I paced anxiously around the room, phone clutched in my hands.“Natalia…,” Luca said my name with a sigh.I shot a quick look at him, but he didn’t tell me to sit down. The guilty expression was still there on his face. I didn’t suddenly hate him, though. I was madder at myself than him, or I would have kicked him out of my room instead of letting him spend the night. Although it had been the first time we’d spent in bed together without anything sexual happening, I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to appreciate it.“Why isn’t she here yet?” I muttered. “She said she’d leave early, so she should have arrived already. Dammit, I’m skipping classes for this.” I turned to him and gave him a weak smile. “You’re a senior, you know. You could have just gone ahead.”Luca shook his head as he stood up. He came over to me, tentatively raising his arms as if worried I would push him away. He’d been acting cautiously around me since yesterday, and I could have told him not to bother, but if I ha

A few weeks passed. Mom refused to do anything about Greg. Luca had told me he’d found his dad, but because Mom didn’t want to, I left it alone. I could only steam about it.I woke up one morning to my phone ringing. I heard a groan from beside me, before Luca shifted around and grabbed the phone.“It’s your mom, Natalia,” he mumbled, still half asleep. I blinked my eyes open and took the phone, then slid out of bed so I wouldn’t bother him. Mom already knew about us since I’d told her we were seeing each other a couple weeks back, but she didn’t know we were this close already. It had both surprised and delighted me when she was happy for me, unconditionally.“Hey, Mom?” I said, covering a yawn. “What is it?”“Honey, why do you sound so tired? Did I catch you at a bad time?”It wasn’t all that early in the morning, but Luca and I had been up late last night, and I felt exhausted. Only, it was the good kind of exhausted that came after long, fun rounds of fulfilling sex. Of course, t