Chapter Nineteen
Nineteen
PROVO, UT
“I’m not sure how I feel about this,” Arden said, her voice impeded by the rain pelting the windshield.
I hadn’t meant to slack on updates, but after my heart-to-heart with Phoebe and this thing growing between Dex and me, I’d forgotten to answer more than a few of Arden’s texts.
This morning, I woke up to: IF YOU DON’T ANSWER IN THE NEXT TEN MINUTES I AM REPORTING YOU AND PHOEBE AS MISSING PERSONS!
!! Of course, she hadn’t accounted for the time difference, and we’d all overslept and had to rush to make checkout, so I didn’t end up calling until two hours later from the highway.
Her relief trumped her anger, although I could tell she wasn’t thrilled to be on speaker. No way could I try to explain what was happening with Dex in the car with him and my sister; even if I spoke in code, Phoebe would figure it out. She was too clever for her own good.
“It’s only two more days,” I replied.
“No, I mean you guys meeting elephants without me.”
Phoebe laughed. “You should go there for your honeymoon.”
“Is it bad that I don’t hate that idea?”
“Well, Noah hates sand and you hate swimming in open water,” I said. “It makes sense in a very specific to you way.”
“Hey, Noah!” she shouted, not bothering to lean away from her phone for our benefit. In the driver’s seat, Dex flinched. “How do you feel about Utah?”
I could just barely make out Noah’s response: “Uh, pro?”
“Interesting,” she said, returning her attention to us. “I could get him on board, I think.”
“Noah would go anywhere you asked,” Phoebe pointed out. Dex glanced at me, so briefly I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t spent a majority of the last eighty miles staring at him. My heart fluttered.
“He would,” Arden agreed. “But it’s our honeymoon. He should enjoy it, too, and you know he would spend the whole time complaining about the smell.”
I looked at Dex and said, “He has a weird thing about zoos.”
“The smell or the institution?” he replied.
Phoebe snorted. “You’d think the institution, but no. He hates the poop.”
“It’s not just the poop,” Arden said. “It’s all the poop. Multispecies poop.”
“Great band name,” Phoebe quipped.
“I can’t make him deal with multispecies poop on our honeymoon.” Arden sighed. “So, it sucks that you guys are doing this magical thing without me. I hate you a tiny bit.”
“Sorry.” I reached for the bag of gas station goodies stashed at my feet, rifling around for snacks. I came up with a package of powdered donuts and tore them open. “Be glad I vetoed Phoebe’s Mall of America suggestion.”
Arden gasped. “I’m dying to go to Mall of America!”
Dex made a face. I smiled and said, “Dex thinks Mall of America sucks.”
“You suck!” Arden cried.
He shrugged. “There are better places.”
“Than the biggest mall in the world?”
I had to bite my cheek to keep from laughing at Dex’s eye roll. “He thinks you have bad taste. And that you need better life goals.”
“That’s…” Arden paused. “That’s nice, actually. It sounds mean, but it’s like telling someone they need higher expectations. Dex thinks I’m worth more than Mall of America.”
“A cockroach is worth more than Mall of America,” he muttered.
I couldn’t stifle my laugh that time.
It was honestly embarrassing, how taken I was with this man.
My mind had whirred to life, concocting scenarios where we were partners, he liked my friends, and he brought takeout to the apartment and played Mario Kart with Phoebe while I dozed on his shoulder.
Quiet, domestic scenarios. A future. And then he would discreetly brush my hand or my thigh and I’d be ripped into the blissful present, and I’d remind myself to appreciate it.
Here on a highway in Utah, Dex caught my eye and smiled a small, secret smile.
He didn’t care that I wanted to talk to Arden.
He adored Phoebe. It felt like he adored me and that meant he was willing to tolerate anything he deemed unpleasant.
If I asked him to take me to Mall of America, he would. He’d complain, but he’d do it.
Before hanging up, Arden asked me to take her off speaker. Softly, she asked, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I answered honestly. “Things are really, really good.”
She inhaled sharply. “Oh, you slept with him.”
“No.” I cleared my throat, casting a quick glance over my shoulder at Phoebe. She’d lost interest in Arden, now grinning at her phone. “Not even a little.”
“Oh, you did something.”
“Something isn’t that.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing.” I cleared my throat again. Dex chuckled, probably reading into this fluently. “Stuff. It’s cool.”
“It’s cool?” Arden repeated, sounding surprised. “So, we’re no longer pretending it never happened?”
“It happened.”
“Are you two…” Her voice rose an octave, excitement bleeding in. “Is this a thing? Are you going to come back from this trip with a boyfriend?”
I studied the side of Dex’s face until he glanced over and smiled. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. I hope so.”
“I will never forgive you for calling me from the car. How are we supposed to have this conversation right now?”
“We’ll have it tonight.”
“Will we?”
I hesitated, a warm flush rising up my neck. “Um. I don’t know?”
“You know,” she said, and I could hear her smirk. I tried to laugh it off, but Dex’s eyes bounced back to me, twinkling as if he could hear the salacious undertone of every word.
Once we got to the wildlife refuge, I watched Phoebe’s entire being light up as she fed a giraffe. I got to pet an elephant. We laughed until we cried when an elephant swiped Dex’s sunglasses off his face. And still, the whole time, I was aware of him more than anything.
He grinned when Phoebe fed the giraffes and took a Polaroid with our dad’s camera when she met the elephants.
He smiled fondly when I asked a tenth question in a row to the man giving us a tour.
He laughed just as hard when the elephant stole his glasses and told it to keep them, please, you’re doing me a favor.
His dirty grin when I caught him checking me out on the way back to the car.
You know, Arden said with such conviction. From the look in his eye, Dex did, too.
It took Phoebe forever to go to sleep. Any other night, I’d have cried in the shower over her enthusiastic suggestion of watching a movie with me. Tonight was not that night.
We made it about three-quarters through a second movie before Phoebe crashed. I threw on a dark green Reformation dress I snagged for a hundred bucks on ThredUp, double-checked that I remembered deodorant after my shower, and slipped out of the room.
The fluorescent lighting was harsh after such a dreary day.
I padded down the hall to Dex’s room, focusing on the brightness rather than my nerves rattling like a loose screen door.
We hadn’t made definitive plans, nothing out loud.
But considering the amount of loaded looks we’d shared, I figured I had an open invitation.
Something unspooled in my chest at the sight of him when he answered my knock: his soft smile, his shirt unbuttoned at the collar and the sleeves rolled to his elbows, feet bare against the plush carpet. I had to resist the urge to step right up to him and bury my face in his neck.
“Hey,” he said, opening the door wider for me. His room was identical to ours, although it had one queen bed and a slightly different painting of a landscape.
“Sorry it’s late,” I said. “Phoebe wanted to watch a movie and then she wanted to watch another movie.” I hesitated, noting his smirk. “Not that we had plans or anything.”
His smirk graduated into a smile. “We had plans.”
I swallowed down the frenzy of fireworks bursting in my throat. “Yeah. We did.”
He got us each a bottle of water from the minifridge and we sat at the edge of the bed, knees pressed together, angled toward each other.
Tension hung like smoke, but I was glad neither of us initiated anything.
As good as I knew it would feel, now that I was here, all I really wanted to do was hang out with him.
He’d become one of my favorite people so quickly. It was dizzying.
“I was a little worried you’d be asleep when I got here,” I told him. He smiled, his thumb scraping at the label on his water. “I almost fell asleep during Mr. Deeds and that’s one of my all-time favorite movies. It was such a long day. Not bad, just long.”
“I used to like driving,” he said, and I snorted. “I used to go for long drives to wind down. Now, I get behind the wheel and I’m instantly furious.”
“Just let me drive!”
“I don’t want you to drive. You deserve a break.”
A loud buzzing filled my head. Our eyes locked. “So do you,” I said quietly.
I felt his smile in my gut. “You can drive tomorrow,” he agreed, just as quiet. “And I will stare at you the entire way to Idaho. I won’t be subtle.”
My heart did some sort of kickflip. Rubbing my chest, I said, “I think you were actually born to be a passenger princess. It’s your calling.”
“What does that mean?”
“Phoebe keeps texting it to me. I’m ninety percent sure it’s not an insult.” He snorted and I felt myself glowing. “I really don’t mind. Driving, I mean. We still have the whole way home.”
His smile widened. “Maybe we’ll take the southern route. Hit every Waffle House along the way.”
“Crazy that you’d voluntarily deal with us longer than necessary.” I bumped his shoulder with mine. “You like us.”
“I do.”
“No complaints?”
“Very few.”
“Well, now you have to tell me.”
“The Twinkies.”
I gasped. “Those were gifts! Out of the kindness of my heart!”
“Anything else. Literally anything else, Vi.”
“Fine. Next time you’re getting a Moon Pie.”
“What the hell is a Moon Pie?”
“It has marshmallow in it.” He pulled a disgusted face and I laughed. “Tell me what else you like,” I urged, leaning in closer. His eyes drifted from my face down the slope of my neck, catching himself before dropping any lower. “I want to know you. You know so much about me.”
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
“What’s your favorite food?”
He didn’t even hesitate. “Pad Thai.”
“Favorite color.”