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“Mountain Dew was an actual magic elixir. Do you know Mountain Dew?”

He nods.

“There were kitchen fairies and mermaids who moved things around to make the grown-ups crazy.”

“Sounds happy,” he says.

“That part of it,” I agree.

“And your sister, what was she like?”

I take a breath. “Beautiful—not just pretty but really beautiful, with this amazing, bright light around her all the time. Everyone loved her, but none of them loved her as much as I did.”

He brings the hand he smoothed up to his mouth, kisses my knuckles. “You must miss her so very much.”

I nod and take my hand back on the pretext of wanting to eat. “Your turn. What did you love as a child?”

“Books,” he says with a laugh. “I loved to read more than anything. My father grew angry with me—‘Javier, you need to run! You need to play with the other boys. Go outside.’” He lifts a shoulder. “I only wanted to lie in the grass and think about other worlds, other places.”

“What did you read?”

“Whatever I could find—” He makes apsshting sound, sends his hand out in a gesture of circles through the air. “Adventure and mysteries and ghost stories. Whatever.”

“You still love reading, don’t you?”

“You don’t?”

“I like to read. I just don’t like to work hard to read. I like books that take me away the same way television or the movies do.”

“Like what?”

I frown and then reach for my phone, where all the books are listed in my reader. Scrolling through it, I say, “Okay, in the past few months I’ve read two historical romances, a mystery by a woman I like because I can trust her not to get too dark, and a cooking memoir.”

“Romance? Are you seeking love,gatita?”

“No,” I say definitively. “Passion ruined my family’s lives. I make it a practice to avoid it.”

“Love is not always destructive,” he says quietly, and slides a finger up my shin. “Sometimes love creates.”

I’m unexpectedly caught by something in his voice, a promise I can barely see, shimmering faintly on the horizon, and that scares me enough to throw out a gauntlet. “Tell me a time that love didn’t destroy what it first created.” He is divorced, clearly not involved with anyone. “In your own life,” I add.

He nods, stretching out sideways in front of me, close enough to touch my knee. I could press my palms to his shoulder, his head, but I don’t. I keep my arms crossed, one hand cradling the wine.

“When I was seventeen, a girl came to our neighborhood. She had the shiniest hair I had ever seen, and pretty ankles, and I could not find my voice to talk to her, but one day we met at the library, in the very same row. She was looking for the very same book I was.”

I’m tempted to brush the hair on his temple away from his face, but I don’t. “What book?”

“Stephen King,The Shining,” he says, and smiles up at me. “You thought it would beDon Quixote, yes?”

I smile. “Maybe.”

“We spent so much time reading and talking about reading. And soon we read each other, you know, both of us virgins.”

A ping snaps my chest, bringing me a memory of myself at seventeen, the first time I made love, to a boy I worked with at Orange Julius. James. How I loved him!

Javier continues. “With her, I learned about how easy sex can be.”

Something in my expression must give me away, because he says, “Who taught you that lesson?”