Tourmaline left Virginia in the bathroom to wash up for dinner and sent Anna May an emergency The ridiculous is too strong please make an excuse to need me text.

She’d have to cross her fingers and look over her shoulder for the rest of the summer. Maybe spend a lot of nights in or something. It didn’t matter. She just had to make it to August.

When she stepped into the kitchen, the scent of rich meat simmering in its own juice and fresh-cut tomatoes and peppers drowned Tourmaline in a hunger so intense she thought she’d faint before she ever took a bite. But she wasn’t entirely sure it was all the food’s fault, so she avoided looking anywhere near the conscript’s turned back.

Her father sat at the head of the table, legs propped on the edge and hands folded over his lap while he talked with Jason.

Tourmaline pulled her chair out and slumped, checking her phone, but there was no reply from Anna May, which was the way it’d been trending all day. Tourmaline mindlessly scrolled through her phone and tried not to feel annoyed.

“Church after dinner. It won’t be a late night, T,” Dad said to her, patting the table as if her hand were on it. “We’re mulching tomorrow.”

“Oh, joy,” Tourmaline drawled.

“Mulch.” Jason shuddered. “I remember those days.” For a long time he’d worked with Tourmaline’s father, but these days he was gone more and more.

“Always so much whining about mulch,” Dad said.

A sizzling sound came from the kitchen and Tourmaline couldn’t help but glance over.

The conscript stood at the counter, chopping onions, as if there were no one in the room. He gathered the onions into his cupped hand with the flat edge of the knife and dumped them into the pan.

It was weird to have him in the kitchen like this, even though all the conscripts did the menial tasks—cooking, cleaning bikes with a toothbrush, cleaning bathrooms with a toothbrush. (The bathrooms in the house had never been cleaner, and every time there was an event families attended Tourmaline heard all about the clean-bathrooms conscript again. And the conscript who’d done science fair projects. And the Girl Scout cookies . . .) There was a rule about not making a conscript do anything the member wouldn’t do himself. She knew, he knew, they all knew that doing work like this was just what it was to be a conscript. But knowing didn’t make it less weird or the subtext less meaningful.

Cash bit his lip and tossed in more onions, looking relaxed and at ease in a way conscripts usually didn’t.

God almighty, she wanted to close her eyes and die naked in his arms. There it was. Thou shalt not, and she damn well wanted to.

She slid farther down in her chair and looked back at her phone. She couldn’t see a way to make anything happen, let alone a relationship, even if he wasn’t a conscript. Patching in would make his position in the club less tenuous, but the consequences of getting involved with Tourmaline more severe. The betrayal would be bigger. She was certain she could live with how pissed off her dad would be, but she couldn’t expect the conscript to make that choice. That was a boots-on, plunge-into-the-icy-depths, not-going-back thing. She blushed. What was she even thinking? Dreaming. That’s what she was doing.