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Elijah lets out a whoop. Before I realize what I’m doing, I’m bouncing on my toes, flinging my arms around his neck in excitement. He lifts me into the air and spins me around, and in this moment, the whole damn world seems to stop. We are the only two people here, and nothing matters but this.
How easy it is to kiss this boy. My eyes close, my hands tangle in his hair. He grips me so tight it’s hard to breathe.
I don’t even care.
It won’t be hard trying to forge my own path with Elijah. I think we’re already on it.
***
Elijah really does plan on sleeping in the Wolf Den, which is funny and dorky and adorable. I sit on my bed, facing the window that overlooks the Dallas skyline, while he takes a shower. I stare at the iconic green ball of the Reunion Tower lit up in the sky, just below the crescent moon. Why didn’t you send us that video, Sasha?
Sasha wasn’t into dating. She had crushes on the guys in the romance books she read, and she couldn’t resist Tom Hardy’s charming smile on the big screen. In all of her years on earth, though, she never had a boyfriend.
I was the boy-crazy part of our duo, the one she always ragged on for dropping everything to spend time with some guy. She hated how I changed my personality to make Zack like me better, hated how I was one person with her and another person with him. She always told me to be true to myself.
I can be myself with Elijah.
On the table next to our ice bucket, that envelope from Sasha stares at me. The warning not to open till the end of the trip has mocked me from the second we got here.
“Oh hell,” I say, throwing myself off the bed. I can still hear the water of the shower running, but I can’t wait for Elijah now. With a sliver of hesitation, I slip my finger under the seal and rip it open.
It’s another one of her fat-cat greeting cards. This one is a tabby wearing black-frame glasses, a cup of coffee next to it.
There’s only one sentence scribbled on the inside of the card.
Please tell me you didn’t fall in love.
Chapter Twenty-Six
We spend the better part of our second and last day on vacation at the water park. It’s too cold to enjoy the outdoor section, but inside, the water is heated. We float in the lazy river, sipping every nonalcoholic drink they offer, all paid for with Sasha’s mad money. With Sasha’s name at the top of the Wizard’s Quest scoreboard, we did all the other kiddie activities, too, including eating candy until our stomachs hurt, getting matching leather bracelets with our names stamped into them, even building our own stuffed animals (dragon for Elijah, four-foot-long pink snake for me).
I keep my hands, my lips and the contents of Sasha’s letter to myself.
Sunday morning comes too soon, and now we’re packing up our stuff, getting ready to check out of the lodge. The side of Elijah’s face still has a sprinkling of green glitter along the jawline from the glitter lizard “tattoos” we got last night. Holding up his bright red dragon, Elijah says, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this thing.” It has plastic wings, a foam heart inside and eyes that light up when you press the foot. “Twenty years old, and this is my first stuffed animal.”
“You take it home with you and sleep with it on your bed,” I say, grinning, as I shove my dirty clothes into my emoji suitcase.
His eyes roll to the ceiling. “I’m a man, Raquel. I don’t sleep with stuffed animals.”
He chucks it at me and I catch it, hugging it close to my chest and petting its fuzzy head like its feelings are hurt and I’m trying to console it. “It’s a dragon, Elijah. They’re the manliest animals around.”
“I thought that was the lion,” he says, zipping his backpack closed. “King of the jungle.”
I scoff. “Lions don’t have wings and they don’t breathe fire.”
He shoulders the backpack. “But lions, you know, exist, so … I win.”
I love that cocky look he gets when we’re messing with each other. So much that my stomach gets this floaty feeling and I turn around, pretending to care about packing my makeup. Really I just don’t want him to see this shit-eating grin on my face.
“I have an idea,” I say, grabbing my perfume. Holding out the dragon, I spritz him all
over and then toss him back across the room into Elijah’s arms. “Now he’ll smell like me. Surely he deserves a place on your bed now, despite how his kind doesn’t actually exist?”
The look Elijah makes awakens some kind of mutant butterfly in my stomach. If my life were a soap opera, I’d dive across the bed and pull him down on top of me. Instead, I swallow the lump in my throat and pray that he won’t reject the silly dragon this time.
He tucks it under his arm. “Can’t argue with that.”
After a final inspection of our room, I grab the fancy Black Bear Lodge pens and stationery as souvenirs and then we head out.
