At the end of Reflections, Addie is distracted because she only wants the meeting to finish so she can meet Nathaniel in the darkroom. Lotus criticizes Addie’s love poem as overly sappy, which embarrasses Addie and makes her doubt whether to show it to Nathaniel. When Lotus unexpectedly invites her out for pizza, Addie refuses because she does not want anything to interfere with her secret meetings.

After letting Lotus leave, Addie goes alone to the darkroom so their arrangement will look less suspicious. While she waits, she thinks about her recent encounters with Nathaniel: they have mostly kissed, talked, and recited poetry, and he has told her he does not want her to do anything she does not want. She also notes that they communicate through disappearing Snapflash messages for secrecy, and she rereads his brief message saying he will arrive in two minutes.

As she waits, Addie rereads the poem she wrote about Nathaniel and rejects Lotus’s criticism, convincing herself Lotus simply does not understand love. When Nathaniel arrives, he greets her affectionately and tells her he has written a poem for her. He recites it aloud, and Addie is overwhelmed because no one has ever written something like that for her before.

Nathaniel tells Addie that she has brought life back into his dreary world, and Addie decides not to show him her own poem because it now feels childish beside his. When they kiss again, Nathaniel begins taking off her clothes and then starts unbuttoning her jeans. Addie steps backward and feels surprised by how quickly he is moving, but she does not tell him to stop.

Cornered against the table and caught between hesitation and her desire to please him, Addie lets Nathaniel continue. She rationalizes that, despite his earlier claims that sex did not matter, she knew he would eventually want it. Addie loses her virginity to Nathaniel in the darkroom, repeating his poem in her head throughout the encounter.