“
Jacob!” I call, not minding when my voice echoes off the library building, so loud he and his friends turn to me.
For once, Jacob doesn’t look sure what he wants to do, whether he wants to stop or keep going. But I do. I know. I shut the car door behind me and venture into the Unknown. His walls are up, fortified by days and days of silence. To my relief, while his face is carefully blank, he doesn’t turn away when I near.
I feel his friends, both guys and girls, watching me. And I realize this might be a colossal mistake, a public humiliation. Maybe Jacob is seeing someone else now. Maybe he’ll never forgive me. His friends draw behind him like bodyguards.
I have no words, just myself and this piece of used paper, which I hold out to him.
Jacob takes my note silently and reads the two coordinates. “What’s this?” he asks gruffly.
This is what I want, I tell myself. He, of all people, is worth this risk of being transparent, of letting him know how I feel, what I want. So despite his friends who are watching, I straighten, throw my hair over my shoulder, and stand before him, utterly vulnerable.
“A geocache,” I say.
“A geocache.”
“If you’ve got the guts to find it.”
For the first time, his eyes glint with something like amusement, something like curiosity. “Well,” he drawls, “that depends on the cache.”
I shrug and shake my head. “It’s a new one. No one has ever found it.”
“So tell me more.”
“It’d take . . . oh, gosh, an entire day at least to tell you all about it.”
“I’ve got time,” he says easily. “Give me a clue.”
“You?” I ask in mock horror. “You, an expert geocacher, are asking for a clue?”
“For especially gnarly caches, I make exceptions.”
“Gnarly?” I frown.
“Complicated,” he amends. The beginning of his crooked smile begins to form, and the murky Unknown solidifies into familiar terrain. “So what’s the cache called?”
That, I hadn’t prepped for. So I improvise: “I’m a Moron and I’m So Sorry. But then really good geocachers know it by its nickname: I’ve Missed You So Much.” A breeze tangles my hair, and when Jacob reaches out to brush a strand off my cheek, the tension releases in me.
”
”