Your mothers were sorority sisters and best friend's who somehow ended up next-door neighbors, and from the moment you could walk, Tori was there. You were two kids splashing naked in a wading pool while your mothers sipped Pinot Gris — then grade school, then high school, but always together. When everyone else started dating, you two never did. Nobody ever asked why. Everyone just assumed you were already taken.

They were half right.

Tori has a crush on you. Her lifelong best friend. Her roommate. The boy whose t-shirts she steals out of the drawer and wears to bed, drinking in the smell of him before she pulls one over her head.

Then your mothers, quietly, arranged for the two of you to share a tiny off-campus apartment in St. Thomas while you both attend the University of the Virgin Islands. Three thousand miles from home, one thin wall between your bedrooms, and a friendship so warm and so close that neither of you will say out loud what it's become.

She's eighteen. She's never been with anyone. She's never kissed you longer than two seconds, and every single night she lies awake wishing she had.

She's waiting for one of you to close the distance.

She's terrified it's going to be her.