Page 65 of When We Believed in Mermaids

“Mountain Dew was an actual magic elixir. Do you know Mountain Dew?”

He nods.

“There were kitchen fairies and mermaids who moved things around to make the grown-ups crazy.”

“Sounds happy,” he says.

“That part of it,” I agree.

“And your sister, what was she like?”

I take a breath. “Beautiful—not just pretty but really beautiful, with this amazing, bright light around her all the time. Everyone loved her, but none of them loved her as much as I did.”

He brings the hand he smoothed up to his mouth, kisses my knuckles. “You must miss her so very much.”

I nod and take my hand back on the pretext of wanting to eat. “Your turn. What did you love as a child?”

“Books,” he says with a laugh. “I loved to read more than anything. My father grew angry with me—‘Javier, you need to run! You need to play with the other boys. Go outside.’” He lifts a shoulder. “I only wanted to lie in the grass and think about other worlds, other places.”

“What did you read?”

“Whatever I could find—” He makes apsshting sound, sends his hand out in a gesture of circles through the air. “Adventure and mysteries and ghost stories. Whatever.”

“You still love reading, don’t you?”

“You don’t?”

“I like to read. I just don’t like to work hard to read. I like books that take me away the same way television or the movies do.”

“Like what?”

I frown and then reach for my phone, where all the books are listed in my reader. Scrolling through it, I say, “Okay, in the past few months I’ve read two historical romances, a mystery by a woman I like because I can trust her not to get too dark, and a cooking memoir.”

“Romance? Are you seeking love,gatita?”

“No,” I say definitively. “Passion ruined my family’s lives. I make it a practice to avoid it.”

“Love is not always destructive,” he says quietly, and slides a finger up my shin. “Sometimes love creates.”

I’m unexpectedly caught by something in his voice, a promise I can barely see, shimmering faintly on the horizon, and that scares me enough to throw out a gauntlet. “Tell me a time that love didn’t destroy what it first created.” He is divorced, clearly not involved with anyone. “In your own life,” I add.

He nods, stretching out sideways in front of me, close enough to touch my knee. I could press my palms to his shoulder, his head, but I don’t. I keep my arms crossed, one hand cradling the wine.

“When I was seventeen, a girl came to our neighborhood. She had the shiniest hair I had ever seen, and pretty ankles, and I could not find my voice to talk to her, but one day we met at the library, in the very same row. She was looking for the very same book I was.”

I’m tempted to brush the hair on his temple away from his face, but I don’t. “What book?”

“Stephen King,The Shining,” he says, and smiles up at me. “You thought it would beDon Quixote, yes?”

I smile. “Maybe.”

“We spent so much time reading and talking about reading. And soon we read each other, you know, both of us virgins.”

A ping snaps my chest, bringing me a memory of myself at seventeen, the first time I made love, to a boy I worked with at Orange Julius. James. How I loved him!

Javier continues. “With her, I learned about how easy sex can be.”

Something in my expression must give me away, because he says, “Who taught you that lesson?”