It’s just a date. You’ve done this before. It’s not a big deal.
Gena repeated the mantra over and over while she got ready at Dylan’s house. The sounds of him moving around downstairs—because he’d been ready for almost an hour now, the jerk—did little to placate her runaway nerves. He didn’t act like there was any big deal about taking her as his date to his friend’s end-of-the-summer bash, though he’d said more than once she didn’t have to go if she didn’t want to. She knew he didn’t mean that. Though they had moved past the third date and the second bath ten days earlier, Dylan needed the occasional reminder that she was really there. Showing her off to his buddies was one way to do that.
What Gena didn’t understand was why she’d agreed to it in the first place. The vast majority of th
