I looked away and he laid his head back down. “Thanks, I think,” I teased, and my stomach flipped when his face broke into the biggest smile I had seen on him yet.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I walked into the lobby and only Mali was there. She wasn’t paying any attention to my arrival and was busy cleaning. I was waiting for Kael when I got Elodie’s text with the BuzzFeed link. She was the queen of “Is It Your Fault You’re Single?” quizzes, and “Are Women Taking Over the Self-Employment Industry?” articles. This one was “25 Things You Need to Know About Twilight.” Trust me, I already knew every detail of those books and films and enjoyed crushing all the “hardest” quizzes. Elodie didn’t share my love for vampires falling in love with humans, so she mostly took the “What Kind of Toast Are You?” or “Choose a Day of Meals and We’ll Tell You Where to Travel” ones.

I started scrolling through the list and wasn’t surprised by how basic these “facts” were. It was public knowledge that New Moon was Robert Pattinson’s favorite book in the series. I kept reading, smiling at the pictures. Twilight was my comfort series and had been since I was a teenager. I had all the merchandise and my mom let me see each of the movies at midnight the night they released. I cried in my room when Kristen and Rob broke up. As I zoomed in on a picture of them in the quiz, I caught something moving from the corner of my eye. My phone fell out of my hands and Kael reached for it. He looked at the screen and then at me. I was mortified. Kristen’s stunning face stared up at me, even more zoomed-in than it was when I’d dropped it.

“Sorry, I—” I started to say.

“Do you apologize every time you speak?” he interrupted me. My cheeks burned.

“Um, no. I just . . .” I paused. He was right. Sorry was probably the most overused word in my vocabulary.

“What are you apologizing for? Being a Twilight fan?” he was laughing at me, biting his lower lip as it curled.

I joined him, smiling even though I was still slightly embarrassed.

“My sister started reading the books last summer and read them all in one week.”

A sister! My brain created a spreadsheet of questions to ask him.

“How old is she?” I started with one question instead of twenty.

“Fifteen.”

I wondered what she was like. If he was a sweet, protective older brother, and if she was as beautiful as he was.

“Aw. Does she live close?”

He shook his head. “Yes and no. Closer than most soldiers are to their families. But her and my ma are in Riverdale. Here in Georgia.”

“Ah, like the show?”