Page 65 of Meet Me at Midnight

OH MY GOD.

I don’t know what to do. I honestly have no idea what to do. My heart is pounding so hard inside my chest, and it’s truly a miracle right now if I’m actually breathing.

Everything is frozen. My legs. My arms. My face.

Our eyes lock in the reflection in the mirror, and a petal of my rose-colored cheeks wilts as wrinkles form at the sides of his eyes.

I was hoping for love and affection, but I got her evil, ugly stepsister—confusion. It’s a completely fair and valid reaction on his part, but still…it stings.

“June?”

“Uh…hey,” I say, but I don’t dare turn around. Instead, I stand there and pretend to do bicep curls with the one lone weight in my hand.

“W-what are you doing here?” he asks, and I can see the wheels of his mind spinning and spinning as he tries to understand if I’m here by coincidence or if I’ve ensnared him with the impossible.

Me? His Mystery Woman?It couldn’t be.

I open and close my mouth, my brain completely incompetent in forming words. For as many times as I’ve thought out this possibility, I never managed to think through the part where I actually explain.

“Beau, I…I wish I knew what to say—”

Unexpectedly, the door swings open from behind him, the wood nearly smacking him in the back. Avery, still dressed in her clubbing attire, screeches to a stop at the sight of us.

“June? Beau?” Her head swivels between us, and I start curling my weight again in a panic. My muscle burns at the sudden overuse, but I don’t care. I keep pumping anyway. “What the hell are you guys doing here?”

Beau looks between the two of us, and I know, even though I’m tryingsohard, I’m doing a shit job of hiding the outright panic on my face.

His brown eyes narrow, locking completely with mine, and I have to reach out a hand toward the mirror to steady myself. I don’t know what my other arm is doing with the stupid dumbbell. It’s a miracle it’s still in my hand.

“Uh, hello?” Avery questions. “June? Pretty sure you have some explaining to do.” Her hand goes to her hip, and my eyes go back to Beau. He’s watching me closely as Avery reads me the riot act. “I can’t fucking believe you would dip on me like that!” She stomps over toward the row of ellipticals and treadmills, her mouth moving a mile a minute. “Do you have any idea how annoying it was when Ben tried to act all alpha when he saw me with another guy on the dance floor? It was a fucking mess, June. You left me high and dry!” She snags something fromone of the machine’s cupholders before spinning back around to meet me. “What the hell happened?”

“I had a migraine again…” I pause, lying straight to both Beau’s and her faces. “And I just thought maybe…you know…maybe a workout would help it.”

“God, Juni,” Avery says through a sigh. “You need to get those looked at. This is, like, the third time this month one of your migraines has gotten in the way of our good time.”

Hook, line, and sinker, my best friend clearly trusts me way too much. She believes the lie and starts rambling more about how Ben was annoyed she was dancing with thatGame of Thrones-looking dude, and I die a little more inside.

How many Banks hearts do I have to break before I turn tail and run?

My pulse feels threaded, a racing flutter in my throat that refuses to quit. June’s blue eyes turn down at the corners, worry and embarrassment and uncertainty warring within them.

How can June be the one I’ve been messaging with all this time? How?

I swallow hard, thinking of all the things she’s said to me. The things I’ve said toher. They’re sexy things, personal things—the kinds of things you don’t come back from.

I’m just finding this all out, but her? She’s known it’s me thewholetime.

Avery chatters on, unfazed by the sudden stop of Earth’s rotation, but the two of us? We’re in the middle of a metal-crunching, tires-shrieking wreck.

“I was going to invite Nathan Turlington to come with me to the annual Banks Halloween bash on Friday, but he refuses to wear a Zorro costume. And if he won’t do that, I’m not sure what the point of taking someone who looks like Antonio Banderas even is, you know? Like, know your niche. If he looked like Glen Powell, we’d go with a white T-shirt and jeans and a cowboy hat like he wears inTwisters, but he doesn’t. Plus, he wants to go as the Hulk. TheHulk. He has to be kidding me with that shit.”

“At least Hulk is shirtless,” June offers, her eyes still on me. She doesn’t look confused like me—she wouldn’t be, of course, being that she left the note for the Midnight meetup in the first place—but her ears are red-hot, and her bottom lip shakes just slightly less than her hands. She’s nervous. Maybe a little embarrassed. But she’s here. Her intention to meet me, to come clean about her identity, to put it all out on the table, is undeniable.

My brain is sludge and my heart out of rhythm. It feels impossible to make sense of and a little like I’m doing something wrong. Growing up so closely together, I had assumptions about how I’d see Juniper Perry for the rest of my life.

But the girl I grew up treating as a sister suddenly isn’t seeming so sisterly at all.

“Oh. Yeah. I guess that’s true,” Avery comments with a clueless smile and a wink directed at June. It’s clear she hasn’t sussed out the elephant-sized tension in this room, but that’s probably because my sister has never been good at sensing other people’s emotions. “See, June, that’s why you’re my best friend. You can see through my bullshit and call me on it. I guess I’ll tell him Hulk is okay, even if he is green.”

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