The Ballad of Darcy and Russell

Chapter 6

It turned out that the Silver Standard Hotel was only a ten-minute walk from the high school. Russell had seen the sign from the top of the bleachers, and we found the hotel with only a couple of wrong turns.

It was a three-story, smallish building done in a faux Old West style. There was a front entrance with a circular driveway and a parking lot around the back. The name of the hotel was spelled out under a neon ten-gallon hat that needed some repair—the brim of the hat seemed to have trouble staying on. FREE HBO! was painted on a sign that hung from the hat, and something about the font—and the fact that they were advertising this at all—made me think it was a few decades old. The VACANCY in the sign was illuminated, the NO dark—presumably, everyone who had been staying here for the festival had headed home as soon as it was over.

“Okay,” Russell said to me as we stood just off to the side of the entrance. “So I’m betting the bathroom is past Reception—there has to be one somewhere in the lobby. I’d just go in, walk fast but not run—just like you have somewhere to be. They’re not going to stop you.”

“Are you sure?” I asked as I peered through the sliding glass doors, trying to get a look at the reception desk but just seeing a potted plant blocking my view. I looked down at my tank top and jean shorts, my Silverspun bracelets. Was I immediately going to be pegged as an interloper?

“Do you want me to go in first? I could scout it out, give you the lay of the land.”

“Really?”

“Sure,” he said with a smile as he squeezed my hand and leaned down to kiss me. Then he took his phone out of his bag and held it to his ear as he headed inside. “Uh-huh,” I heard him say to nobody as he walked through the automatic glass doors. “Right. Interesting.”

I took a step away from the door, still feeling Russell’s kiss on my lips, and leaned back against the brick of the building, taking a moment to try to process everything. How was this happening?!

Oh my god!Katy shrieked.

Calm down,Didi muttered.

No. Shan’t. OH MY GOD!!

Itis exciting, Didi acknowledged. I just don’t want Darcy to lose sight of reality. She’s not in one of her movies.

Maybe sheis, Katy swooned. Lose sight of reality, Darce. Lose it entirely. Who needs reality? How often does something like this occur?

What’s going to happen tomorrow?Didi asked, startling me.

Which really shouldn’t have been so startling, since this whole conversation was taking place inside my head. But I hadn’t even allowed myself to think past one moment at a time, taking things as they came.

And I realized a second later that I didn’t want to. This whole night felt like a miracle—it was turning me into the heroine of a cinematic love story all my own. Worrying about the future, by contrast, felt like the antithesis of sweeping romance. And a sweeping romance was what I had, for the first time ever, found myself in.

Darcy’s deciding things again,Didi said with a sigh.

But she’s right for once,Katy protested. She shouldn’t worry about tomorrow. Maybe there won’t even be a tomorrow. There could be an apocalypse! There could be the Rapture! This could be the last night on Earth, and I think Darcy would really regret it if she didn’t spend it kissing a cute guy.

“Okay.” Russell had returned, and as soon as I saw him, I smiled—automatically, like a reflex. He smiled back at me—maybe he’d just experienced the same thing. “So there was no problem at all. I just walked straight past the desk, and then the bathrooms are off to the left, down a little hallway.”

“Awesome. I’ll be right back.”

I pulled out my (dead) phone and stepped through the doors into the lobby. A second later, though, I wondered if it would look suspicious for Russell and I to have done this back-to-back. One teenager walking through a lobby having a one-sided conversation was one thing. But two? In quick succession? I decided maybe I shouldn’t risk it.

I dropped my phone in my canvas bag, but that half second of not looking where I was going must have been enough, because when I looked up again, I saw that there was a large dog barreling toward me, towing a small child who did not look like they were at all capable of handling this dog. The dog probably weighed more than the kid did. I tried to step out of the way, but the dog—it looked like some kind of Lab, but with a more squashed face—lunged toward me, jumping up, tongue flopping out of its mouth and tail wagging fast, whapping the kid every time.

“Down,” I said, taking another step to the side and trying to give the dog a pat on the head. “Good dog. Nice buddy.” We’d never had a dog. I’d begged for one every year until I realized sometime around fifth grade that we weren’t ever getting one and stopped asking.

“Did you fill out the pet waiver?” I looked over and realized that the woman behind the desk was talking to me. She looked like she was in her forties, with red hair that appeared dyed, cut into a blunt bob. This hairstyle—and her expression—contrasted mightily with the cowboy hat that was perched jauntily atop her head.

There was a guy on the phone next to her and I saw he was also wearing one, so clearly this was part of the uniform at the Silver Standard hotel, not just a fashion choice.

“Oh,” I said, taking another step away from the kid and his happy, drooling dog. “No. I’m not… with them.”

“Brinkley!” I heard a voice call from across the lobby, and a harried-looking mom came running up. I didn’t know if she was talking to the kid or the dog; both seemed possible. I used this commotion to edge past them, but I could feel eyes on me, and as I glanced back before taking the hallway to the left that Russell had told me about, I saw that the red-haired lady behind the desk was watching me, her eyes narrowed. I looked away quickly, and kept my head down as I pushed open the door to the bathroom.

When I was done washing my hands, I dug my tiny toiletry bag out of my canvas tote, beyond glad that it had come with me and hadn’t ended up in my duffel. There wasn’t a ton in there—a foldable hairbrush, mints, a lipstick, lip gloss. Also an emergency tampon, Advil, and liner, because I’d learned the hard way what happened when I didn’t have those things on me at all times.

I quickly brushed the tangles out of my hair, popped in a mint, and then contemplated the lipstick before choosing the gloss and applying it quickly. After all—I was going to be kissing someone imminently, so lipstick probably wouldn’t be the best idea. Just the thought of that was enough to give me that bubbling, fluttering feeling again, and when I met my eyes in the mirror, I could see just how different I looked. This was not the same reflection I’d caught in the WELCOME TO JESSE bus station mirror. My cheeks were flushed (no surprise there) but my eyes were practically sparkling. I looked about a thousand times happier—like I had a secret to tell.

Because things were happening. It felt like my whole life, I’d been listening to songs and watching movies and reading stories about things happening to other people, and now, finally, things were happening to me. This was my Theseus’s Sailboat. My Before Sunrise. My one perfect night.

Go have fun,Katy practically yelled. Why not?

Why not?was the thought rattling around in my brain as I pulled out another paper towel, wiped away the droplets on the sink, and balled it up to throw it away.

Which was when I noticed, lying on top of the tissues and paper towels and chewed-up gum—a plastic key card. Silver Standard Hotel was written in fancy script along the top, and along the bottom—Keep Exploring.

I picked it up out of the trash, wiping it quickly on my jean shorts before pocketing it. This was the kind of souvenir I wanted of this night—especially since neither Russell or I could take any pictures. I’d want something to remember it, something to prove that I was here, that this had happened. Something I could pull out with a flourish when I told the story to Didi and Katy over FaceTime.

This, along with the persistent drumbeat of why not, was echoing in my head as I pushed my way out the door and crossed through the lobby—but I went in the opposite direction this time, not wanting to draw any more attention from the front-desk woman. I figured that there would be a side entrance somewhere. I picked a hallway at random and walked down it, trying not to look suspicious, focusing on the horseshoe pattern on the slightly worn carpet.

I saw the door at the end of the hallway and pushed out—I was now around back, near the parking lot. I figured I’d just walk to the front of the hotel—but then I turned my head and saw it.

And right then, it seemed like it was the thing that absolutely needed to happen now. And given what I’d just taken from the bathroom, it seemed like it absolutely could.

“Why not,” I murmured, making a decision as I hitched my bag over my shoulder and started walking fast, hurrying around to the front of the hotel.

Russell was leaning back against the front entrance, one leg bent, and he smiled and straightened up when he saw me. “Hey. I thought you’d come out the, you know, door. You all set?”

“Uh-huh,” I said, then looked back to where I’d just come from. “But I actually had an idea.”

It turned out it really wasn’t at all hard to break into the pool of the Silver Standard Hotel. It was located in the fenced-off area I’d noticed when I’d gone out the side door. There was a hot tub, and plastic loungers all around the concrete deck. The pool itself was medium-size, with underwater lights that cast a cool blue glow over everything.

“So I think this is a great idea,” Russell said when I’d led him around the side of the hotel and presented the pool proudly. “There’s just one problem.” He’d pointed to the locked gate that required a key card to get in.

“Ah,” I said. I took the key card out of my back pocket and held it up. “Problem solved.” Russell just looked at me, eyes wide, like I’d pulled off a magic trick, and I laughed. “I found it in the bathroom. I figured someone must have checked out and tossed it. But maybe it’ll still work?” I waved the key card at the sensor, and after a pause, the green light flickered on, and I pushed the pool gate open and we walked through.

We stood there for just a moment in the silence of the pool deck. There was one lone inflatable bobbing in the shallow end—a round red-and-orange float, with handles on the side. I looked at the lights changing as the water in the pool moved, and at the sky above us, huge and dotted with stars.

“It’s nice that there’s nobody here,” Russell said.

I nodded and looked around—and then saw the sign near the door that led back into the hotel. NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY. SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK. POOL HOURS 7:30 A.M.–7:30 P.M. POOL FOR HOTEL GUESTS ONLY. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. “I think technically it’s closed.”

“And we’re not hotel guests. We’re breaking all kinds of rules.”

I smiled at that as I set my bag down and kicked my Birks off, leaving them under one of the loungers, then dipped a foot in the pool to check the temperature.

“How is it?”

“Nice,” I said, pulling my foot back out. It was a good temperature—maybe a little colder than I would have picked, but in my opinion, that was way better than it being too hot.

Russell sat on one of the loungers and untied his shoelaces, taking off his shoes and socks. He pushed up his jeans and walked over to the deep end. He sat by the edge of the pool and put his legs in the water. I walked over to sit next to him, glad that I was wearing shorts and didn’t have to worry about my jeans getting wet. Russell leaned back on his hands, then looked over and smiled at me. “Well—today is really not going how I was expecting it to.”

I laughed. “Me neither.” I leaned over to look at his watch, and seeing what I wanted, he lifted it up to show me. But even so, I took the opportunity to hold his wrist in mine, turning it so that I could see the watch face, but really so that I could just hold on to his hand, running my fingers lightly over his arm, but then I had to stop. You can only pretend to need to see someone’s watch for so long, after all.

But as though Russell also felt it really had been too long since we’d touched each other, he brushed a lock of hair away from my forehead, tucked it behind my ear, and traced his fingers lightly down my neck. “Are you tired?”

I shook my head—I had never felt less tired in my life. “You know, if things hadn’t gone wrong, our bus would be closing in on California.”

“You mean we would have been on a bus this whole time?” Russell shook his head. “I have to say, I prefer this.”

“Same.”

Russell circled his feet in the water, brushing against my ankle for just a second. But that moment—his bare skin against mine—was enough to transport me back to the football field. I was about to touch his foot back, when something suddenly occurred to me, and I sat up straighter.

“Wait,” I said, shaking my head. “Do you have to let your mom know?”

Russell just blinked at me, a dull flush starting to creep up his neck. “Um. I wasn’t… um…”

“Oh—no,” I said, shaking my head quickly. “I just meant, did you have to tell her that you’re not going to be on the bus?” Russell was still frowning, and I suddenly wondered if I’d overstepped. “Sorry—it’s not my business.”

“No, it’s fine. I… was supposed to stay overnight with the friend I went to Silverspun with, that’s all. So she’s not expecting me to be home tonight.”

“The friend you had a fight with?”

Russell nodded and let out a short breath, eyes fixed on the water. “Yeah.”

“Was it Tall Ben?” I asked, mostly just to break the tension. “Or Actually Tall Ben?”

It worked, because Russell laughed. “No. Nary a Ben attended Silverspun with me.”

“How do you get to Ojai from Union Station?” I asked, realizing that for me, that was the end of the line, but Russell would still have a lot of travel to get home again. I would have thought there would be a way to get there without going through LA, but apparently not. “Do you take a train?”

“You can take a train. Or get a bus.… What about your dad?”

“What about him?”

“Is he going to be expecting you in LA tonight?”

I shook my head. “Thankfully, no. He’s with my uncle at his lake house. He’s not back until tomorrow afternoon. Hopefully I’ll be home by then, and he won’t have to know about this. He really wouldn’t be happy about it.” A second later, I realized what I’d just said and how this might have sounded to Russell. “I didn’t mean you,” I said quickly. Though if I was being honest, my dad probably wouldn’t have been super thrilled about me being at a hotel with someone I’d met in a bus station. “I just meant he wouldn’t be happy about the whole stranded-in-Nevada-with-no-phone thing.”

“See, my mom would probably be happy about it. She has all these stories about backpacking through Europe with no phones or internet. She believes that we’ve all gotten too soft and isolated. And that the only way we can actually connect with people, and be our true selves, is when we step away from our devices.” Russell said this with a kind of weariness, like he’d heard it a lot. He shrugged. “She always says that I need more grit.”

“Well, she is French,” I pointed out, and he laughed.

“Mais bien s?r,”he said, so easily, his accent so good. It was honestly almost too much to take.

Please keep it together,Didi sighed.

Make him speak more French!Katy swooned.

“It is funny, though,” Russell said after a moment of comfortable silence, our feet circling each other, coming into each other’s orbits but not quite touching. “About how the smallest things can make the biggest difference and we don’t even know it at the time?”

“What do you mean? Like the butterfly effect?”

“Kind of. I guess it’s like—what if we’d just picked another bus to get on? We’d almost be home now, and we’d have no idea that there was this whole other thing that could have happened. Or what if our bus had worked instead? We wouldn’t be here now. I wouldn’t… know you. And that feels impossible.” He turned to face me, more fully, his eyes searching mine. “Doesn’t it?”

I made myself keep looking back at him and nodded. It did feel impossible—that there was any other way this day could have gone. “I guess you just never know, except in retrospect.” I pulled my legs out of the pool, let the water drip off them for just a moment, then pulled them up in front of me. “Like, if I’d known what the result would be, I wouldn’t have gotten barbecue the night before my history midterm.”

“Oh no—what happened?”

It was only a second later that I realized I probably shouldn’t have brought up a food-poisoning story in front of someone who I really wanted to kiss me again. It was probably the same way Russell had felt when he realized he’d started to tell his un-fun fact about scabies. “Well—let’s just say nothing good. I was really sick, but I insisted on going in to take my test. It was, like, half our grade. I should have just waited, but I’d been studying before the evil brisket had come into my life, so I thought I’d do okay.”

“And?”

“And I did not.”

Russell laughed, but not in a mean way. “I’m really sorry.”

“Yeah.” I was about to leave it at that. But then I realized I could tell him the truth—even the stuff I normally kept hidden from other people. I felt in my bones that I could trust him—and more than that, I wanted him to see me, flaws and all, just like he was letting me see him. “It’s actually—” I started, then took a breath. “I’ve never actually told this to anyone else. But that one test—it really brought down my GPA. And… I don’t know if that was why, but I didn’t get into as many schools as I was hoping. Just two.” Even just saying it, I felt the shame flare somewhere in my chest, remembering the cascade of rejection emails while all my friends seemed to be swimming in acceptances.

“What was the other school?”

“Ithaca College. It’s in upstate New York. And neither of them was my first choice, by any stretch. I wasn’t even going to apply to Stanwich, but—” I stopped before I said something I didn’t want to go into. I didn’t want to explain why I was getting a nearly free ride, or the price I would have to pay for it. I hugged my knees, remembering a second too late that they were still wet. “Anyway. My dad said the choice was mine—but it’s like it wasn’t even a choice, you know? Because Ithaca would have just meant a ton of loans, and Stanwich was basically free. And it wasn’t like I even really wanted to go to Ithaca in the first place, so…”

“I know what you mean. It—the same thing kind of happened to me.”

“It did? But I thought—that you wanted to go to Michigan. To be the next… Evan Hansen.”

“Evan Hansen is the character in the musical, not the composer. Nice reference, though.”

“It’s really all I have. I’m out now.”

Russell’s smile faded, little by little, and he took a breath. “I got rejected from USC’s musical theater program. And from Temple’s. And from Tisch. The musical I submitted as my sample—it just wasn’t ready. And my dad told me that. And of course I should have listened to him—he would know, after all. And while Michigan is great, I just…” He shook his head. “It didn’t turn out the way I was hoping.”

I nodded as I looked at him, feeling somehow lighter, knowing we had this in common too. “I know how you feel. It’s why I’m not looking forward to tomorrow.”

“All because of some brisket.”

“Right? Like if I’d ordered a burger or something, I might have ended up going to a totally different college. So you’re right. You never know those little choices that are actually going to make the biggest difference.”

“Wouldn’t it be great if you could? If, like, you could get an alert on your phone—‘Turn left ahead.’ ‘Don’t eat that brisket.’ ‘Go talk to the cute girl in the bus station.’?”

I smiled. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” he said simply. “As soon as I saw you, I was only pretending to read. I was just staring at the same page.”

“It’s a good thing you’d read the book before.”

Russell smiled but didn’t look away from me. “When that guy told me you were looking for me, it felt like the moment I’d been waiting for.” He moved a touch closer to me and hooked his ankle around mine, entwining our feet. “It was like something out of a story.”

I blinked at him, surprised but thrilled that he thought this too. “Like Theseus’s Sailboat.”

“Yes! Is that stupid?”

“No, I thought the same thing. It’s like that, but… better. Because it’s actually real. And… this can happen.” I reached out for his hand on the concrete, getting a little zingy jolt the second I touched his skin.

I knew that when people had been together for a while, this wasn’t a big deal at all. I’d seen the way that Didi would take the hand of whatever girl she was dating. I understood that eventually, things just became familiar and easier. But right now, in the newness of whatever this was, it felt like there were sparks and electricity every time I got close to him.

Russell picked up my hand and kissed it, looking at me over our entwined fingers. “Hi.”

The lights around and inside the pool suddenly snapped off all at once, like they’d been on a timer. Now the only light was coming from the floodlights in the parking lot, the faint neon glow of the cowboy hat, and the occasional lighted window in the rooms above us.

I reached my other hand out and touched his face, cupping his cheek. He leaned his head into my hand, giving me the weight of it for just a moment. I traced my fingers over the planes of his face, like I was trying to memorize it. I ran my thumb over his lips and he kissed it. It was all more than I could take, and I leaned in and kissed him.

And it was as if we’d both been waiting for the same moment, the same downbeat of the music, because we were kissing like we’d never stopped. It was just like the football field again, but more comfortable now—this was just what we did. Less finding our rhythm, more settling back into it.

His arms were around me, and he was running his fingers under the hem of my tank top, touching my bare skin, making me shiver and gasp against his mouth as his hands spanned my waist and his thumbs traced circles on my stomach.

But after a while—I had no idea how much time had passed—I became aware that as nice as this was, sitting on a concrete pool deck was really not the most comfortable thing, even if you’re really enjoying all the other aspects of the experience.

And Russell must have been feeling the same way, because when we took a break to catch our breath, he stood up, leaving wet footprints on the concrete. He pulled me to my feet, and then into his arms, pressing me close. We just stood there for a moment and I wrapped my arms around his waist, still a little amazed that I got to do this. “Maybe,” he said, “we should…” Then he looked around and frowned.

I laughed at his expression, and Russell laughed too, the sound shattering the stillness of the night. A light flicked on in a room two floors above us. I looked up at it, worried for a second, but then dismissed it. Probably someone just wanted to read or something; it had nothing to do with us.

“Well,” I said, gesturing to what was in front of us. “We could always… go swimming?”

He leaned back a little bit, like he wanted to see me better, and smiled. “We could do that.” He slipped a hand up under my tank top again, letting his hand rest there, just above my hip bone. “I don’t have a bathing suit, though.”

“Me neither,” I said, trying to ignore that the skin under his hand suddenly felt like it was on fire, and it was currently all I could think about. “I actually thought about packing one, but…” I took a big breath. How was it me who was proposing this? But all at once, it just seemed like the only thing to do. “I guess we don’t really… need them?”

Russell leaned down and kissed me gently. “You make an excellent point.” He pulled his hand away from my hip and touched the hem of my tank top carefully, like it was a precious garment, and not something I’d gotten on clearance at J.Crew Factory. “May I?”

I nodded, my heart beating a million miles an hour. Russell slowly, inch by inch, lifted up my tank top until he pulled it over my head, and the cool Nevada night air was hitting my bare skin and my dark red bralette.

“Oh,” he breathed as he looked at me. He touched the strap carefully, like maybe it was made of glass and might shatter. “Red?”

I nodded. “Red.”

“But… you were wearing white. Wouldn’t it have shown through?”

I couldn’t help but smile at his expression of utter bafflement. “Well, here’s a fun fact for you. When you wear red under white, it doesn’t show through. Something about the way it absorbs light and blends with your skin rather than reflecting it. I don’t know exactly how.” I paused for a second. “I guess I really didn’t have enough facts in there, huh? But it always works.”

“I’ll say,” Russell said, still gazing at me.

I laughed and touched the hem of his black T-shirt. “May I?”

He nodded, and I held his eyes as I started lifting up his shirt. He bent his knees slightly so that I could get it over his head.

“Um,” I said, swallowing hard as I took him in, bathed in the moonlight and the blue lights of the hotel pool. Russell was thin but muscular, with well-defined stomach muscles and really nice arms. I wondered if he played any sports—it certainly looked like it. I regretted that I hadn’t asked him back when he was clothed. “Well.” I tried to get my thoughts in any kind of order, but at the moment, that seemed like an ask of monumental proportions. “I mean,” I said, gesturing to him. “This is just unfair.”

He looked at me, shaking his head. “Imagine how I feel.” I realized I was still holding his shirt, and handed it to him. He handed me mine, and we both started laughing—with giddy delight at the whole absurdity of the situation. He put his shirt back on the lounger near his shoes, and I did the same with my tank top. I reached for the button on my jean shorts, trying to tell myself that this was no big deal. After all, I was pretty sure my underwear covered more than a lot of my bathing suits did. If we’d brought bathing suits with us, this whole thing would have been no big deal. But we didn’t have bathing suits—and the fact that I was about to be in just my underwear in front of a boy I really liked made the whole thing seem really intimate.

I knew I was wearing the same kind of underwear as always—lacy stretchy thongs that I bought in packs of three. I was very glad I’d randomly picked the black pair from my duffel, and that it wasn’t one of the ones with sprouting elastic and a stretched-out band. When I’d gotten dressed in the tent that morning, I had just been grabbing whatever pair was nearest, not thinking in the least that someone else would be seeing it before the day was over.

Offering up a brief thank-you to faulty buses and people who chose to use Android phones, I undid my jean shorts and stepped out of them, dropping them on the lounger with my tank top.

Then I turned and ran for the pool, jumping into the deep end with a splash.

The water was cool, and heavily chlorinated, and felt great. I stayed under for just a moment before pushing off the bottom and surfacing.

I smoothed my hair down—it looked like maybe another light in the hotel was now on, and I turned to Russell to mention it, but then I saw him and promptly forgot all about it.

He was walking into the pool from the shallow end, wearing navy boxer-briefs that showed long legs and even more stomach muscles, including those ones that looked like lines on either side of his torso.…

I ducked under the water for another moment, feeling like I needed to cool myself down. He dove off the last step into the pool and then surfaced a moment later, pushing his hair back. He swam over to me, grinning. “It feels great.”

I smiled back. “I know.” He dove down again, and when he surfaced he was swimming on his back.

“When I was little…,” he said, pushing himself through the water toward the end of the pool. I started doing sidestroke, keeping pace with him. “We spent all our time in my dad’s pool. Like, you’d wake up in the morning and put on your bathing suit and not take it off until night, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said, stopping to tread water. “What do you mean, your dad’s pool?”

“Oh.” Russell shook his head. “Sorry—that’s what we call it since my mom never goes swimming.”

“It’s nice you have a pool at your house. My friends and I do the same thing at the Raven Rock pool—go early in the morning, don’t leave until night. Stake your claim.” I swam over to the shallower end until I could touch the bottom, then walked to the float. I ducked underneath it, surfaced through the hole in the center, and pushed off the pebbled concrete floor and swam back over toward Russell.

He smiled as he nodded down at the float. “Nice.”

“I figured it was here—might as well get some use out of it.”

“We used to play this pool game we’d invented, Brontosaurus. It involved a series of floats, and had all these crazy rules, and just got more complicated every year.”

“What does a dinosaur have to do with swimming?”

He laughed. “Nothing. My older—Connor, my cousin, named it back when he was obsessed with Jurassic Park, and it stuck.” Russell swam closer to me, and I could see there were water droplets on his forehead. His eyelashes, which were long and dark, had turned into damp triangles, and there was water beading on his neck, on his nice shoulders…

“So how do you play?”

“Play what?”

“Brontosaurus! I mean, we are in a pool.”

He smiled, reached out and brushed some water droplets off my cheek. “That’s really nice. But we need four people. And a ball. And ideally, a diving board.”

“Can we do a modified version? I…”

“What?”

“Nothing.” I dipped my head under the water for a second, smoothing my hair down. “Just weird déjà vu. I feel like I’ve heard about that game before? But that’s not possible.”

“So about that—fun fact—”

“We’re getting an aquatic fun fact? An AquaFact! A fact that’s anything but dry.” Russell smiled patiently, like he’d already learned to wait this out. “I’m done now.”

“I highly doubt that. Please interrupt me if you think of any more.”

“I absolutely will. Wait! A fact that will hold water. Okay, now I’m done.”

“It was just about déjà vu. There’s an explanation for why we feel it. It’s not that we’re remembering something from the past, or getting a sense of the future. When you have it, what’s happening is that your brain is coding a new memory as an old one, that’s all. Like something being put into the wrong folder. Nothing mystical.”

“Is it the same when you feel like you know someone? Your brain misidentifies them?”

“I don’t know.” He took a step toward me. “I think that’s something else. Something more… special. Don’t you?”

We swam closer to each other until we were only inches apart, and suddenly the float seemed like a huge impediment. I ducked under it and pushed it away. When I surfaced, I realized that we were close enough to the shallow end that I could stand—the water hitting just below my shoulders. I walked on my toes closer to Russell, and let myself just drink him in for a moment. I liked seeing him like this—water dripping off his hair, lit by the moon and the glow of a neon cowboy hat, nothing between us. His kind eyes, his half smile that was growing as he noticed me looking at him.

“What?”

“Just you.”

He touched my waist and looked at me. “Is this okay?”

I nodded, then I leaned forward and kissed him. He tasted like chlorine and pineapple soda, like sunshine and possibilities. While we were kissing, I touched his chest, and then his shoulders, and let my hands run down his arms, feeling the muscles underneath. He felt so strong—like he could hold me up if he needed to. (I couldn’t imagine when that would be necessary, but it was somehow nice to know.) I broke away and looked into his eyes as my hands started to trace lower, over the ridges of his abs. “Is this okay?”

“Uh-huh,” he said, kissing me again. “Very much so.”

And we were kissing in the water, and there was suddenly so much more of him that I could touch—arms and legs and stomach and back, all exposed to me, and I couldn’t get enough of it. He seemed to be feeling the same way, his touching my stomach, my back, my legs…

We were kissing faster now, and my legs were wrapped around his waist. Russell had one hand bracing against the side of the pool, one hand on my back, his fingers slipping under the band of my bralette. I was holding on to him, and somehow it didn’t feel like the football field kissing anymore. It no longer felt like we had all night.

There was a hunger to our kissing now, a need I’d never felt before. It felt deeper, and more intense, like somehow, even though we were surrounded by water, a fire had started burning.

“Um,” I said, when we’d both paused to take a breath. My legs were still wrapped around him, and I was above him, looking down. Russell leaned forward and kissed my collarbone. He slid my wet strap off my shoulder and kissed the skin there, his lips soft on me.

“Yes?” he asked, looking up at me. He smiled, then took a breath and pulled us both under. We surfaced together, and I was laughing and wiping water out of my eyes. “Sorry,” he said, running his fingers up and down my arm. “Couldn’t resist. What were you going to say?” he asked, even though he sounded a little bit dazed, which was exactly how I felt.

“Just—” I said, looking around. I unhooked my legs and stood on the pebbly bottom of the pool, flexing my feet. I wasn’t sure what happened now. I suddenly wished that one of us had a car. “I wasn’t sure if we should… go somewhere?” I realized this was the vaguest thing I could have said, but I wasn’t sure how else to put it. I wasn’t really sure what I even meant, just that I wanted this to continue, but maybe not in the pool.

“Well, we could…” He hesitated. When he spoke again, it was all in a rush. “I don’t want this to sound presumptuous. And I’m not saying we even have to… not that I would expect—or that you would! Just… This is coming out all wrong.” He looked at me and took a deep breath. “I was just thinking that—if you wanted—we could get a room.”

“Here?” A second later, I realized what an inane question that was. Of course here. Here, at the hotel we were currently at that had vacancies.

But—could we even get a room? Were we allowed to? A second later, though, I realized that we probably could—we were both eighteen, and technically adults, so booking a hotel room was something I was actually, legally, allowed to do. I just had never done it before.

“Wait—you have enough money for a hotel room?”

I’d assumed that we were somewhat in the same boat at the moment, money-wise. As in, neither of us had very much. Otherwise, why would Russell have even been stuck in the bus station to begin with? Why wouldn’t he have taken an Uber to Vegas with everyone else?

“I… have a credit card we can use. If you want! We don’t have to at all, and nothing has to happen. I mean…” He let out a breath, then looked at me again. “We could just take hot showers and watch HBO.”

“You know, I did see that they have it here. And for free!”

He laughed at that, but didn’t look away from me, searching my face as though he was trying to figure out how I felt—which was exactly what I was doing.

Is this what you want?Didi whispered, her voice quiet.

And I was pretty sure it was. I knew Russell. I trusted him. And this seemed like the next step on a path that had just led me to more and more wonderful things. This was my epic night, after all. I was in my one-night, magical story—and this was just the next chapter. I felt an excited little thrill flutter somewhere inside my chest.

“I mean, I do love HBO. And hot showers.” I met his eyes and nodded. “I think that sounds… like something we should do.”

Russell smiled wide—it practically took over his whole face. “Yeah?”

I nodded, then took a breath. “I’ve never… um… stayed at a hotel with someone before.” I felt heat creeping into my cheeks. It was embarrassing to have to admit this, but didn’t we need to talk about it? Also—what if that changed something?

“Oh.” Russell smoothed my wet hair back gently.

“Not that I haven’t wanted to! I’ve just been… looking for the right one. Five stars, all the amenities.” He smiled at that, and I made myself ask the question I was pretty sure I already knew the answer to. “Um… have you?”

Russell nodded, and I tried to figure out if I was disappointed or relieved. Somehow, it was a little bit of both. “I have,” he said, then took a breath and looked right into my eyes. “But now I wish I hadn’t. I wish I would have waited for this hotel. For right now.” He ran his hand down my arm, picked up my hand, and kissed it. “I should have waited for Darcy Milligan.”

I smiled at that—at the way he sounded saying my name. “I know this is kind of crazy,” I said as I placed my hands on his face, looking into his eyes. “But it just feels right, doesn’t it? Like… everything’s been leading to this. Since that first moment.” I smiled at him, feeling like my heart was cracked open, exposed—but I wasn’t scared. Because I knew I could trust him. Like I could see him, and he could see me, and there was nothing to be afraid of. This was what Wylie Sanders and everyone else had been singing about all these years. And here, in a moonlit pool in Nevada, I finally got it.

“Maybe I’ve always been waiting for you,” I said, cupping his cheek in my hand. “For Russell Henrion.”

He took a step back, something I couldn’t read passing over his face. “Look, Darcy,” he said. Then he took a big breath. “There’s actually something that I need to talk to you about. I’m—”

“Hey!”

All of a sudden, there was a flashlight beam pointing at us, and I drew in a sharp breath, squinting against the light that was blinding me. Russell stepped in front of me, which I was glad about, because there was an irritated-looking man in a security uniform glaring at us.

“Pool’s closed.”

“Ah,” Russell said, nodding. “Right. Sorry. We’ll get out.”

“We’ve had some noise complaints,” he said as he pointed his flashlight around.

I was suddenly very aware that I was in my underwear in front of a strange man, in a pool I wasn’t supposed to be in.

“You’re hotel guests?”

“Yeah,” Russell said easily. “Guess we didn’t see the time that the pool closed. We’ll be on our way.”

The guard’s flashlight landed on the loungers and I watched as it moved around, every time landing on something that just seemed more suspicious. My bag, Russell’s backpack, our clothes. I felt my heart sink. Actual hotel guests would have brought bathing suits, and changed into them in the rooms. Actual hotel guests would have towels, and wouldn’t be swimming in their underwear. Suddenly, my big idea seemed incredibly stupid. All at once, I was getting to see the flip side of why not.

I looked at Russell—he looked as freaked out as I felt. “I…,” I started.

“Out of the pool,” the security guy said, already reaching to talk into the walkie attached to his shoulder. “Now.”