“Hey!” Phoebe’s voice cut through the rustling leaves and chirping insects. Dex and I swiveled to find her standing near Yogi, hands up in a what-the-hell gesture. “Are you taking a picture or not?”
I reached through the open window to grab Dad’s camera from the back seat. “Compromise,” I said again, glancing atDex. “Maybe nothing’s around here, but there must be something along the route. Take a wrong turn by the world’s largest spool of thread.”
“She’s not interested in Yogi but sure, a spool of thread.”
“I’m open to suggestions.”
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. I took it as a win.
The moment Dad’s camera spat out the Polaroid, Phoebe darted over, huffing and red-faced.
“Air-conditioning,” she gasped.
“What she said,” Dex agreed.
A few hours and a looped playlist later, we made it to the hotel in Toledo. Not a smidge of pink to be found.
Phoebe and I shared a suite with two queen beds and a view of the parking lot, while Dex had a room to himself on an entirely different floor, apparently having anticipated needing space when he made the reservation. With glorious air-conditioning and a bed fluffy enough to keep memories of the floor at bay, I couldn’t complain. But Phoebe could.
“This is soboring,” she moaned. Her hair was damp from a dip in the pool downstairs; I’d let her go while I showered, suppressing a panic attack as I imagined her getting kidnapped at a Hilton. (Arden talked me down until Phoebe returned forty minutes later.)
“Watch TV,” I said from under the covers, fully tucked in at 8P.M.
“There’s nothing to watch.”
“Order a movie.”
“They’ll charge Dex.”
“So?”
“There aren’t any movies I want to watch, anyway,” shemumbled. I snuggled farther into the stiff pillow, inhaling the generic detergent; it wasn’t a thousand fluffy Sherpa blankets laid out by a moody companion, but it would suffice. “Ugh. I should’ve stayed at the pool longer, but Dex said I shouldn’t leave you alone for that long.”
My eyes snapped open. “Dex was at the pool?”
“Yeah.” She was lying in bed, legs crossed, inspecting her chipped nail polish. “I thought maybe he’d be up for a swim. He was.”
I sat up, blinking. “You invited him? And he went?”
She shot me an annoyed look. “Yeah? We’re friends.”
I tried to imagine my dad’s face if he knew Phoebe’s only friend was a thirty-one-year-old man we met through mail fraud. Something told me he wouldn’t find it as funny as everything else.
“I can’t imagine Dex swimming,” I said. Then another wave of shirtless Dex fantasies thundered through my brain—the lean muscles in his back, his olive skin, that little bit of hair I glimpsed when he unbuttoned his collar. Cheeks warm, I mentally slapped myself for the bad thoughts in general, but especially with Phoebe ten feet away. “Did he wear one of those nineteen-fifties bathing suits?”
“He told me he almost drowned in a pool when he was a kid. His brother saved his life.”
“He told you that?”
“Yes.” She shot me another look. “We’refriends.”
“Does Dex know you’re friends?” I asked, and she cracked a smile.
“He has a soft spot for me,” she said, stretching her legs to cross them at her ankles. “Just kids in general, probably. I mean, he works with kids for a living. Supposedly.”
I smiled. “Supposedly.”
“The more I get to know him, the easier it is to see.” Her voice grew a bit softer and her index finger dug at the nail polish of her thumbnail. “The guy who wrote the letter and broke so bad that he just, like, reprogrammed his entire world.”
