My voice sounds small, and I guess Alex can hear it, because when I turn toward him, he finds a way to inelegantly wrap his arms around me in the small space of the cab.

“Oh,” I say, my head turned awkwardly against his shoulder. “Oh, we’re hugging now?”

“Yes.” Alex’s voice is definitive, no room for argument. “We’re hugging now.”

“Um, why?”

I’m certain this will make him pull back, but he doesn’t.

“You know why,” he says.

“Because I saved your grass from being turned into soup by a golf cart?”

He pulls back and looks toward the roof of the car like maybe the god of the whales can somehow help deal with me.

“Because you saved him.”

My heart hammers faster in my chest, and it makes me agitated.

“No, I didn’t,” I answer too quickly. “I saved Wally.”

“Don’t be stupid when you’re not,” Alex says. “Nolan could never like somebody stupid.”

This conversation is not helping my heart rate, but blessedly I can hear Nolan returning in the golf cart.

“What makes you think he likes me?”

Alex levels a look at me that reminds me so strongly of Jenna it hurts. But instead of wanting to sob, I find myself laughing and shoving him in the arm.

“Don’t give me that look!” I say.

“Then don’t be stupid,” he says, shoving me back. He’s laughing, too.

Nolan opens the door on my side while Alex and I are midshove. He stands and watches us in bemusement, which should sober the moment, but instead we laugh harder, until Nolan groans.

“It’s cool. Just have fun while I stand here in the rain.”

His hands are everywhere when he helps me slide from the tall cab of the truck, to the ground, to the cart. He brushes my waist, my arm, my back, and even though he’s just trying to keep from hurting me, I blush.

After Valerie inspects my ankle—badly bruised but not twisted or broken—and fills the three of us with enough hot cocoa to drown a greedy kid in a chocolate factory, I’m sent to nap and to “not catch my death.” Valerie won’t listen to my arguments that I am fine and don’t want to go to sleep at three in the afternoon. She directs Alex to help me to the third floor, and when Nolan makes to follow us, she calls him back with a sharp “Not you, boy. Let the girl get some rest.”

Nolan and I lock eyes as the electricity-restored elevator doors snap our gaze in two, but our new, tenuous bond is still intact, an unbroken twine that extends from his body to mine.