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more familiar territory. And frequently, as we were kissing, I’d be struck by how amazingly right it all felt—that this was Nate, who made me laugh and who I could talk to about anything—but it was also
Nate
, who could literally make my knees weak when he ran his lips over that one spot on my collarbone, and whose kisses had the power to remove all rational thought from my head. It seemed too wonderful to me that both of these things could be found simultaneously in the same person.
    After we’d been kissing on the blanket for a while—I had absolutely no idea how long it had been. Making out with Nate seemed to take place in some strange wormhole where I completely lost all sense of time passing—we paused and caught our breath.
    “Wow,” he murmured into my hair, kissing me on the forehead.
    “Yeah,” I agreed, opening my eyes, blinking at the surroundings, and trying to remember where I was. Things came slowly into focus. Nate and I weren’t on a balcony in the South of France. We were at the Bluff. Nate smiled at me, and I sat up, straightening his shirt and my own. “Dinner?” I asked, reaching for the bag, and glad that while we’d been otherwise occupied, some hungry woodland creatures hadn’t made off with our food.
    “Absolutely,” he said, sitting up as well. I reached for the takeout bag and unpacked our picnic. My grilled cheese was stone cold, but I’d actually come to enjoy the taste of them that way. Nate’s pancakes were chocolate chip, with extra syrup, and looking at them, I felt my stomach rumble and hoped that he’d share.
    “Fry?” I asked, angling the container closer to him.
    “Why, thank you,” he said, taking one. Then he opened his plastic container and poured syrup over his pancakes. I leaned over, looking at them hopefully. He smiled and held out his fork to me, and I cut off a piece of pancake. It was cold, but also chocolatey, and syrupy, and I cut off another piece before handing the container back to him.
    “How are they?” he asked. Rather than answering, I leaned over and gave him a slightly sticky kiss. “Those
are
good,” he said, and I gave him a smile before leaning back and picking up my own food. “Question,” he said after a moment of both of us eating in silence. It was amazing what a good makeout session could do for the appetite.
    “Shoot,” I said, taking a bite of my grilled cheese.
    “On Dave and Lisa’s status updates,” he said, swirling a piece of pancake in the syrup, “I’ve seen them leaving each other messages—like ‘one-four-three,’ I’m pretty sure.” He raised one eyebrow at me, something I always loved, as it reminded me of the first time I saw him do this, when we first went to the drive-in together.
    “Yeah,” I said. “What about it?”
    “I think it’s some kind of code,” he said excitedly. “And I think we should figure it out. I bet it’s not that hard to crack.”
    I smiled, feeling like I should have been expecting this. Right as Stanwich High had let out for the summer, Nate had read a book called
Spy, Spy Again
, an anonymous memoir of a high-ranking former CIA agent. He had become obsessed with it, and with codes and clues and espionage in general. He was in the middle of three other books on spying, and his DVD picks all tended now toward things like the Bourne trilogy. And because “watching a DVD” had become our mutual code for “making out on the couch” I found it very hard to concentrate on kissing Nate when things kept exploding on the screen and Matt Damon kept beating people up in foreign locations. Nate had even started texting me in code (but then usually texting me the key to thecode if we were pressed for time). I was trying to just roll with this, and even though he had insisted on giving me some of his spy books to read, I had yet to open any of them. But reading them myself actually didn’t seem to be necessary, as Nate was perfectly happy to recap them all—in detail—for