Sweet Talk

It's officially booty o'clock, and Jessie is alone in her kitchen with a slice of terrible chocolate cake when her phone lights up. She's fairly sure she's just been drunk texted by Eliot Hoffman, the man whose dimples she has been daydreaming about for two months. He almost certainly meant the message for someone else. But a mistake on his end can still be an opening on hers.

It's the middle of the night and she simply wants to talk to him, so she writes back. Neither of them can sleep, and one night of conversation becomes every night. They begin with reality TV, which they analyze in loving detail, then drift into harder territory: Jessie's tangled relationship with her family and the art Eliot makes, which she finds stunning. Almost nothing is off limits.

Almost. There is one question of his that Jessie refuses to answer, which is who she actually is. As her crush grows into something much bigger, she thinks about him constantly, and she knows that the truth could bring down everything the two of them have built in the dark.

Sweet Talk is a romantic comedy by Cara Bastone, the author of Ready or Not and Promise Me Sunshine. This is its first print edition in the U.S.