his leather jacket are waiting for me—no Bean this time—when I cross the street and make it over to him, super cool, my camera hanging around my neck, best jeans and perfect flats.… You can do this, everything is fine …
“Hey.”
One word. That’s all he says. And all at once, my body suddenly turns into a dark cave filled with a thousand bats that are all trying to escape in a panic, flapping their batty wings and gnawing at my insides with their tiny vampire teeth.
O-o-o-h, what is happening to me?
Must calm down.
Maybe he doesn’t notice, because his gaze swings from me to the windows above the Nook. “So … is that your mom watching us from your apartment?”
“Yes, indeed-y,” I say, moving around him to get a better angle of the boatyard’s sign.
“Wow. Okay. I didn’t think she meant it that literally. About watching us.”
“She did.”
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
Tiny bat wings. So nervous.
“Nothing. Can you move? You’re blocking …”
“Oh, sorry. Is that better?”
“Yep. Thanks.”
“Josie?”
“Are these real photos that your parents want, or is this just a ruse?”
“No,” he says as early evening traffic speeds past us, bumping along the setts. “I mean, yes. I told my mom about this. She said it would be nice to have better photos on the website. They need to print new catalogs, so she’ll use them there, too. It’s legit.”
“I just didn’t want to waste my time if this is fake.”
“You mean, fake like when you hired me to pilot you around the harbor?”
“That was a completely real scam to pay you back for the department store window. And just when I’d scrimped and saved up enough dough to hire Captain Lucky again—”
“Puke buckets will cost you extra, by the way.”
“—you went and pulled this stunt, and now I’m back where I was before. So thanks?”
“You’re most welcome.”
“Thanking you most unkindly.”
He chuckles and leans against an iron hitching post with a molded horse head—one of a hundred that dot the old streets around town. “So, hey … How have you been?”
I adjust a setting on my camera. “Fine, fine. Working at the Nook, makin’ that cash,” I say in a ridiculous voice, immediately regretting it. I sound nervous. But Lucky looks completely calm and cool, as usual, so now I’m wondering if this is a one-sided nervousness, and that only makes the bats in my chest flutter faster.
“And you … You’ve been busy, I take it,” I say. It comes out sounding more agitated than I intend, but I’m just so. Unbelievably. Palm-sweatingly. Anxious.
It’s jUsT LuCky.
It wAs jUsT a kIsS.
He frowns and scratches the back of his neck. “Yeah. It’s been weird around here lately.”
“The boatyard window, you mean?”
“That’s definitely been a big point of stress. You heard about what happened at the neighborhood meeting right? Nobody believes Adrian did it.”
“I heard.”
“Wow,” he mumbles, turning his head. “She’s really watching us like a hawk.”
I glance across the street at our apartment window.
“Does she know?”
“What?” My eyes flick to his. “Know what?”
He lightly kicks the iron hitching post with the heel of his boot. “Never mind.”
Wait, wait, wait—we almost made it to The Topic. Then he backed down.
“Of course she doesn’t know,” I say, adjusting my lens. “I haven’t even told her I went to Sunday dinner at your house. You think I’m going to tell her about … ?”
“The darkroom,” he finishes, voice deep and husky.
“The darkroom,” I repeat, feeling a little lightheaded. “She’d only say I’ve activated the curse. Nope. She can never know. Ever. I’ll bury her first. It’s the Saint-Martin way. She keeps her love life secret, so that’s exactly what I’ll be …” I trail off. I realize as soon as it’s out of my mouth that I said “love life.”
It’s only supposed to be Lucky. My friend. Friend life, not love life! Can I get a do-over?
I snap five photos in row. All unnecessary. All poorly framed.
Lucky. Kiss. Uncertainty. Good jeans not helping. Bats! Bat escaping!
I can’t hold it in any longer, so here comes the honesty. I’m lifting the invisible wall.
Hope he’s happy.
“Look,” I say in a low voice, as if my mother can somehow hear us all the way through a closed window and across a street filled with traffic. “I don’t know if you regret what we did, or maybe it was no big deal to you, but it meant something to me, and I’ve been really confused that you’ve just sort of ghosted me over the last few days. I don’t know what we’re