Sean exhales, his breath shaky. “You and me. Right. It’s just hard to see them together. I mean, they’re together, I knew they would go on dates, but to actually see them on one? And at the place we always went? Which I knew was going to happen since I brought us here in the first place, but wow. And why did I start sounding British? Getting through the shot list might be tougher than I thought.”

“Shot list?”

Sean pulls out his phone and shows me a series of events with a bunch of terminology I don’t understand: close-up, two shot, mid-shot.

“What is this?”

“Camera shots, directions for how things would look if this was a movie.”

“And we can do all of this before the full moon? Before my Journey is over?”

Sean nods. “It’ll be cutting it close, because the Pre-Prom Pier Fundraiser is the night of the full moon, but we’ll be there before sunset. If you prompose before the sun goes down, I know Dominic will do his grand love declaration there. He can’t resist the lure of a crowd. And who knows, maybe if we’re really believable, D could ask for me back before all that too.”

It makes me nervous that we’re planning this Journey right until the very last day, but I don’t have any other ideas. I look over the list again and notice a pretty glaring pattern.

“An awful lot of these include you and me kissing,” I say, and Sean’s face instantly goes red.

“I mean . . . I just thought . . . if we are really going to make Dominic jealous . . . God, I’m so stupid. And creepy, huh? This is never going to work.”

He looks like he could throw up, burst into tears, or rip out Dominic’s throat. Or all three.

“Hey, it’s going to be okay.” I pull Sean into a hug. His back is tense and broad beneath my fingers, and I realize how much bigger he is than me. Sean could completely wrap me up and create a protective bubble with his body. And it feels like something he would do, if he ever had to. I mean, he wanted to make sure some random stranger who washed up on the beach was okay. “Dominic is an idiot for needing this reminder of how great you are. Seriously. You give so much of yourself; you’d actually do pretty well in Pacifica.”

Sean pulls back. “Can I do that? Become a merman? It’d be nice to just jump in the ocean and forget the last few weeks.”