The heavy doors opened, and the last two people I expected to see staggered out into the gathering dawn: Stesha and Quattro. What were they doing here? Together? As soon as Quattro spotted me, he flushed. That momentary lowering of his self-confident guard made me yearn to photograph him again: Quattro, unplugged.
“Well, fancy meeting you here,” Stesha said, smiling as if she had anticipated this very encounter. “You’re up early.”
“I was just going to take some last pictures,” I said lamely, holding up my camera as proof that I wasn’t here to petition Saint Anthony. No, not me. No help needed in the boy department. I babbled on, “I thought I’d get a picture of this at dawn.”
Stesha waved at the entry of the cathedral. “We’ll wait.”
“No, you don’t have to. Really.”
“It’s not safe for you to be out alone. Do your parents know you’re here?”
“This is a small town,” I said, shrugging. “What could happen?”
“Anything!” Quattro retorted hotly, as if he were furious at me. I blinked at him. What was his problem?
“What he means is that tourists have been known to be robbed or kidnapped even here,” said Stesha smoothly. She nodded in the direction of the plaza. “We were just going to hunt for some coffee, but we can wait for you, right, Quattro?”
Feeling self-conscious and embarrassed, I could already hear my mom’s lecture once she found out that I had snuck out alone.
“Nah, I need caffeine, too,” I told them quickly, and swung my backpack around so I could stash away my camera. “I’ll grab the shot with Dad on our way home.”
Stesha studied me intently, just like Reb does when she feels compelled to tell me the hard truth in the most loving way possible. Whatever it was that Stesha wanted to say about safety, I didn’t want to hear any more, not with Quattro beside me. A girl can only look like so much of an idiot before any guy.
“It’s better this way. Dad would hate to miss out on this,” I said. Then, desperate to fill the growing silence, I found myself babbling about how my parents are so careful with money, we rarely go to coffee shops, much less restaurants, except on Sundays. “That’s when my brothers and I were treated to hot chocolate, and my parents got themselves their lattes,” I said, laughing. “We went to a different coffee shop every week.”
“An expedition at home,” Stesha translated.
I blinked at this reinterpretation of what I’d always seen as nothing more than a weekly treat.
“We used to do something like that, too,” said Quattro. “Only it was hiking. Our Saturday morning hike. My mom says her church was in the mountains.” A fraction of a second later, Quattro corrected himself, “Used to say.”
“I sometimes think people forget that they can have adventures without even leaving their homes,” Stesha said, leading us across the street.
As I followed, I cast a curious glance at Quattro, wondering what had happened to his mom, but his inadvertent slip wasn’t an opening for a deeper conversation. Instead, his mouth clamped tight, as firmly locked as the shuttered cafés lining the streets.
Defeated, Stesha sighed. “Well, there’s always the hotel, I suppose.” But when we reached the hotel, Ernesto, our driver, flagged her down from outside the van, where he’d been waiting for her. Whatever he needed to discuss, it looked urgent.
“Oh, dear,” Stesha sighed. “You two go on in.”
A good five feet separated Quattro and me before I even stepped foot in the lobby. If he’d hustled any faster toward the elevator, he would have set a world record for racewalking. Just before the door closed in front of him, Quattro mumbled something about needing to wake his dad for coffee—at least that’s what I guessed since I could only make out the words “wake” and “coffee” and “dad” before he left me standing there, alone.
My head rattled back and forth between disbelief and confusion. Waking his dad to join us for coffee was only a slight variant of my rarely invoked but highly effective “Oh, my parents have always wanted to try that restaurant! You mind if they come?” Plus, yesterday, I had seen with my own two eyes his father’s megalithic watch, which had more instruments than an airplane’s cockpit. Waking his dad up, my foot. I bet his father’s watch could have blared an alarm that could scare the entire hotel awake.
From behind me, I heard Stesha—my best friend’s grandmother, the woman who had committed to taking care of our needs this next week, the tour guide who vowed to transport us safely—chuckle. At me.
“I bet that doesn’t happen to you every day,” she said, not even bothering to hide her smirk. “That boy ran from you.”
“Whoa, for a second there, I thought it was Reb speaking.”
“Oh, thanks for reminding me. She said to remember that she met Jackson on a trip. Good karma, these trip romances.”
I blushed and informed Stesha that Quattro and I were both on relationship moratoriums. “So nothing’s going on.”