The differences in my mood were stark, volleying between comfortable enjoyment and unfamiliar distrust.

I couldn’t figure out what he had switched on in me, where he found the secret key hidden after it spent so many years collecting undisturbed dust. But proximity left me with no choice but to face it, embracing it a little more each day as all of the previously solitary hours of my days filled with him.

I just wondered if I was at all prepared to handle it. I had no real ruler against which to measure my feelings and reactions or the way he felt about me. I didn’t know how to navigate what was appropriate and what wasn’t or if any of it even mattered.

I just knew I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to.

Time seemed to speed up as he handed me the extra helmet out of his saddle bag and climbed astride as he strapped on his own. I wasn’t sure if my anxiety was playing with my perception of the passing of time or if it actually was fast, a desperate method by a man intent on keeping me from changing my mind.

All I knew is that one moment I was saying yes, and the next, I was climbing astride a motorcycle for the first time in my life with little instruction or insight into what I was getting myself into.

Three weeks of familiarity and long surreptitious forays into his eyes had me fairly confident that I wasn’t riding straight to my own murder, but other than that I knew nothing. I still had no personal information about his background or family or what had brought him here. His likes could be extrapolated from genuine smiles and warm excitement, but outside of gymnastics and tumbling, I hadn’t had all that much to apply it to.

And as someone who’d had her future mapped from the first few, not entirely clumsy, toddler steps, the notion of going in blind both boiled and iced over in the pit of my very unsure stomach.

“Nik,” I called as he started the bike and pulled my arms around his taut stomach.

His hand covered mine, and the feel of his fingers sliding through mine started to calm the riotous waters within before he even started to speak.

“Don’t worry, Cal,” he assured me, calling me by a nickname only ever used by my father. The sound of it from his endearing lips made fast work of changing it into something sought after rather than protected against. “I promise you’re going to love it.”

I rolled my eyes, and he laughed at the same time, clarifying, “Or, at the very least, live through it and feel no regret from having been there.”

He squeezed my hand again, and then lifted his hands to the grips, revving the throttle in a teasing exhibition of potential danger and releasing the clutch until we lurched forward in a slow roll.

A squeal escaped my lips uninhibited, and the muscles of his abdomen shook under my hand.

He turned right out of the parking lot and headed straight into the darkness of one of the most rural areas of our town, moving at a leisurely enough pace to set me at ease without adding an extra hour to our arrival time.

As first, I held on tight, focusing my eyes on the road like a professional grade laser in order to be prepared for catastrophe or mayhem. But as the minutes ticked by and the vibration between my legs dulled and smoothed out from adjustment, I finally started to settle.

Deep breaths once again passed through my lungs with ease, and the smell of saltwater tickled the tip of my nose with awareness.

“We’re heading for the water?” I tried to question over the roar.

I swore I could feel his smile all the way into the line of his body, but he didn’t answer.

The exhaust popped a couple of times as he cracked the throttle from open to closed, slowed us to a crawl, and turned off onto a sandy dirt path through a waist-high, grassy field.

I could hear the dull roar of waves, just barely whooshing over the more gravelly hum of his motorcycle.

I couldn’t see it, though, as he pulled to a stop at the back of a tall dune and killed the engine.

Silence rang loudly in my noise-expectant ears for the first few seconds, and his hands moved mine from his stomach to his shoulders in a nonverbal prompt to climb off.

I did as he asked, standing on one peg and swinging the other leg over the back of my seat. He followed me as soon as I cleared his space, reaching for my helmet as I unstrapped it and setting it gently on the seat where my butt had been.

When he had his helmet off too, he replaced it with his hat, having worn it nearly constantly since I’d made the comments about his hair, and reached for my hand.

I took it without hesitation, questioning only where we were going—and trusting him to guide me there.

We climbed the dune together with relative ease, but when we reached the top, I felt my breathing labor.

Stretched out before me, a similar path to the one we’d just been on sliced through another willowy, breezy-blown field, yawned into a beach, and led directly to the moonlit ocean. Blue crystals of gulf water seemed to shimmer above the surface, and the sand took on the motion of active glitter. But what really got me were the thousands upon thousands of lightning bugs that danced over the grass of the field, mirroring the luster of the sand and the ocean and perfectly tying together the fantastical location.

Nik waited patiently through my silence, doing nothing but squeezing my hand as a gasp of air escaped my lips.

“What is this place?”

“Well, I guess technically, it’s Riley Beach. The last place I know of this close to the ocean to have lightning bugs.”

I knew nothing about the habitat of lightning bugs, but his words suggested significance. I settled for believing him.

I shook my head in answer to my wonder, but I didn’t look at him—or away from the picture in front of me.

“But to me, it’s the place I come to feel close to my parents.”

“Why does this place make you feel close to your parents?” I asked, turning to look at him at the prompting of his tone.

He shrugged, looking out in front of us, and took one deep breath. “Because it’s impossible to see them again.” My free hand floated to my lips, just as he gripped the one resting in his. “And this place feels like magic.”

“Nik.”

“They died in a car accident six months ago.”

It was fact. It was an admission. It was a functionally large crack in his well-performing heart.

“I’m sorry,” I said, pouring my condolences into the two words and moving my hand from my mouth to his, cocooning it with my hands from both sides.

“Me too, Cal,” he whispered, moving his eyes from the beach to me. “That’s not why I brought you here, though, okay?”

My eyebrows pinched together and my lips lifted closer to my nose.

“I’m sad they’re gone. But they didn’t miss anything, you know? I’m happy and healthy and they raised me to be a person we’re all proud of. They loved each other more than most people think is natural, and they built a life for themselves in a country that wasn’t their own. They treated it like it was, though. You know, they never even talked about Russia to me. Never taught me a syllable of Russian, never enforced customs or traditions.”

I paid attention, trying to soak in all the things he spoke about with such positive conviction without making my own opposing judgements.

“I know,” he said, once again reading my traitorous face. “Trust me, my relatives thought it was crazy too. But see, to me, it was because they didn’t see themselves as Russian anymore. They were American, and so was their baby.” He shrugged his shoulder. “I’m not saying it was right or wrong, but it did make them happy. And now, with them gone what seems like so soon, I’m thankful for that.”

“Me too.”

Not knowing if I should but doing it anyway, I pushed it, noting, “They sure as hell gave you a Russian sounding name though, Nikolai.”