it.
“Why’re you hiding?” Dean asked.
“Oh lord. Well, Mel met a couple of guys she likes, and one’s kinda cute but chatty and the other one is hot but quiet, and she’s been trying to figure out which one she likes best all night. I just couldn’t with her anymore.”
“Is this what we teenagers call ‘drama’?” Yeah. He actually made air quotes when he said it.
“You’re like a middle-aged economy professor in a seventeen-year-old’s body.” I snapped my fingers. “That’s what happened, isn’t it? You were really a professor at Harvard or something, and one of your professor buddies in the weird physics department figured out how to swap bodies with people, so you killed that dude and stole his invention so you could hijack a younger, hot body. And somewhere out there the real Dean is stuck with wrinkled balls and no idea what the hell happened.”
Dean was laughing so hard I thought he was going to drop his phone, and that made me laugh, and I did drop my phone, but thankfully, it landed on the floor and didn’t crack the screen because that would have ruined what was turning out to be an okay night.
“Did you call me hot?”
“Relatively speaking,” I said, trying to keep my cheeks from turning bright red. “Compared to me, you’re a soft six.”
“A six?!” Dean held the phone farther away. “But I’m wearing the suit!”
“Which is why you’re not a five.”
“Wow,” Dean said. “I hope this isn’t what passes for flirting for you or you might be single forever.”
“Who said I was flirting?” Was I flirting? Did Dean want me to flirt? Was he flirting? Nah, right? I mean . . . no freaking way. That was not what was happening. Right?
“Dre?”
I shook off the confusion and threw my grin back on. “Just keeping it real, you know? But I’m sure there are some circles where you’re like, maybe a seven or an eight.”
“Well, gee whiz. Thanks.”
The laughter faded into easy smiles, and the conversation faded into us staring at one another. If we’d been in the same room instead of separated by hundreds of miles, maybe we could’ve let the silence stand, embraced just hanging out, but it was weird over the phone.
“I liked what you said,” I told him. “I get that way too. Lonely.”
“You do?”
“Yeah,” I said. “All the time. But it’s boring. You don’t wanna hear about it.”
“I do!” he said. “Tell me.”
And I believed him. It wasn’t something he was just saying because he thought it was what I wanted to hear. He was actually interested. “It’s like, all I want in the world is to find one person who gets me for real.”
“Your friend—Mel?—she doesn’t get you?”
“She does. Kinda. Parts of me, really. But there’re always gonna be parts she doesn’t get. Like, she thinks I need to take advantage of my dad running for president to raise awareness for stuff, like getting conversion therapy banned and shit. And I’ve got feelings about all that, but she doesn’t understand why I just wanna be me and do my thing. It’s not her fault. It’s just who she is and who I am and who we are together, you know?”
“I do.”
“You really do, don’t you?”
“I think so.”
“And, like, I’m not so caught up in my own shit to think one person’s gotta be responsible for giving me everything I need, but I feel like knowing someone shouldn’t be so much work. If it’s right, it should be easy. Easier. Easy-ish.”
Dean’s smile was soft and dreamy. “You’re pretty easy.”
I snorted. “Bitch, you don’t even know me.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“I’m only playing.”
“Oh,” he said. “Good. Because I never would have insinuated that you were sexually promiscuous.”
I rolled my eyes to hide that I was blushing because Dean was so impossibly cute. I doubted he even knew how adorable he was. “Now tell me why you’re hiding.”
Dean’s smile wilted, and he bit his bottom lip. “You’ll think I’m being foolish.”
“Probably,” I said. “Tell me anyway.”
“Last year, I danced with Charlotte McBride,” he said. “She dragged me out for a song where most of the dancing involved jumping up and down. The next song was a slow one, and Charlotte and I danced to that one too. I love dancing, and Charlotte was nice, so I didn’t think anything of it.”
“Lemme guess,” I said. “She thought something of it?”
Dean nodded. “By school on Monday, she had already told her friends that we were a couple, which was definitely news to me, and I