“We made it,” I said when we finally got to the beach. It was an exhausting walk, but during that time, Baekhyun and I had opened and learned so much about each other. Turns out we both enjoyed the Harry Potter books. Who knew?

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Yeah. Look, I had a really great time today.”

“Me, too.”

“You’re so different from any other girl I’ve ever known,” he admitted with laughter in his voice.

“Different weird, different annoying?” I asked, afraid of what he might say, but I had to know.

“Different surprising,” he countered. He put his hand in mine. I looked down at our intertwined hands with a smile. “In the best way.”

I looked up at him. He continued to explain, “I mean, you say things to me everyone else is afraid to say, and you make me see things about myself that I can’t see.”

Trying to hide the rising blush on my cheeks, I looked down at my feet to calm down before I can look back up at me to reveal, “You’re pretty surprising, too.”

“Really? How?’

“Well, for one thing, you’re a terrible driver,” I started, and he groaned, “which is strange for a guy with six cars.”

“I’m wounded.”

We let out small sounds of laughter. I mustered up the courage to ask the question that’d been bugging me for a while. “Do you, uh, really think I’m bossy?”

Baekhyun stopped walking to face me and look at me. “No. I think you’re amazing,” he said honestly.

“I think you’re amazing, too,” I returned with a smile. He cocked his head a little, and I looked at his lips, filled with a sudden urge to kiss him. I could see him wanting to kiss me too. He leaned in closer, and before I could stop myself, I did so as well.

But our lips were still at least three inches away when Baekhyun’s eyes widened at the sound of two surfers talking as they passed by us. In an instant, he turned his back to them and pulled out my grandpa’s hat to stuff onto his head.

I laughed at his odd behavior. “What are you doing?”

He glanced at them over his shoulder and sighed. “Whoo, that was close.” I smiled, albeit uneasily. He shook himself quickly as if coming out of a daze. “Okay, uh, back to the real world. Um,” he searched for the words. “You know what happens next, right?”

I shook my head and shrugged. “No.”

“This ends here.”

“What does?” I really didn’t understand what he was going on about.

“This. Us. You can’t tell anybody about what