Aliyah had her phone propped against the mirror with a tube of lip gloss, angled so the camera caught her from the collarbone down. The green corset hung off one finger, boning stiff as a rib cage, the laces swinging. On the screen, Jaehyun's face went flat.

"No," he said.

"You haven't even seen it on."

"I've seen enough of it." He was in his room, she could tell — that same gray wall behind him, the corner of a poster she'd spent an entire night not looking at. His hair was damp, pushed back off his forehead like he'd just gotten out of the shower. "Put it back."

"It's not even that short."

"Aliyah."

"It's a corset, Jaehyun. It's structural." She turned it around, held it up against her chest, the cups flat against her sweatshirt. "See? Modest."

His jaw moved. Not much. Just a small shift, the muscle flexing once under the skin, and then going still like he'd told it to. "No."

She watched him in the little rectangle of glass, the way his eyes kept dropping from her face to the fabric and back, and she felt something bright and mean uncurl in her chest. The floorboards under her bare feet hummed. Marcus lived two floors down in the same complex — the bass had been going since six, and it came up through the wood like a second heartbeat, so she could feel the party before she could hear it.

"Okay," she said, and let the corset drop to her lap. "Then I'll wear the black one."

"There's a black one?"

"Mm-hm. It's lower."

He was quiet for a second. She could hear his fan turning somewhere behind him, that slow mechanical swish. "You should get a longer skirt," he said finally, and his voice had gone careful, like he was reading the sentence off a card and didn't trust it.

"My friends think it's cute."

"Your friends—" He stopped. Rubbed his thumb along his eyebrow. "Your friends aren't the ones who have to look at you all night."

"Nobody's making you look."

That landed. She saw it land — the way his eyes cut sideways off-screen, the way his mouth pressed into a line. She knew exactly what she was doing. She'd known since she held the corset up, since before she even called him, if she was honest, standing in front of the mirror turning this way and that with the laces loose and her hair still in its puff, deciding whether the green made her skin look like something worth touching.

"Aliyah." His voice had dropped. Not the flat one. The other one. "I'm your—"

She waited.

"Your you know," he finished, and it came out strangled, half-swallowed.

"My what, Jaehyun?" She tilted her head, let the corset slide through her fingers. "Say it. My what?"

He huffed — a short, disgusted breath out through his nose, the sound he made when a problem wouldn't solve. Then he leaned forward, and the phone shifted, and she got a hard look at his face up close: the sharp cut of his jaw, the dark eyes doing something complicated. "I just don't want anyone seeing you like that."

Her stomach went warm and stupid. She hated how much she liked it. She bit the inside of her lip to keep it off her face and failed, and he saw her fail, and something in his expression eased a fraction — satisfied, the bastard.

"Fine," he said. "I'm coming. And I'm inviting my friends too."

"Wait—"

"You want to wear the corset, I'm bringing backup." He was already moving, phone set down somewhere so the screen showed only the ceiling, and she heard the rustle of fabric, the soft thump of a drawer. Then he came back into frame pulling a shirt over his head, and his stomach was right there, the flat plane of it, the trail of dark hair, and she forgot to be annoyed for a full three seconds.

"That's not backup, that's a chaperone."

"Same thing." His head came through the collar, hair wrecked. "I'll be there in twenty. Don't leave without me."

"You don't even know where it is."

"I'll find it." The call went black.

She sat there a second with the phone in her hand and the bass coming up through the floor, and then she stood up so fast her knee knocked the edge of her desk. Twenty minutes. She had twenty minutes and a corset with forty feet of lacing, and she was going to a party with the class president, who was bringing his friends, because she'd pushed him until he cracked.

The laces won. She got the corset on, but only after a fight — the boning digging into her ribs, her arms twisted behind her back like she was trying to scratch between her own shoulder blades, three failed bows and one snapped nail. The green sat against her skin like it had opinions. She stood in front of the mirror and turned sideways and the thing did what corsets were built to do, gathered her up and pushed her out, and she thought, yeah, okay, fine, and then immediately thought about Jaehyun's face and had to look away from herself.

Skirt: black, short enough that her mother would have had a stroke if she'd been home to see it. Hoops. Her hair — she'd been going to slick the edges, had the gel out and everything — but then the bass thumped up through the floor and her phone buzzed once and some switch flipped in her, and she left the puff exactly as it was. Fuck it. It was her hair.

She was halfway through a second coat of lip gloss when the knock came. Three knocks. Even. Not a party knock.

She opened the door with something already loaded in her mouth — some line about being early, about the chaperone arriving ahead of schedule — and it died there, unspoken, her lips still parted around the first syllable.

Jaehyun stood in the hallway with his hands in his pockets.

He was in the button-up. Black, pressed, sleeves rolled to the elbow, the collar open two buttons and no more, and it was the kind of shirt that made it obvious somebody had ironed it — actually ironed it, with heat and a board, not shaken out and hoped for. His hair was slicked back off his forehead. Wet-looking, combed, every strand told where to go. And on his face, sitting on the bridge of his nose like they'd always lived there, were the glasses. Thick black frames. Square-ish. The kind that should have looked like a costume and instead made his whole face sharper, made the angles of his jaw and his cheekbones read like a sentence she suddenly had to finish.

He looked like a professor. He looked like a professor who did not grade on a curve.

Aliyah's mouth was dry. She'd had a whole thing to say about the chaperone.

"You wear glasses," she said.

"I wear glasses." He adjusted them with one long finger, pushing them up the bridge of his nose, and the gesture was so unbothered, so practiced, that she understood he'd been wearing them his whole life and had simply decided she didn't rate the true face until now. "You have a problem with that?"

"No." Too fast. She cleared her throat. "No. I just — you never—"

"I wear contacts." He said it like this explained the universe. His eyes went past her, into the apartment, took in the desk, the mirror, the open drawer with the gel in it, and then came back and landed on her, and stayed, and did not move. "You going to let me in, or am I supposed to chaperone from the hall?"

She stepped back. He came through and the hallway behind him smelled like whatever he'd put on — clean, a little sharp, something with cedar in it — and she had to turn away so he wouldn't see her nose twitch.

"Where's the backup," she said, closing the door. "The friends."

"Outside. I told them to wait in the car." He was looking at the corset now. Not the way men usually looked at a corset — all at once, greedy, gone — but the way he read a problem set, top to bottom, line by line, checking his work. His jaw worked once. "That's the green one."

"This is the green one."

"It's not short." He said it slowly, like he was conceding a point against his will. "It's not short at all."

"I told you." She crossed her arms under her chest, which had the effect of making the corset do the thing it was built to do, and she watched him notice, watched him look away — up, at the ceiling, at the light fixture, anywhere — and she felt that mean bright thing uncurl again. "It's structural."

"It's structural," he repeated. Flat. He pulled one hand out of his pocket and rubbed at the back of his neck, and the sleeve of the button-up shifted and she caught the muscle in his forearm, the vein running down the inside of it. "You're going to be cold."

"It's sixty-eight degrees."

"You're going to be cold," he said again, and this time it had the weight of a ruling, and he reached for the door like he'd decided the conversation was over and he was going to go find her a jacket, and she stepped into his path.

"Jaehyun."

He stopped. Close, now. The glasses did something to him up this near — the frames caught the light from her desk lamp and made his eyes look darker, deeper-set, like there was more of him behind them than she'd ever been allowed to see. She could see the faint red line the nosepiece had pressed into his skin. She wanted, suddenly and stupidly, to touch it.

"What," he said.

"Why the glasses."

He blinked. Behind the thick frames, it was almost a whole expression. "Contacts dry out," he said, and then, quieter, like it cost something, "and I didn't want to be squinting at you all night."

Something in her chest did a slow, stupid turn.

"That's not what I—" she started, and then stopped, because she didn't know what she meant, and because the bass had changed downstairs — a song she knew, the one that made people move — and the floor hummed under her bare feet, and Jaehyun was still standing there in his pressed shirt with his hair combed back and his glasses on, waiting for her to finish a sentence she'd abandoned.

"You're doing it again," he said.

"Doing what."

"Looking at me like I'm a test you're about to fail." He tilted his head, and the light slid along the frames. "I'm not that hard, Aliyah."

"You're impossible," she said. "That's not the same thing."

"No," he agreed, and there was something in his voice that she hadn't heard before, dry and warm both, like he was enjoying himself and didn't want her to know. "It's not."

He moved past her, toward the door, and she caught his sleeve — just the cuff of it, just her fingers on the rolled fabric — and he stopped again, and looked down at her hand, and then at her face, and the glasses made him look patient in a way that was worse than impatient, patient like he had all night and knew she was going to have to be the one to say it.

"My friends are going to be there," she said. "Nia, Priya, Camille. They know about — they know some things. About the bet. About — us. Whatever us is."

"I figured."

"They're going to look at you." She let go of his sleeve. "They're going to look at you a lot."

"Let them." He said it without heat, like it was simply true, and then he did the thing with the glasses again — two fingers, up the bridge — and it was so casual and so devastating that she had to look at the wall. "You ready?"

"I need my shoes."

"Get your shoes."

She got her shoes. He waited by the door with his hands in his pockets and his shoulder against the frame, and when she crouched to buckle the straps he didn't stare at her legs, which somehow made her more aware of her legs than staring would have. The bass downstairs dropped out for a second — someone changing the song — and in the quiet she heard him exhale, long and slow, the sound of a man talking himself into something.

"Aliyah."

"Mm."

"The corset's fine." He said it to the door, not to her. "It's — it's fine. You look—" He stopped. Adjusted his glasses. Started over. "You look like a problem I'm going to enjoy solving."

Her mouth went dry.

She stood up with her shoes half-buckled and her heart doing something stupid and loud behind her ribs, and Jaehyun was already pulling the door open, already stepping out into the hallway, the light from the stairwell catching the frames of his glasses and the pressed line of his shoulder, and he didn't look back to see if she was following.

He didn't have to. She was already moving.

He took the stairs two at a time, and she followed the back of his neck down — the clean shaved line of it, the way the hair was cut close and even there — and the stairwell was all echo and cold concrete and her hoops swinging, and when they hit the ground floor he pushed the fire door with his forearm and the music came at them like weather.

The party was in the basement of Marcus's building, a rec room somebody's parents had given up on, low ceiling, cinderblock walls, a string of lights taped up crooked and throwing everything in the room a little orange. It smelled like sweat and cheap vodka and the fog machine somebody had dragged in from a Halloween bin. Bodies packed shoulder to shoulder. The floor was already sticky.

Jaehyun stopped a half-step inside the door and did a slow sweep of the room, and she watched the glasses catch the string lights and throw them back, and understood, with a small private horror, that he was counting exits. Or people. Or both.

"Don't," she said.

"Don't what."

"Whatever you're doing right now. The — the survey. You look like you're about to take attendance."

The corner of his mouth moved. "Habit."

"Break it." She hooked her fingers through his elbow — bold, because the corset had made her bold, because the music was loud enough to hide behind — and pulled him in. "You're at a party. You're supposed to look stupid and happy."

"I don't do stupid and happy."

"I've noticed."

They found the kitchen table that had become the bar. A pyramid of red cups, a bottle of something clear with a hand-lettered label, half a cooler of melting ice sweating onto the laminate. Jaehyun picked up a cup, looked into it, and set it back down like the cup had personally disappointed him. Then he reached past the cooler, found a bottle of water behind it, cracked the seal, and put it in her hand.

"I'm not thirsty," she said.

"You're going to be." He was already pouring himself something out of the clear bottle, a careful two fingers, more measured than anybody at this party had ever poured anything. "You're going to drink that water and then you're going to dance, and then you're going to drink another one."

"You're a real thrill, you know that?"

"I've been told."

She drank the water. She didn't mean to, but the corset had her ribs in custody and the room was hot and the water was cold, and she drank half of it standing there watching him take a single sip of his drink and make a face he tried to hide and failed.

"That's disgusting," he admitted.

"I know." She grinned. "That's the point. It's supposed to taste like regret."

"It does."

"Then you're doing it right."

Somebody yelled his name — not his, actually, somebody yelled Jae-hyun! in three syllables like a chant — and Aliyah turned to see a knot of his friends at the far end of the room, two guys and a girl, all of them waving with the enthusiasm of people who had been drinking longer than he had. He lifted two fingers off his cup in a wave that somehow managed to be both acknowledgment and dismissal, and he did not go over.

"You're not going to say hi?"

"Later." He said it to her, not to them, and he turned his shoulder to the room and his face to her, and the glasses made it feel deliberate, a door closing. "I'm here with you."

She had to look at the water bottle. She had to look at the water bottle very hard.

"Nia's going to lose her mind," she said, mostly to the bottle. "When she sees you. She's been asking me — she's going to interrogate you, just so you know. Priya too. Camille will just stare at you and then text me about it later."

"Let them interrogate." He took another sip of the terrible drink and his face did the thing again, and this time she laughed out loud, and he looked at her like the laugh was a result he'd been hoping for. "What do they want to know?"

"Everything." She gestured with the bottle. "What the bet was. Whether you're — I don't know. Whether you're going to be weird about it. Whether you're going to be weird about me. "

He was quiet for a second. The music changed again, something slower, something with a low throb in it, and around them the room rearranged itself into pairs.

"I'm not going to be weird about you," he said.

"You say that like it's a report."

"It's a fact." He adjusted the glasses — one finger, unhurried — and the light slid off the frame and across his cheek. "I'm the most predictable person in this room, Aliyah. I do what I say I'm going to do."

"That's not the same as not being weird."

"No," he agreed. "It's better."

She opened her mouth to argue and found she didn't have the argument, and Jaehyun watched her fail to find it with an expression that was almost kind, and then he set his cup down on the table and held out his hand, palm up, in the middle of a party where his friends were shouting his name and the floor was sticky and the lights were crooked.

"Dance with me," he said.

It wasn't a question. He'd already decided, the way he decided everything, and the hand was just the courtesy of letting her catch up.

She put her water down and took it.

He pulled her in with a tug that was more confident than his usual careful — the corset brought her chest to his chest and her hand up into his shoulder and the other one still caught in his, and he was warm through the pressed shirt and he smelled like cedar and clean cotton and underneath it something sharper, something with salt in it. He didn't dance like a class president. He danced like a man who'd learned in a kitchen somewhere and never told anybody, one hand low on her back, the other turning her slow, and the glasses caught the string lights every time he turned his head and she kept getting distracted by them, by the way they made him look at her from behind a little window.

"You're staring," he said, near her ear.

"You're wearing glasses."

"I've been wearing glasses for eleven years."

"Not at me."

His hand tightened on her back. Just once. Just enough that she felt the individual fingers.

"No," he said. "Not at you."

The song slid into the chorus and the room got louder and somebody bumped her from behind and she stumbled into him and he caught her, both hands now, and held her there a beat longer than the stumble needed. His jaw was at her temple. She could feel him breathe.

"Aliyah," he said, and it was quiet enough that she almost missed it under the music. "Your friends. Where are they."

She lifted her head off his shoulder and looked over the crowd, up on her toes, and there — at the top of the basement stairs, where the fire door stood propped with a folding chair — the three of them came through in a wedge like they'd rehearsed it.

"Door," she said. "Ten o'clock. Well — door."

Jaehyun turned his head. His hand stayed where it was, low on her back, thumb pressed into the boning of the corset like he was holding a page open.

Nia came first, in a dress the color of a peach that had never been asked to do a day of work, her braids piled up off her neck and a phone already in her hand. She stopped at the top of the last step and did exactly what Aliyah knew she would do — swept the room, found them, and her whole face opened up like a window.

"Oh, she's got it bad," Aliyah said.

"She's seen you."

"She's seen you."

Priya was behind her, taller, in wide-leg pants and a top that was mostly straps, and she took the stairs sideways, eyes already narrowed to a squint, doing math. Camille brought up the back, unhurried, a drink she'd brought from somewhere in her hand and her hair in two low buns, and she was the only one of the three not looking at Aliyah at all. She was looking at Jaehyun. Steady. The way you'd look at a car you were thinking about buying.

"They're coming," Aliyah said.

"I can see that."

"They're going to be a lot."

"Aliyah." He turned back to her, and the glasses caught the orange lights and threw them off again, and behind them his eyes had gone calm in a way that would have been insulting if it hadn't been so steadying. "I've been in a room with your friends before. At school. They talk about you like you're a weather event."

"That's — that's actually fair."

"I know it's fair. I've been listening."

The crowd between them and the door was a knot of shoulders and raised cups, and Nia was already working through it, one hand out to part people, saying something to a boy in a hoodie that made him step aside. The string lights swung where somebody had knocked the tape loose and sent a slow orange wash across the room and back.

"Okay," Aliyah said, and she took her hand off his shoulder and turned to face them square, because standing sideways felt like hiding and she'd promised she was done with that. "Okay. Don't — don't be weird."

"I'm not going to be weird."

"You keep saying that and then you adjust your glasses like you're about to deliver a grade."

He didn't adjust his glasses. He looked at her, and the corner of his mouth pulled, and she understood that he'd heard the whole thing — that he'd caught her telling on herself and was going to keep it, quiet, in whatever pocket he kept things in.

Nia broke through the last of the crowd and stopped a foot away and put both hands over her mouth.

"Aliyah," she said, muffled, and then dropped her hands. "Aliyah. The corset. It's laced. You laced it."

"I had to. It's not a zip-up."

"You laced it yourself?"

"With my arms behind my back like a circus act, yes."

Nia's eyes slid past her, up and to the left, and her whole posture changed — shoulders back, chin up, the way she got before a fight or a sale. "And this is him."

Jaehyun had his hands at his sides now, one still holding the cup he hadn't drunk from, and he didn't offer it or hide it. He just stood there.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi," Nia said, and then, because she was Nia, "You're taller than I thought you'd be."

"People say that."

"Do they?"

"No." He said it flat, no smile, and then — one beat, two — the corner of his mouth moved. "You're the first."

Priya arrived at Nia's shoulder and did not say hi. She looked at the corset, then at his hands, then at his face, and then she leaned in toward Aliyah without taking her eyes off him. "He's got glasses," she said, out of the side of her mouth. "You didn't tell me about the glasses."

"I didn't know about the glasses."

"How do you not know—"

"I wear contacts," Jaehyun said, and Priya's eyes snapped to him, and she had the decency to look caught. "They dry out. Tonight I wanted to see."

Priya's mouth opened. Closed. She looked at Aliyah with an expression that said, clearly, I am going to need a full report and I am going to need it soon, and Aliyah felt the laugh climb up her throat and had to bite it back.

Camille came last, unhurried, and stopped a little off to the side, and took a sip of her drink, and looked at Jaehyun over the rim for long enough that the silence got its own weight.

"Camille," she said finally, and put out her hand.

Jaehyun took it. "Jaehyun."

"I know." She didn't let go right away. "You're in my stats section. You sit in the front and you don't take notes."

"I take notes."

"You don't take notes during."

"No," he said. "I take them after."

Camille's eyebrows went up a fraction and she let go of his hand and turned to Aliyah, and her face did something that was almost approval and almost a threat. "He's real," she said. "I thought maybe you'd made him up."

"I told you he was real."

"You told me he was the class president. That's not the same as real." She took another sip. "You didn't tell me about the shirt."

"The shirt is — he irons."

"I can see he irons."

Jaehyun stood there through all of it with the cup in his hand and his shoulders loose, and Aliyah watched him take the inspection without flinching, without puffing up either, and she felt something settle in her chest that she hadn't known was up in the air. He wasn't performing. He was just — there. Letting them look.

Nia crossed her arms. "Okay," she said. "The bet."

"Nia—" Aliyah started.

"No, I'm asking. She told us. I want to hear it from him."

Jaehyun didn't look at Aliyah. He looked at Nia, and he set his cup down on the table behind him without turning around, finding the edge of it with his hand like he knew exactly where it was, and then he put his hands in his pockets.

"My brother and his friends made a bet," he said. "About who would be last. I don't like being last."

"That's it?"

"That's the bet. That's why I asked her." He paused, and his jaw worked once, and Aliyah watched him decide something behind the glasses. "That's not why I stayed."

Nia's arms came down. She looked at him for a long moment, and then she looked at Aliyah, and something passed between them that didn't need words — the old language, the one they'd built before the month of silence, and Aliyah felt it come back into the room like somebody had opened a window.

"Okay," Nia said. "Okay." And then her face split into a grin so wide it was almost a warning. "Okay but you have to dance with me. Not — not like that. I have to see if you can dance. For science."

"I can dance," Jaehyun said.

"Prove it."

"Nia," Aliyah said, "he already—"

"Prove it," Nia repeated, and she grabbed his wrist — his wrist, not his hand, like she was hauling a friend out of a chair — and pulled him toward the middle of the floor, and Jaehyun looked back over his shoulder at Aliyah with an expression that was very carefully blank and underneath it, if you knew where to look, completely at a loss.

Aliyah put her hand over her mouth and laughed into it.

Priya slid into the space he left, shoulder to shoulder with her, and bumped her with her hip. "You're glowing," she said. "You know that? You're actually glowing. It's obnoxious."

"It's the lights."

"It's not the lights. The lights are orange. Nobody glows orange."

Camille came around to her other side, and the three of them stood in a row and watched Nia teach the class president to dance to a song that did not deserve him, and he was — actually — not bad. Stiff, at first, the way he was stiff at everything until he'd decided it, and then somewhere in the second chorus he stopped thinking about it and his shoulders dropped and he moved, and Nia threw her head back and yelled something Aliyah couldn't hear over the bass.

"He's watching you," Camille said, not looking at her. "Even when he's dancing with her. He keeps checking where you are."

"He's not—"

"He is. I've been counting." She took a sip. "Four times in the last minute."

Aliyah looked at her water bottle instead of at the floor, because the floor would have given her away, and the water bottle was safe and cold and half empty. "You're counting?"

"I'm always counting. It's the only thing that keeps me from having to talk to people."

Priya laughed, sudden and loud, and leaned across Aliyah to look at Camille. "That's the most honest thing you've said all semester."

"It's a low bar."

Somebody turned the music up and the room surged, and the three of them got pushed a step closer together, and Aliyah felt Priya's hand find her elbow to steady her and Camille's shoulder brace against her back, and for a second she was just — held. By her friends. In a basement. With a corset digging into her ribs and her hair in a puff she hadn't bothered to slick and a boy on the dance floor who kept checking where she was.

She looked over at him. He was looking back. Nia was saying something in his ear and he was nodding along, but his eyes were on Aliyah across the room, and when he caught her looking he didn't look away, didn't do the thing where he pretended he hadn't been. He just held it, and the glasses caught the light, and the corner of his mouth moved.

"Okay," Priya said, into her ear. "I get it now. I get why you didn't come to chem for a week."

"I came to chem. I was just—"

"Sore. Yeah. I remember." Priya grinned. "I'm going to need the whole story. Not the version you told us at the locker. The whole story."

"There's no whole story."

"There's always a whole story."

Camille finished her drink and set the empty cup on the table with the others, and looked at Aliyah, and her face was doing that thing again — steady, unhurried, the car-buying look. "He's not going to be the problem," she said.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means he's already decided about you. You can see it. He's not going to be the problem." She shrugged. "You might be. But he's not."

And then Nia was back, out of breath, her braids coming loose, and she grabbed Aliyah by both hands and pulled her off the wall and into the middle of the floor before she could answer, and Jaehyun was there too, a half-step behind, and Nia put Aliyah's hand into his and stepped back with her arms crossed and her chin up like a woman who had arranged something and was waiting to see it work.

"There," Nia said. "Now dance with her."

Jaehyun's hand was still in hers, warm and a little damp at the base of the fingers, and the song had shifted to something with a slower grind to it, and he was looking down at their joined hands like he'd been handed an object he didn't recognize. Then the shout came again — three syllables, drawn out, from the far end of the basement — and this time it was closer.

"Jae-hyun! Jae-hyun, you son of a—"

"Incoming," Aliyah said.

Three guys came through the crowd like they were playing a sport and the crowd was the other team. The one in front was built wide through the shoulders with a laugh already open on his face, and Aliyah recognized him from the hallway by the water fountain — Marcus, who owned the basement, who hosted everything, whose red cup was always the fullest. Behind him a leaner one with a fade and a gold chain that looked real, and behind him a stocky one carrying two cups and a phone in his teeth.

Marcus hit Jaehyun with a shoulder check that turned into a hug, one arm around the back of his neck, hard enough that Jaehyun's glasses slipped down his nose.

"You came," Marcus said into his ear. "You actually came. I bet Dae twenty you wouldn't."

"You bet my brother twenty dollars?"

"Twenty and a plate of wings. He's gonna be sick." Marcus pulled back and dapped him up — the handshake sharp and fast, a thumb hooked, a chest bump that Jaehyun took with the long-suffering stillness of a man being handled by a dog. "You brought a girl. You brought a girl."

"Marcus."

"I'm not saying anything. I'm not saying a word." He turned and looked at Aliyah, and his eyebrows went up, and he did a small approving nod that she decided to accept. "Hey. I'm Marcus. Welcome to my basement. It's not much of a basement."

"It's a good basement," Aliyah said.

"It's a great basement." He pointed at her cup. "You need a refill. You need a refill and I need to hear how you got this man out of his apartment on a Friday."

The lean one with the chain stepped in before she could answer, and he didn't dap Jaehyun up so much as grab him by the shoulder and shake him. "Bro. Bro. You've been holding out. You've been holding out on us this whole time."

"I haven't been holding out, Tae."

"You have been holding out." Tae turned to Aliyah and put his hand out, and his smile was all charm and zero shame. "Tae. I'm Tae. I've known this man since seventh grade and he has never once brought a girl anywhere, so you're basically a unicorn."

"Tae," Jaehyun said.

"I'm being nice."

"You're being a lot."

Aliyah shook Tae's hand anyway. The stocky one finally got his phone out of his teeth and took a long pull off one of his cups before he said anything. "I'm Jun. I'm the one who actually won the bet," he said, and then, at the look Jaehyun cut at him, "What? I'm just saying. I already won. I'm just saying it out loud."

"You didn't win anything," Jaehyun said.

"I came in second to last. That's not last. That's a win in my book."

"Your book has one page."

"One page and a picture of me winning."

Aliyah laughed, and Jun's face lit up like she'd given him a gift, and she felt Jaehyun's hand settle at the small of her back — not possessive, just there, a warm weight against the boning of the corset. Marcus noticed the hand. Marcus's grin got wider, and he opened his mouth to say something about it, and then the girls came through.

They came the way girls always come through a party — in a pair, side by side, one of them holding the other's wrist so they wouldn't get separated, both of them scanning. The first one was tall, in a slip dress the color of champagne, her hair down and curled and her makeup done in a way that had clearly taken an hour. The second one was shorter, in a crop top and a pleated skirt, and her eyes found Jaehyun before she'd even finished the last three steps.

"Jaehyun!" the shorter one shrieked, and she launched herself at him.

He caught her. He had to — she came in with enough momentum that not catching her would have been a decision — and his arm went around her back and his hand settled between her shoulder blades, and she wrapped both arms around his neck and put her chin on his shoulder and held on.

Aliyah watched.

One second. Two. The champagne-dress girl stopped at Tae's side and said something to him that Aliyah didn't hear. The shorter girl's hands were laced behind Jaehyun's neck, her fingers crossed, and her face was pressed into the curve of his shoulder, and her eyes — her eyes were open, and they came up over his shoulder, and they found Aliyah, and they did not look away.

Three seconds. Four.

"Okay," Marcus said, with the nervous cheer of a man watching a car roll backward down a hill. "Okay, Soo-Min, that's — that's a long hug."

Soo-Min didn't move. Her chin stayed on Jaehyun's shoulder. She said something into his shirt, too quiet and too muffled to catch, and Jaehyun's hand shifted on her back — not pushing her off, not pulling her closer, just shifting, the way you'd adjust a bag on your shoulder.

Five seconds.

Aliyah felt the floor hum up through the soles of her shoes. The corset was tight around her ribs and her hoops swung a little where she'd turned, and somewhere behind her Priya had gone quiet, and Camille had gone quieter, and Nia — Aliyah could feel Nia's stillness at her back like a hand on her spine.

Soo-Min's eyes were still on her. They were brown, and steady, and they had a question in them that Aliyah recognized from the mirror — the look of a girl checking the competition and finding it wanting, or finding it not wanting, or not having decided yet.

"Soo-Min," Jaehyun said. His voice was flat. "You're crushing my glasses."

She laughed, and it was a bright, easy sound, and she pulled back just enough to look at his face instead of his shoulder — her arms still looped around his neck, her hands still laced. "You're wearing your glasses. You never wear your glasses out."

"I'm wearing them tonight."

"I can see that." She tilted her head. Her thumb moved against the back of his neck, a small, absent stroke. "They're cute. You should wear them more."

Six seconds. Seven.

Aliyah's hand was at her side, and she was aware of it in a way she hadn't been a minute ago — the fingers loose, the palm open, the whole arm just hanging there like it was waiting for instructions. Her other hand still held the water bottle, and she looked at it, at the wet ring of condensation on the plastic, and she set it down on the table beside her without taking her eyes off the two of them.

"You remember Aliyah," Jaehyun said.

Soo-Min's eyes came back to her, and she smiled, and the smile was pleasant. "We have chem together," she said. "Right? You sit by the window."

"I sit by the window," Aliyah said.

"I thought so. I'm Soo-Min." She still hadn't let go of Jaehyun's neck. "We grew up together. Our moms are — our moms do that thing where they call each other and pretend they're not talking about us."

"That's nice," Aliyah said.

"It's a lot," Soo-Min said, and laughed again, and her chin came down onto Jaehyun's shoulder once more, settling in, and her eyes stayed on Aliyah's face, and the whole thing — the arms, the chin, the thumb on the back of his neck — sat there in the orange light like a challenge laid on a table.

Eight seconds. Nine.

Jaehyun's jaw had gone tight. Aliyah could see it from where she stood, the muscle working under the skin, and his hand on Soo-Min's back had stopped shifting. His eyes came over Soo-Min's shoulder and found Aliyah's, and there was something in them that she hadn't seen before — not the calm, not the flat, but a flicker of something caught, something that didn't know what to do with itself.

Ten seconds.

Aliyah's feet moved before she told them to.

Two steps and she was through the gap between Marcus and Tae, and her hand came up and closed around Soo-Min's wrist.

Soo-Min's skin was warm from Jaehyun's neck. Aliyah felt the pulse under her thumb, quick and steady, and she felt Soo-Min go still the way people go still when they've been grabbed before and know better than to yank.

"Hands," Aliyah said.

Soo-Min's chin came up off Jaehyun's shoulder. Her eyes were level with Aliyah's, brown and unblinking, and she didn't move her arms. "Excuse me?"

"Off his neck." Aliyah's voice came out lower than she'd planned, and steadier, and she didn't let go of the wrist. "You've had them there long enough."

Nobody in the basement said anything. The song had gotten to the part where the bass drops out and the vocal rides alone, and in that hole in the music Aliyah could hear the ice in the cooler settling, a cup hitting the floor somewhere across the room, Marcus breathing through his nose.

Soo-Min smiled. It was a good smile, practiced, the kind that made you the unreasonable one. "We're hugging. Have you never seen a hug?"

"I've seen a hug." Aliyah's fingers found the top hand — the one laced behind Jaehyun's neck — and she worked the fingers loose one at a time. Pinky first. It came free with a small wet sound of skin unsticking. "This isn't a hug."

"Aliyah," Jaehyun said.

"I'm not talking to you."

His mouth closed.

Soo-Min's ring finger let go. Then the middle. Her hand was opening in Aliyah's grip now, the tendons going slack, and her smile had thinned out into something with more teeth in it. "You know, we've been friends since we were six," she said. "Our mothers—"

"You keep saying that." Aliyah pulled the last two fingers free and lowered Soo-Min's hand, and then reached around and got the other one off the far side of his neck, and that one came easier, like Soo-Min had already decided. Aliyah held both her wrists, one in each hand, and set them down between them like she was returning something borrowed. "Your moms call each other. That's nice. That's not a reason to hang on him in the middle of a party while his —" She stopped.

The word sat right there. She could feel it behind her teeth, fat and obvious, and she had no idea what came after it. His girl. His date. His whatever-us-is. She'd said that to him upstairs, whatever us is, and he hadn't corrected her, and now the whole basement was waiting to hear which one she'd pick.

She let go of Soo-Min's wrists.

"While I'm standing right here," she said.

Soo-Min's hands dropped to her sides. She looked down at them like she was surprised to find them there, then back up, and her jaw was working. Behind her the champagne-dress girl had gone very interested in her own cup.

"Okay," Soo-Min said, and the word came out flat and a little high. "Okay. I see how it is."

She stepped back.

One step, then another, and her heel caught the edge of the cooler and she had to put a hand out to Tae to keep from going over, and Tae took her elbow and said something quiet to her that Aliyah couldn't hear. Soo-Min shook him off. She wasn't looking at Aliyah anymore. She was looking at Jaehyun, and her face had gone through something fast and private and come out the other side composed, and that composure was worse than anger. "You could've said something," she said, to him, not to Aliyah.

Jaehyun's glasses had slipped down his nose. He pushed them up with one finger, and the gesture was the same as always — unhurried, exact — but his hand was shaking. Just slightly. Just enough that Aliyah caught it and knew nobody else in the room would.

"I did say something," he said. "I said you were crushing my glasses."

Soo-Min stared at him. Then she laughed — one short, disbelieving sound — and turned and walked toward the stairs, and the champagne-dress girl went after her, and the crowd closed up behind them the way crowds do, hungry and quick, already whispering.

Jaehyun turned to Aliyah. He didn't look angry. He looked like a man who'd been walking on ice and had just heard it crack under somebody else's foot. "You want to tell me what that was?"

"What that was." Aliyah's hands were still up at her sides, empty, and she didn't know what to do with them, so she crossed her arms under her chest, which made the corset creak. "She had her thumb on your neck, Jaehyun. She was stroking your neck."

"I know what she was doing."

"Then why didn't you —" She stopped, because Marcus was right there, and Tae was right there, and Jun was right there with his cup halfway to his mouth and his eyes going back and forth like he was watching a tennis match. She turned her shoulder to them. "Why didn't you take her hands off yourself?"

Jaehyun's jaw moved. He looked past her, at the boys, and something passed over his face — not embarrassment exactly, something more tired than that — and he took her by the elbow and walked her three steps away, toward the cinderblock wall, out of the circle of light. The string lights threw his shadow up big and crooked behind him.

"Because I've known her since I was six," he said, low. "And she does this. She's done it since we were kids. She hangs on me and I let her hang and then she gets bored and she lets go. It's a whole thing. It's not —" He stopped. Rubbed the back of his neck, right where Soo-Min's thumb had been, and Aliyah watched him do it and felt something hot and ugly turn over in her stomach. "It's not what you think."

"You don't know what I think."

"I know exactly what you think. You think I liked it."

Aliyah said nothing.

"I didn't like it." His voice had gone quiet and hard. "I was standing there trying to figure out how to get her off me without making a scene, and you made the scene for me, so — thank you. Genuinely. But next time—"

"Next time?" She laughed, and it came out wrong, sharp. "There's going to be a next time?"

"That's not what I—" He stopped himself. Took a breath through his nose. When he spoke again his voice was flat and careful, the voice he used in class. "You put your hands on her."

"She put her hands on you first."

"That's not the same and you know it."

"Is it not?" Aliyah stepped in closer, and the corset brought her chest almost to his chest, and she had to tilt her chin up to keep his eyes. "Because from where I was standing it looked exactly the same. She touched you without asking. I touched her without asking. The only difference is she's known you since you were six, and I've known you since September."

He looked at her. The glasses caught the light and made his eyes two dark coins, and she couldn't read them at all, and that scared her more than the fight.

"Aliyah," he said. "Do you want to be here with me?"

The question landed like a slap. She rocked back half a step. "What?"

"You heard me."

"That's — of course I —" She made a sound of frustration and turned her face away, and there was Priya, ten feet off, arms crossed, watching with her eyebrows all the way up. Nia beside her. Camille behind them both, still as a fence post. All three of them had seen everything. All three of them were going to have opinions.

"Of course you what," Jaehyun said.

She turned back to him. "Of course I want to be here. I've been wanting to be here since the first time you ignored me in the hallway, and I didn't even know what I wanted, I just knew I wanted you to look at me. And now you look at me and it's — it's worse, Jaehyun. It's so much worse, because now I know what your face does when you're trying not to smile, and I know what you sound like when you're pretending you don't care, and I know what you taste like, and none of that was supposed to happen, and I have a chem grade to fix and a mother who's going to ask me about you on Sunday and I don't know what I'm going to tell her because I don't even know what we are."

She ran out of air. The corset had taken it all.

Jaehyun was quiet for a moment. Then he reached out and took her hand — the one she'd used to pull Soo-Min's fingers loose — and turned it over, and looked at her palm like there was something written on it.

"You're shaking," he said.

"I'm not."

"You are." His thumb moved across her palm, once, slow. "You were shaking when you did it, too. I saw." He looked up. "You didn't have to do that."

"Yes I did."

"No." He shook his head, and his mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile. "You could've waited. You could've let me handle it. You could've done a hundred things that weren't making a scene in Marcus's basement in front of your friends and mine." He paused. His thumb was still moving. "But you didn't."