"I'm sorry."

Nancy nodded, studying her feet. She was still flushed, although their stroll around the block, fighting the sharp moist edge of the wind every step, had helped, and she had her sweater wrapped tight around her.

"I mean, what I said back there... do you want to know the truth?"

She let out a low chuckle at that. "I don't know. Is it going to make me madder?"

"I just couldn't believe that the smartest, most beautiful girl I'd ever met..."

"Is still a virgin? And I'm staying that way, whether you keep buttering me up or not," she said, and he finally began to hear the humor creeping back into her voice.

"Especially not after you'd been dating the same guy for ten years."

Nancy smiled. "It was easier," she said, just loud enough for him to hear. "I just always knew that he'd be there, and one day we'd be married, and there was never any question that it would happen, just when."

"And then it didn't."

She nodded. "And it didn't. And our breakup was bad enough..."

Ned nodded. "So he never..."

She glanced sideways at him, waiting for him to finish his sentence, and when she saw that he wasn't going to, she laughed again, and of its own volition his hand began to rise toward hers.

"He wanted to. I... didn't."

"So you don't in general, or you didn't, specifically, with him?"

She paused. "Are you being this direct because you haven't slept in a week, or because you've been thinking about this the entire time since I dropped you off in that parking lot?"

"Left," he corrected her. "Left me there in that parking lot. And you're damn lucky I had cab fare. Unless, of course, you wanted the cabbie to shoot me when he figured out I couldn't pay him."

"I wasn't quite that mad. Close, but not quite."

"Why? I mean, if you're that defensive about it..."

She shot him another sideways glance. "You're not even like this when you've been drinking."

"I probably am," he replied, "you just haven't seen me this drunk. I've been running on caffeine and adrenaline for days, and as soon as I think it, it seems to come out of my mouth. I'm sorry. On Monday I'll probably wake up and hope this weekend was all some fever-inspired dream, but for now..."

She ducked her head. "I thought I'd be married by now," she said. "I never thought we would go this long, this way, without one of us breaking down and moving to be with the other one. And I always thought it would be him."

"If you were so sure about this guy, why not...?" Ned shrugged.

"The timing never felt right."

"Which means he never made the timing feel right."

Nancy's mouth fell open. "What are you trying to say, that it was never my choice at all?"

"I mean..." Ned stopped, searching for words. "I think that if he really wanted to be with you, he would have tried harder. I'm not just talking about..." He made a vague gesture, his hand describing an arc through the air before it fell again to his side. "I'm not talking about whether you had sex with him or not. But if you two were so close, and he never pressed you about having sex..."

"Well, he really did want to get married."

"And being married to him meant having sex with him."

"And a whole lot of other things," she said, laughing. "But yes, that."

"And you didn't want to."

"I didn't want to marry Frank. Not until we were closer... we were so close once, but being close at sixteen is entirely different from being close at twenty-four, and... and I couldn't even imagine how the two of us could build a life together," she sighed, finally. "Not with my job, and his job. Even if we did live in the same place, it still wasn't like we'd spend that much time together, and maybe that would have worked in the long run, since our entire relationship was spent at arm's length, through phone conversations and long letters and the occasional visit. Maybe it would have been the easiest thing in the world, everything the same, just with a new last name."

He reached over and rested a palm against her forehead, their steps slowing again. "How many did you say you had to drink?"

"Not enough," she retorted, her eyes shining, as she pushed his hand away. "This is too much for one o'clock in the morning, isn't it."

"No, I think it's perfect," he said, after a moment's consideration. "Just tired and drunk enough to say what we need to say, but tomorrow, we still have the plausible deniability."

"I can't wait to hear what excuse you have for being this fascinated by my sex life. Or lack thereof."

"It is fascinating," he protested. "I would never have said you were easy. It's just that I never saw you as someone who would be saving herself for marriage."

"Because it's an outmoded and meaningless moral concept? So you never thought that you would wait?"

He shrugged. "I did," he said, shoving his hands into his pockets, his gaze on his feet. "Then I realized that I might never find a girl I loved, I might never find one who would be willing to marry me. And at seventeen, that's... well, that was enough to make me change my mind."

"And when I was seventeen, I had no doubt about it. Any of it."

Ned kicked at a stone a few times. "Which brings me back to my other question. Frank specifically, or sex in general?"

She looked away from him before she answered. "Frank specifically," she said, then darted a quick glance back at him, gratified by the sudden grin on his face. "If I wanted to be with him right now, like you said... I would be. But I'm not."

"You're with me," he said softly.

She nodded, slowing her steps to match his, as they came to a stop at the front door of her apartment building. "I'm with you. Although," she said, and chuckled a little, but there was no humor in it, "I understand if you want to stop seeing me, knowing what you know now. That you're not getting anywhere on the twentieth date, the fiftieth date..."

He shrugged, then pulled in a long breath. "I understand. And it's not that I'm saying I want our relationship to change with what I'm about to say, but..."

"But what?"

He shook his head. "I sound like I'm twelve," he muttered under his breath, then forced his gaze back to hers, his shoulders arched as he shoved his hands deeper in his pockets. "Would you be my girlfriend?"

Her lips curved up in a grin. "You want to go steady, Nickerson?"

He relaxed a little, then, letting his hands fall loose and open at his sides. "Yes. I want to go steady, and have monthly anniversaries, and kiss you goodnight even though I'm dying to know what color your underwear is."

"Black," she replied dryly, her eyes sparkling. "Yes, I'll be your girlfriend. I feel like you should have handed me some slip of paper with check-boxes on it."

"You're lucky I didn't," he said. Then he slowly reached for her hand, and she let him take it in his. "But then it would have been so much easier for you to shoot me down."

"Which you deserved," she said, but her voice held no rancor, no anger, and her gaze was steady on his. "But you already looked so pitiful, and knowing that you were sitting there in our hallway waiting for me, that entire time..."

"That's what I like to hear," he said. "That I won the sympathy vote."

"You've already said you felt sorry for Frank," she teased him. "Now it's all you. And you can't say you didn't know what you were getting into."

"Yeah, I know what I won't be getting into," he said, then ducked as she directed a playful slap at his cheek. "I'm sorry. That was uncalled for."

Her fingers tightened in his. "You want to come upstairs? You look like you're about to pass out."

"I keep praying that it'll happen," he admitted. "That I'll sort of just buckle and find myself twelve hours from now, in some clean soft bed, and I'll be able to think again."

"I can't wait to see what you'll say when that's true."

"Not much different," he said, leaning in close to her. "It'll just be cleaned up. Maybe I'll even use finger puppets, for the more difficult parts."

"Sounds good," she murmured, her eyelashes fluttering down when he kissed her, slow and hard. "I can't offer you a bed, but we do have a couch, and you're welcome to it."

He hesitated, glancing between her and the street, but finally, the feel of her fingers twisted against his palm settled it. "Okay," he murmured. "Okay. But no funny business, Drew."

"Wouldn't dream of it," she said lightly, fishing in her purse for her keys. "And... Ned...?"

"Hmm?" He slumped against the side of the elevator when the car arrived, smiling when she moved in close to him.

"You still feel that way? Like you're never going to find someone you love, that way?"

He looped his arm around her waist and pulled her in even closer, leaning down until his lips were resting at the point of her jaw, and she rocked faintly against him as the car began its ascent.

"I think you're beginning to change my mind."