I shouldn’t have watched. I knew that then. I don’t even know why I did in the first place. Pan and Rikky were outside— I knew they were—and I was going over to join them, but instead I stood there like a creeper.
And I saw her kiss him.
And I saw him kiss her back.
And I saw him stop. He put his hand on her shoulder and pulled away.
And I heard him say, loudly, “This isn’t a good idea, Rikky.”
She didn’t say anything, but she moved forward, like she meant to try again, so this time he took a full step back.
That’s when I decided I’d watched enough (too much, really), and I knew it shouldn’t hurt, but it did. Pan wasn’t really my anything. I had no claim to him, and even if I did, she had kissed him. He had stopped it. Almost right away.
Pan had done nothing wrong.
Neither had Rikky.
But I wish I hadn’t seen him kiss her.
Or at least I wish I had kissed him first. Before I had seen him kissing her in the mist.
I went back to my room and I pulled the blanket over my head and I wished I didn’t feel this way. I wished I didn’t feel sick to my stomach. But mostly I wished I would fall asleep and feel better tomorrow.
It ended up being a little of both. I fell asleep relatively quickly, after a brief obligatory bout of tossing and turning, and I woke up feeling a little better but not great.
I didn’t really know how to act around Pan. Or Rikky, for that matter. Which made for a very awkward farewell. It didn’t help that the conversation between Pan and Rikky was very stilted, full of lots of “ums” and “uhs” and very little eye contact.
Things finally started to feel more relaxed when Pan and I were miles down the road. Until then, we’d been traveling in silence, but then he switched radio stations, flipping over to Elton John. He turned it up and sang along to “Rocket Man,” and eventually I joined in.
“I’m really surprised you knew that one,” he commented once the song had finished, and he turned the radio down. “I didn’t think you guys listened to a lot of pop music in those really isolated villages where you grew up.”
“We do, sorta.” I shrugged. “The changelings bring a lot of pop culture back with them, and everyone everywhere knows about the Beatles and Star Wars. But I would say generally speaking our tastes tend to be a little dated. In Iskyla, I heard a lot of Cher, Diana Ross, and Elton John.”
“That doesn’t sound all that dissimilar to music in my house growing up,” he said with a laugh.
We lapsed into a silence, but it didn’t last long before Pan broke it with, “Are you done talking to me until another classic rock song?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “You haven’t been talking much this morning, and it seems like something is wrong.”
I slouched down in the seat, staring out the window as desert landscape rolled by. “No, everything’s fine. I’m just nervous about getting back.”
“Have you heard back from Sylvi yet?” he asked.
“No, but I’ve decided to take that as a good sign.”
“I’ll try to put in a good word for you, for whatever my word is worth to her.”
“Thanks. I’ll take whatever I can get, and Sylvi definitely likes you more than she likes me,” I said, which only made him laugh.
“She’ll warm to you. It just takes time,” he assured me.
“If you say so.”
“Hey, I warmed to you eventually.”
“What?” I looked sharply at him. “You didn’t like me at first?”
He nodded. “Oh, yeah. For the first thirty seconds or so, I was really on the fence about you. And then you said, ‘Hello.’”
I smiled. “That’s what did it for you?”
“Yep.” He barely suppressed his own laughter. “That’s what won me over. I’ve always been partial to folks that know their greetings.”
“I’m glad I finally won you over.”
“Yeah, me too,” he agreed.
Phoenix, Arizona, was roughly the halfway point in our nearly thirty-four-hour drive back to Oregon, so we stopped at a little motel on the side of the highway. Neither of us were exactly flush with cash, so we chose the cheapest option. It was a little rundown and still had physical metal keys for the doors, but it looked clean enough, and we got two queen beds in our room.
“You want the bed by the window?” Pan pointed to the poppy-patterned bedspread. “I’ll take the one by the door?”
“Sure. Whatever you want.” I tossed my duffel bag on the bed. “Is it cool if I use the bathroom first? I ate way too much sugar on the road, and I really gotta brush my teeth.”
“Yeah, go ahead. I was gonna call Dagny anyway.”
I’d begun gathering up my toiletries, but I stopped. “Dagny?”
“Yeah, since she’s been dog-sitting Brueger for me, I wanted to call and check in,” he reminded me as he pulled his phone out of the pocket of his snug jeans.
When he’d asked Dagny to take care of his dog, I’d been there. Technically, Brueger the Belgian Malinois was the property of the city of Merellä, used to herd the giant woolly elk. But Brueger had been sleeping at Pan’s apartment since he was a puppy, and he didn’t think it was fair to ask him to sleep out in the barn.
“Tell her hi for me,” I said before ducking into the bathroom.
I freshened up, and when I turned the tap off, I could hear him through the door, talking on the phone first to Dagny—in his normal voice, thanking her again—then to Brueger, in a slightly higher-pitched, excitable tone, asking him if he’s a good boy.
I put a hand over my mouth to silence my giggle, but I won’t lie that it made me feel like taffy left in the sun all day—so warm and gooey and strangely pleasant.
When I came out a few minutes later—having changed into light shorts and a tank top—Pan had gotten off the phone and changed into his own pajamas. Well, changed might have been too strong a word. He’d really just stripped down to his boxers, so he stood shirtless beside the bed.
“Is this okay?” He motioned toward himself. (And, for the record, he had that wonderful naturally lean, muscular physique that happened with taking care of yourself and a bit of good genetics, and not that insanely jacked superhero look, so he would still be soft when he held you, but I already knew that from when he’d hugged me, and from when we’d danced.)
“Sorry.” He apologized and reached for his shirt, and I realized I’d been staring at him, frozen, like a maniac. “You’re obviously not—”
I held my hand up to stop him. “No, it’s fine.”
“You sure?” He held his shirt like he meant to pull it over his head. “I did it because it’s hot in here.”
The air conditioner sputtered in the window, doing its best to slowly cool the room, but he wasn’t wrong. It was stuffy and warm in here.
I laughed, trying to break the tension of the moment. “It’s not that big a deal.” Then with a smirk I added, “I can sleep topless, if that’ll make you feel more comfortable.”
“I never realized that was an option, but yeah, yes. That would make me feel much more comfortable,” he said, so I threw a pillow at him, and he laughed.
“I should’ve known you’d answer that way,” I said as I climbed into the bed.
“I think you did know,” he countered before hopping into his bed.
“Good night, Panuk,” I said, before clicking off the lights.
“Good night, Ullaakuut.”
I heard the springs creaking and groaning as Pan got settled in. I double-checked my phone to make sure my alarms were set for the morning, and then I listened to the pathetic hum of the AC. He sighed, then rolled over. And then rolled over again.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yeah. I just…” He muttered something to himself that I couldn’t understand. “Was it because Rikky kissed me?”
“What?”
“You’ve been aloof with me today,” he said. “And … and last night, Rikky kissed me. I was wondering if there was a correlation.”
“Yeah, but not the one you think,” I admitted.
The thin motel curtains let in enough of the streetlight that I could see his silhouette as Pan propped himself up on an elbow. “What are you talking about?”
“She’s still so hung up on you.”
“She’s not—” he argued, but I cut him off.
“She really is, Pan. And you broke up with her because she wanted to go home and you wanted to stay in Merellä.”
“That’s not the only reason,” he interjected quietly.
“By the time we get back, I’ll have missed a week of my internship, and it ends three weeks from now,” I said. “Maybe even less, the way things are going.”
He waited a little bit before saying, “You could stay.”
“I might,” I admitted. “But I might not. I don’t know what I’m going to do yet.”
“Nobody knows what they’re going to do, not really,” he argued gently. “There’s no way I could’ve known that I’d ever be here, with you.”
“I know.” I stared up at the ceiling and the blinking red light of the smoke detector, and I thought carefully how to word what I felt. “It’s not that…” I sighed. “I want to figure out what I want to do first. My internship ends soon. And then I will make a decision about where I’ll be living, and then … then I’ll be open to dating.”
I grimaced in the darkness, hating how awkward and presumptuous it all sounded, but I didn’t see any way around the conversation. And I wasn’t sure I was saying the right things.
If Finn were here for me to ask, I know that he’d praise me for being responsible and making smart choices, which was definitely a recurring theme in the Holmes household. All the kids—including myself—were encouraged by both Finn and Mia to make smart choices, to use critical thinking and logic.
Of course, Hanna—who spent nearly the entirety of twelve years under the guidance of Finn and her mother—would be livid if she knew I was sort of turning Pan down.
That fact really did reaffirm that I was probably making the right decision by waiting to get involved with someone until I knew for sure what kind of commitment I could make.
But I was still thinking about how he looked shirtless, and that crooked smile that he had when we were dancing together, and the way his arms felt around me … and then I was wondering why I even made the decision to say no—
“So,” Pan said, interrupting my train of thought, “if I understand correctly, what you’re basically saying is the real-life equivalent of the Magic 8 Ball saying, ‘Reply hazy, try back later.’”
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t know Magic 8 Balls?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“It was a clunky joke anyway,” he said with a self-deprecating laugh. “I was really saying that you meant, ‘Not never, just not right now.’”
“Yeah, that is exactly it.”
Pan lay back down, his silhouette disappearing into the dark shadow of his bed. “That all sounds reasonable and mature.”
“Why do you sound so disappointed?” I asked.
“Because I can’t really argue it. You’re right.”
“Thank you,” I said, feeling rather disappointed with myself.