Growing Up
Mara is wasted as a physicist; she should go into counseling.
It works.
For a while, Ryan worries that he’ll have the reverse problem and develop a fascination with kissing her, but he doesn’t. At the same time, his brain, apparently satisfied with her explanation, drops the concern like a hot potato.
Okay, he still thinks of Alex at least three times a day—and wakes up from more than one completely embarrassing dream—but the fear, the anxiety, the twitchy nerves that have been plaguing him…
Gone.
“Get over your crush, then?” Tom observes in late January, and snickers when Ryan stares at him. “Come on, it was obvious you had one. Who was it? Francine again?”
“Nope.”
And it gets easier.
While he still says nothing, and still throws out the odd idle observation of a girl’
