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“Is that French?”
“Do you speak it?” He then said something in French, very quickly, and I nearly fainted. Katy, who had what could only be described as a shrine to Timothée Chalamet in her room, would have burst into flames on the spot. A cute guy was speaking French to me. It was almost too much to take. I cursed the fact that I’d taken Spanish and—for reasons passing understanding—Latin, all throughout school. What good were they to me now?
“Oh, um, no. I mean, non.”
He smiled. “My mom’s French. I wasn’t going to be able to get away with not speaking it.”
“Well—nice to meet you, Russell.”
“Et vous aussi. That is—you too. Darcy.” He held eye contact with me for a moment, and suddenly I wished that we were in a more formal environment, so that we could have shaken hands without it being weird. I wished we were in a Jane Austen ballroom, about to do the… pavane, or whatever. I had a feeling that if we touched, there would be an actual spark.
His mouth curled up in a smile on one side—god, I couldn’t stop staring at his mouth—and as we kept looking at each other, I let myself wonder if maybe he was feeling the same thing I was. Maybe all he wanted was to reach out and touch my hand as well. Maybe the world had spun the first time he’d seen me, too.
Was it possible?
“Right.” He tore his eyes away from mine and cleared his throat. “So. Our recon mission. I say we do a lap, see what we can see.”
“Look out for any evidence of an iPhone.”
“And if that fails, we can try to make noise or something so that he wakes up, and then we take advantage of the moment to ask him about chargers.”
“Solid plan.”
“Why, thank you.”
He grinned at me and we crept toward the sleeping man. I saw the girl look up from her tablet and give me a small, understanding smile as I passed her.
We approached the sunburned guy, who was sleeping on his side. His head was even worse up close—a dark, mottled red, with patches that were already peeling. Russell looked at me and mouthed Yikes and I had to press my lips together tightly to prevent myself from laughing.
The guy’s possessions were tucked under the bench he was sleeping on—a tent bag like I had and a large hiking-style backpack. Unfortunately, the backpack was zipped up tightly, and I wasn’t about to go rifling through a stranger’s possessions. It was one thing to assess the situation; it was quite another to cross that line. I met Russell’s eye and shook my head, and I could see that he’d come to the same conclusion. Just as I’d started to take a step away, though, the guy let out a giant, rumbling snore. He rolled over on his back, and his arm flung over the side of the bench, his hand grazing the floor. His hand that had a phone in it.
An Android phone.
I pointed at it, and Russell nodded. We walked back to the other end of the bus station, near my stuff, out of earshot of the sleeping, sunburned, snoring, non–Apple user. Russell shook his head. “That’s a bummer. What’s with all the Androids in this bus station?”
“Thanks for trying to help, though.”
“It might have been purely selfish. My phone’s about to die too.”
I nodded. Silence fell, and I realized I didn’t know what happened now. My stomach plunged at the thought that this might be over. Were we going to go back to our separate corners now, after the banter and the French and the sparks? Was this just… done? It couldn’t be, right? Not if this was what I was hoping it was.
“Okay,” Russell said. “So I saw a few places in town as we were driving in. Not a ton, but it might be worth trying. Maybe we’ll find someone who has a charger they can lend us, or a place we can buy one.”
Relief flooded through me, like a cool drink on a hot day. This wasn’t over. It was—possibly—just beginning.
“What do you think, Darcy? Want to explore?”
I nodded. In that moment, what I really wanted was a time-out so I somehow could have pulled Didi and Katy into a huddle and told them everything that had happened and was currently, right now, still happening. How did all the love-at-first-sight people in movies and books do it? How did they not have to grab their friends to fill them in? I wanted a pause in the adventure just to acknowledge that an adventure was happening.
Because something was happening. I could feel it in my bones. It felt like the curtain had just risen on a play I’d been waiting my whole life to perform, lines memorized and blocking down pat.
So even though I couldn’t talk to Didi and Katy about this, I’d just have to save everything up to tell them all about it later. Suddenly, the stories from this weekend would not be about how Romy had screwed me—they would be about Russell. Romy’s role in this whole thing had diminished—just like that, she’d gone from villain to footnote.
“I do,” I said, then felt myself blush. “I mean, yeah. Exploring. Let’s go for it.” I slung my canvas bag over my shoulder, then picked up my duffel and the tent bag. Once I was carrying all of it, I could feel just how weighed down I was. “Oof.”
“Maybe—” Russell started to reach for my tent bag, then paused and drew his hand back. “May I?” I nodded, and he took the tent bag from me. “ ‘Meredith,’ ” he read.
“I borrowed it from my best friends. It’s their parents’ tent.”
