I pretended to flip through a few more books before I heard the door jingle, signaling that the author had left. I finally grabbed a copy of The Perks of Being a Wallflower (it was a euro cheaper than the other YA paperbacks) and took it to the checkout desk. The bookstore clerk looked up and dog-eared his page in the book he was reading.

That’s when I lost any semblance of cool.

No one should be allowed to look that good and work in a bookstore.

Seriously, this guy looked like he had jumped straight off of a romance novel cover. His eyes were absurdly piercing. I wanted to roll a marble down his slicked-back hair. And the way he wore his tank top, light and loose, with tattoos and muscles peeking out from underneath it—they stopped me so hard in my tracks I said a little prayer for all the men and women who had fallen before me.

He was immediately friendly. All, “Perks! Wow. Great pick. I haven’t read that one in forever.”

And I was immediately a fool. Awkward. Clumsy.

The man rang me up and handed me my receipt, and he was prepared to send me off like any other customer, when I blurted, “I’m only in town for a couple days, and I was kind of wondering what there is to do . . . in town?”

He smiled, like any friendly person would, and I think my shoulders actually melted into my chest. He ripped a piece of paper off a notebook to the left of his desk (sadly, that was the only thing he ripped off) and started writing.

“I assume you don’t want the tourist traps, like the Colosseum and the Sistine Chapel . . . not that they’re not historically important! But you can find those recommended in any guidebook . . . Oh! There’s this gorgeous park, Giardino degli Aranci, which is lovely in and of itself, but if you go, you have to find the keyhole. It has the most jaw-dropping view of Rome. Like, you get the most incredible view of Saint Peter’s Basilica through it.”

He also wrote down a couple of bar and restaurant recommendations.

“Are you old enough to drink?” he asked.

“I don’t . . . know,” I said. What I started to say was I don’t drink, but that wasn’t true. Not after senior year.

“The drinking age here is eighteen,” the book clerk said, twirling his pen on his finger, and in that moment, he was a magician. He was straight-up Cedric Diggory. “I can’t believe it’s still twenty-one in the States.”

I used to genuinely think I’d never drink alcohol. Neither of my parents drink, and I have relatives who call alcohol poison, so it seemed straightforward to me. But Jackson had changed my mind on drinking, among other things.

“In that case, I’m old enough,” I told the bookseller.

He started to write something else but scribbled it out. “If only you were staying a bit longer,” he said. “My partner just opened a bar—well, not a bar, a cultural association—and the official opening is in a couple of days . . .”