissed you at the Midsummer party, you literally ran out of the room. I thought I’d ruined everything.”
I run my fingers through her hair. “I didn’t run because I didn’t like it,” I say. “I needed a minute to figure things out, you know? I didn’t know what it meant.”
“It meant I wanted to kiss you, silly. What else could it have meant?”
“I don’t know. We were playing a game. Maybe you were doing it for attention, or to get a reaction out of everyone, or to freak them out, or—”
“Brooklyn,” she says. She touches my cheek, and I shut up. “You’re overthinking this, okay?”
“I’m just saying, I wasn’t sure—”
“Do you like it when I do this?” Zoe kisses me again, incredibly gently now. It’s barely more than a whisper against my lips.
“Yes,” I say.
“And this?” She pushes my hair aside and kisses my neck.
“Yes,” I whisper. And I do, I do like it. I always liked it when Jason used to kiss my neck, so why should this be any different? It feels overwhelming and unfamiliar with Zoe, but I probably just need time to get used to it.
“Then enjoy it,” she says. “Not everything has to mean something. We like each other. We like making out. That’s all that matters. Okay?”
“It’s more complicated than that, though, isn’t it?” I say. “You already have someone else, and—”
“I don’t want to think about him right now,” Zoe says. “I want to think about you.”
She leans back in and kisses me again, and I try to relax into it. But I keep thinking about the last time the two of us were in this practice room, after the Midsummer party, when she stared right into my eyes as she sang to me, and the tension between us pulled and stretched like taffy. There was something so exciting about that uncertainty, the not-knowing. Everything was full of possibility, and now that I know exactly what it’s like to be pressed up against her, all of that is gone.