“Of course you can,” he says, putting the books in a canvas tote he extracts from under the counter. “But I can, too. It’s not a big deal.”

“I should pay for my own,” I say, and I wonder why I’m being so insistent.

“Let me do this for you,” Nolan says. “Please.” And in a move that seems terribly bold, with the clusters of patrons loitering nearby, he reaches forward and touches my cheek. “Let me give you stories.”

It’s easily the sexiest thing anyone has ever said to me, and suddenly I understand the word desire on a whole new level.

We sneak out the back door—so Alex, in his bazaar prep mayhem, doesn’t recruit us to help unclog cotton candy machines—and take Nolan’s car to his house so we only have to carry the books down the hill rather than through town. It’s the first time I’ve sat in his car, the leather interior still new and so different from Alex’s old truck, but already it feels like I belong.

I don’t have time to decide whether this is weird or not.

It all feels strange—lying outstretched on the beach next to the fort, our bare toes digging into the sand as Nolan reads from the Scottish romance novel I picked for him, and I from the high fantasy novel he chose. Our other books spill from the tote in a warm scene that promises hours and hours of being lost in separate stories together, like this is something we do and will continue to do every day.

It’s surreal, this feeling. It’s brand new and bubbly and delicate, but it also feels like I’m remembering it instead of living it, like maybe in some long-ago life I was sitting on this same patch of beach with Nolan Endsley, his dark hair a silhouette against the water.

My internal camera lens must be overactive today. It suggests this would make a perfect photo—Nolan and me by the water as spectral shadow puppets.

In the Orman Chronicles, after the girls discover Emmeline is the new queen, they stumble across a room full of snow globes that contain tiny, confined worlds and real occupants who live inside of them. Emmeline finds this comforting, but to Ainsley it is constraining.

“It looks nice,” Emmeline said. “You could have your books and family and whoever else you wanted and nobody else to bother you.”

“That’s stupid,” Ainsley said. “What’s the point of being alive if you’re not going to be bothered into something better?”

“What’s the point of being alive if you’re too busy being bothered to do any living?” Emmeline retorted.