Not for the whole drive and not even at dinner, where he managed to down a whole burger, one-handed, without dropping a single pickle. I didn’t need any hands at all to eat, because I was afraid to add food to the strange fluttering in my stomach. Also, the gross way my hand was sweating was enough to kill my appetite. Why did human bodies produce disgusting fluids in response to romance?

He was still holding my hand when we wound up back at All Hours, which Dex called “our place.”

The coffee shop was crowded, but we found a tiny table tucked up against an inside wall, under a photo of Lina perched on the edge of a boat floating in impossibly clear water. She was decked out in a wet suit and surrounded by oxygen tanks she didn’t need.

Dexter caught me staring at the photo. “That’s going to be us, next year.”

“What do you mean?”

“Grad trip, senior year. Every Hope High senior class takes a big organized trip right after graduation, and Sydney and Sophia have decided we should go to a beach in Mexico, spring break–style.”

“Sounds a little cliché,” I said. Like a cautionary episode of every teen TV show I’d ever watched.

“Agreed, but when Syd and Soph want something . . . well, you know.”

I smiled. “I do know.”

“Crazy that graduation is less than two years away,” he said with wonder. “Sometimes I feel like we’re all still just kids.”

He took a sip of his drink. “Except for Poe, I guess. He’s an old soul.”

Old soul.

Could a soul age, even if the body and mind remained frozen in time? Was I really a hundred years older than Dexter? And if so, did that make me some kind of pervert?

A guy with a guitar hopped up on a stool near the shop’s front window and started an acoustic set that made it a little harder to talk, so Dex and I mostly held hands and listened to the music.

Lina was hustling around, tending to customers, and she caught my eye only a few times. I was grateful to her for giving us some space, though at one point, I did catch her watching us with a sadness in her eyes. I wondered if she saw herself and Sal in me and Dexter.

We stayed until the music wound down, and the shop cleared out. Dex suggested we get our last coffees to go, and he switched to decaf.

Amateur.

Lina brought the drinks to our table and flopped into a chair with perfectly faked exhaustion. “I’m beat.”

“Busy night,” Dex commented. “Someone should bring you a coffee.”

A mischievous twinkle lit up her eyes. “That’s an excellent idea, O’Shea. Why don’t you hop behind that coffee bar and pour me one?”