“Jamie! My goodness!”

At the sound of a shrill female voice, I opened my eyes to see a scandalized Tilly standing on the front steps of the Atholl Arms.

“You are the last young man I expected to see ravishing a lady in a carriage!”

“He wasn’t,” I hastened to explain as I scrambled over Jamie and out of the sleigh. “I mean, it was a consensual ravishing.”

“The Consensual Ravishing,” Jamie said, as I knew he would the minute that idiotic sentence left my mouth.

As the cameraman hopped off the front of the sleigh, I realized I’d been making out with Jamie literally in front of the camera. Oh my God. I sank deeper into my seat, burning with mortification. How could I possibly have let my guard down? I had played right into TRC’s manipulative hands. I hated to admit it, but maybe Dusty had been right, and you did adjust to the camera eventually—because the minute I closed my eyes and started kissing Jamie, I had totally, completely forgotten it existed. And now Dusty and Mom and all the randos from the back of my calculus class were going to see it.

“At least you’re still all buttoned up, poor duck,” Tilly clucked as she bustled me out of the sleigh and into the warmth of the inn. “Loose hands of an aristocratic roué and all.”

“Aristocratic roué?” I mouthed at Jamie.

He shrugged wildly and mouthed back something that looked like “Romance novels.”

“I expected more.” Tilly waggled her finger at Jamie.

“Blame it on the moonlight, Tilly. I suppose we got a bit carried away.”

“Hmph. Moonlight,” she snorted. “Give me your coats, then, and off to dinner with ye.”

Jamie helped me out of my coat and handed it to her. We followed Tilly’s stiff back as she marched down the hall. The Christmas decorations at the Atholl Arms appeared to have multiplied since the last time we’d been there. At the end of the hall, just past a mounted deer head wearing a Santa hat, she pushed open the door to a private dining room. The walls were decked out with glowing candles and green garlands. In the middle of the room an elaborate table was set for two. And, in the corner, I kid you not, there was a string quartet. In tuxedos. As we entered the room, they raised their bows and began playing a sweet melody.

A wave of something that felt disconcertingly like nausea rocked me.

“Excuse me,” I said abruptly as I began backing out of the room past a very confused Tilly. “I have to go.”

“Dylan, are you quite all right?” Jamie asked with concern.

“Yeah, yeah.” I waved him away as he reached out for me. “I’ll just, um, be a minute.”

And just like Heaven had at the Cineplex on her first date with Tate Moseley, I bolted for the girls’ bathroom.

The cameraman followed me for a bit, but I shut the bathroom door in his face when it blessedly appeared right off the lobby. Let him go film Tilly and Jamie and the string quartet. I just needed a minute. By myself. With no one looking at me.

Myself. Ha. I caught a glimpse of a girl in the mirror above the sink. I had no idea who she was. I rubbed at my eye, watching my makeup smear.

I sank to the floor, relishing the cool tile at my back. Despite the cloying scent of the potpourri, I felt like I could breathe a little easier in here, with no one’s eyes on me.

A knock at the door.

“Go away!” I yelled.

A knock again.

“You can’t film me in the bathroom! I’m pretty sure that’s illegal!”

“I’m not trying to film you.” Jamie. “May I come in?”

“Um. Sure.”

He slid into the small bathroom, shutting the door quickly behind him, keeping it closed with his back. The cameraman was probably hot on his heels out there.

“What on earth are you doing down there?”

“Just, um, taking a minute,” I answered.

“May I join you?”

I nodded as he slid down the wall next to me and pulled his knees into his chest.

“So this is the ladies’ room,” he observed. “Pinker, on the whole. Equally floral.” He inhaled deeply. “Smells about the same, shockingly.”

“I think that’s the potpourri.” I pointed to a basket of what looked like wood chips resting on the counter.

“Keenly observed, as per usual, Dylan.” He cleared his throat. “While we are on the subject of observation, I may not be a dating expert, but I imagine that one’s date hiding in the loo is generally not a favorable sign.”

“Sorry,” I whispered.

“Did I do something wrong?”

“No. No!” I rushed to explain. When I looked up I hated myself for causing that wrinkle of concern to furrow between his brows. “You did everything right. Maybe too right?”

“Too right?” he repeated.

“This is all so nice but it’s all just…a little much.”

“I see,” he said stiffly.

“It’s not bad, Jamie! It’s perfect. But I’m not a princess.”

“Not yet, at any rate. Shall we see how the next season of Prince in Disguise proceeds?”

“Hilarious.” I knocked my shoulder against his. “But you know what I mean.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“This just felt like too much…pressure.”

“Pressure?”

“To be perfect. For me to be perfect,” I explained. “Because this date is perfect. And I am so not. It just felt like too much.”

“Dylan,” he said after a pause, “why do you think I have so many poems memorized?”

“Because you’re really smart,” I answered immediately even though I had no idea where he was going with this.

“Oh. Erm, thank you.” He blushed. “But I can assure you I am of most decidedly average intelligence. That’s certainly not why I know so many poems.”

“Then why?”

“I’ve spent rather a lot of time in libraries. I never made friends easily, in school. Still don’t, as a matter of fact.”

“Me neither,” I said. “I’m so lucky Heaven sat down next to me on the first day of kindergarten and decided we were going to be best friends.”

“I would have been exceedingly grateful for a Heaven of my own,” he said fervently. “But as it was, I quickly found I preferred to spend my time in the library. Fictional friends never found me strange.”

“I get that.”

“I have no experience with real-life romance, Dylan, but quite a bit with love stories. You are the first girl I’ve ever asked out,” he admitted shyly. “And I wanted it to be perfect. I wanted Jane Austen to wet herself at the romance of it.”

“Jane Austen would have peed all over this date.”

“That is a truly horrifying mental image.”

“Sorry.” I hid my face in my hands. “I’m not good with romance.”

“I suppose I overdid it a bit.”

“No!” I popped my head back up. “You didn’t! The problem isn’t you, it’s me. This date was completely perfect. For a normal girl. Not a weirdo freak like me. You deserve someone who loves this stuff, who’ll get swept up in the romance right along with you. Someone who wants all kinds of attention. Not someone who’d rather be invisible.”

“I want you, Dylan.”

He tilted my chin up with his hand.

“And you could never be invisible.” He leaned in, and before I knew it, we were kissing. On the bathroom floor. Which was horribly unhygienic and probably disgusting, but was also somehow…perfect.

Knock, knock, knock.

“Just a minute!” we shouted in unison, then grinned at each other.

“If you’re not peeing, you have to let me in or get out of the bathroom.”

“He speaks!” Jamie whispered in amazement.

“I thought they’d taken a vow of silence,” I whispered back.

“Seriously, guys,” the cameraman continued, banging on the door. “Come out.”

“We’re coming!” I trilled. “Come on.”

I sprang up to my feet—weak ankles be damned—and pulled Jamie up with me. We swung open the bathroom door and the cameraman leaped out of the way.

“So if we were at home in Tupelo,” Jamie asked as we walked into the lobby, “where would we have gone on a date?”

“Well, we probably would have just, like, hung out in a big group in someone’s basement a couple times first.”

“Naturally. Terribly romantic, basements.”

“Then maybe we would have gone to the movies.” I was basing all of my Tupelo dating knowledge on Heaven and Tate Moseley. “Or gotten a burger or something.”

“The movie I cannot do, but would you like a burger?”

“I would always like a burger.”

“Then burgers we shall have.”

He started walking confidently toward the bar at the end of the lobby.

“I’m sorry, Jamie.” I pulled him to a stop.

“No, no, Dylan, please. I’m sorry. I suppose it was a bit much.”

“It was nice, I swear. It was just that pressure…”

“To be perfect. I know,” he said ruefully. “Well, then you understand perfectly how I felt as I attempted to plan our first date.”

“So you planned this? Not TRC?”

“Oh, no, this was all me.” He led me into the pub. We passed empty wooden tables and corner booths on our way up to the bar. “Actually, TRC had to rein me in quite a bit.”

“Thank you.” I squeezed his hand. “This is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.”

“Even if you hated it.”

“I didn’t hate it!” I protested as he pulled a barstool out for me. I swung myself up onto the stool, resting my elbows on the bar. “It was awesome. I swear. I just—I don’t like being in the spotlight.”

He looked at me quizzically.

“I mean I don’t like people looking at me.”

“Who’s looking at you?” He looked around the pub, confused. The few people in there were ignoring us completely.

“You are,” I said in a quiet voice. And the camera was, too.

“Well, that, unfortunately, I suppose you’ll have to get used to. For I’ve found I can’t look away.” That was the kind of thing that would have made me roll my eyes if I heard it on TV, but hearing it from Jamie, so sincere, made me feel like maybe there was something here to believe in. Not something to be scared of. “Two cheeseburgers with chips, please,” he instructed the surly bald barman, who nodded once, then returned to wiping out glasses.

One song faded out as another started—something cheesy and eighties. The kind of thing Mom liked to listen to when she got ready in the morning.

“Will you dance with me, Dylan?”

“Dance with you?” I looked around. There certainly wasn’t anything that even remotely resembled a dance floor. “Here?”

“It’s hardly romantic. The cigarette butts and the low drone of the telly. Surely you can’t object.”

He was wrong—it was incredibly romantic. No one had ever asked me to dance at an actual dance, let alone created a dance floor where none existed for the sole purpose of dancing with me. But I let him pull me to his chest anyway, and we swayed back and forth, my heels making little sucking noises each time they pulled up from the sticky floor.

“I want to know what love is,” Jamie warbled along, off-key.

“Sometimes it’s okay to be quiet,” I whispered in his ear.

“Let’s be quiet, then,” he agreed as he held me in his arms.

And we were.