“Nothing.” I cleared my throat again. Dex chuckled, probably reading into this fluently. “Stuff. It’s cool.”
“It’s cool?” Arden repeated, sounding surprised. “So, we’re no longer pretending it never happened?”
“It happened.”
“Are you two…” Her voice rose an octave, excitement bleeding in. “Is this a thing? Are you going to come back from this trip with a boyfriend?”
I studied the side of Dex’s face until he glanced over and smiled. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. I hope so.”
“I will never forgive you for calling me from the car. How are we supposed to have this conversation right now?”
“We’ll have it tonight.”
“Will we?”
I hesitated, a warm flush rising up my neck. “Um. I don’t know?”
“You know,” she said, and I could hear her smirk. I tried to laugh it off, but Dex’s eyes bounced back to me, twinkling as if he could hear the salacious undertone of every word.
Once we got to the wildlife refuge, I watched Phoebe’s entire being light up as she fed a giraffe. I got to pet an elephant. We laughed until we cried when an elephant swiped Dex’s sunglasses off his face. And still, the whole time, I was aware ofhimmore than anything.
He grinned when Phoebe fed the giraffes and took a Polaroid with our dad’s camera when she met the elephants. He smiled fondly when I asked a tenth question in a row to the man giving us a tour. He laughed just as hard when the elephant stole his glasses and told it tokeep them, please, you’re doing me a favor. Hisdirty grin when I caught him checking me out on the way back to the car.
You know, Arden said with such conviction. From the look in his eye, Dex did, too.
It took Phoebe forever to go to sleep. Any other night, I’d have cried in the shower over her enthusiastic suggestion of watching a movie with me. Tonight was not that night.
We made it about three-quarters through a second movie before Phoebe crashed. I threw on a dark green Reformation dress I snagged for a hundred bucks on ThredUp, double-checked that I remembered deodorant after my shower, and slipped out of the room.
The fluorescent lighting was harsh after such a dreary day. I padded down the hall to Dex’s room, focusing on the brightness rather than my nerves rattling like a loose screen door. We hadn’t made definitive plans, nothing out loud. But considering the amount of loaded looks we’d shared, I figured I had an open invitation.
Something unspooled in my chest at the sight of him when he answered my knock: his soft smile, his shirt unbuttoned at the collar and the sleeves rolled to his elbows, feet bare against the plush carpet. I had to resist the urge to step right up to him and bury my face in his neck.
“Hey,” he said, opening the door wider for me. His room was identical to ours, although it had one queen bed and a slightly different painting of a landscape.
“Sorry it’s late,” I said. “Phoebe wanted to watch a movie and then she wanted to watchanothermovie.” I hesitated, noting his smirk. “Not that we had plans or anything.”
His smirk graduated into a smile. “We had plans.”
I swallowed down the frenzy of fireworks bursting in my throat. “Yeah. We did.”
He got us each a bottle of water from the minifridge and we sat at the edge of the bed, knees pressed together, angled toward each other. Tension hung like smoke, but I was glad neither of us initiated anything. As good as I knew it would feel, now that I was here, all I really wanted to do was hang out with him.
He’d become one of my favorite people so quickly. It was dizzying.
“I was a little worried you’d be asleep when I got here,” I told him. He smiled, his thumb scraping at the label on his water. “I almost fell asleep duringMr. Deedsand that’s one of my all-time favorite movies. It was such a long day. Not bad, just long.”
“I used to like driving,” he said, and I snorted. “I used to go for long drives to wind down. Now, I get behind the wheel and I’m instantly furious.”
“Just let me drive!”
“I don’t want you to drive. You deserve a break.”
A loud buzzing filled my head. Our eyes locked. “So do you,” I said quietly.
I felt his smile in my gut. “You can drive tomorrow,” he agreed, just as quiet. “And I will stare at you the entire way to Idaho. I won’t be subtle.”
My heart did some sort of kickflip. Rubbing my chest, I said, “I think you were actually born to be a passenger princess. It’s your calling.”
