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Luca is already pocketing her phone and room key. “Okay.”
“You two are going out?” Miray asks, poking her head out of the top bunk.
“Yeah.” Florence tilts her chin back to look at her. “Do you want to come with?”
Only when Miray shakes her head does she realize she hoped the answer would be no. The thought is disquieting, so she pushes it aside. “I’m just going to read for a bit, I think,” Miray says. “You two have fun!”
“We’ll try to be quiet when we get back,” Florence promises.
Izzy and Toni are in the bathroom, brushing their teeth over the tiny sink. Amid all their bickering seeping through the half-open door, neither of them notices Florence and Luca slip out.
It’s only a ten-minute walk from their hostel to the Spree, across a busy intersection and past graffitied remnants of the Berlin Wall. The river glitters in the moonlight. Even though it’s past midnight, the air is warm against Florence’s bare arms. She never wants this summer to end.
Luca is the first one to break the comfortable silence. “I can’t believe we’re in Berlin.”
Florence looks at her. She can’t help but smile. “Yeah.”
“Did you ever leave the UK before this?”
“My mum took me to Rome once,” Florence says. “You?”
Luca shakes her head. “No. I . . . since the tour started, there have been a few times where I woke up and had no idea where I was, just that I was someplace new.” She pauses. “I love that feeling.”
Florence’s smile widens. “Me too. I love how different every venue we’ve played so far has been too. And the audience, of course.” She looks at Luca. “I never asked. Do you have a favorite song of ours?”
Luca scratches at her neck. “Is it weird if I say ‘swallow me’?”
Florence can’t help it—she laughs. “I can’t believe that’s how we go viral. I wasn’t even thinking when I did it.”
“My brothers are never going to let me live it down,” Luca says, but she looks like she’s holding back a laugh of her own. There’s something different about the way she says my brothers—amused, and quietly fond.
“I didn’t know you had siblings,” Florence says. She tries not to sound too eager. The truth is, she wants to know everything there is to know about Luca, like a dragon hoarding its gold. A selfish desire, maybe, considering how bad she is at giving away anything about herself in return.
Hands in her pockets, Luca shrugs. “It hasn’t come up.”
“How old are they?”
“Henry is two years older than me,” Luca says, “and Mason four.”
“You’re the nestling,” Florence says, inexplicably charmed.
“I guess.” They’ve slowed to a stop. Luca folds her arms on top of the cast-iron balustrade. “You don’t have any siblings, do you?”
“No. It’s just me and my mum.”
Luca ducks her head a little so she can peer at Florence’s face. “Are you two close?”
Florence looks down at the water. She isn’t sure how to describe the relationship she and her mother have. What comes out is, “When I brought home a bad mark, my mum would make me rewrite the entire paper at the dinner table and grade me on it. I was only allowed to get up when I scored above a B. She’s an English professor at Oxford, you see.”
Luca turns so she’s facing Florence. It’s strange—Florence is so used to seeing her in motion, it almost unsettles her when all Luca’s focus narrows down on only one thing. Her gaze is startlingly intense.
“Sorry.” Florence looks away. “I don’t know why I said that. That makes it sound like she’s a horrible person. She’s really not.”
“I didn’t think she was,” Luca says. “But . . . it sounds like she had high expectations.”
“She did. She does.”
“How does she feel about all this?” Luca asks. She makes a vague motion that Florence takes to mean her music career.
