by Claire Adams
I swallowed hard and nodded. Finally, I felt him begin to slow down, and I let out a breath that I hadn't realized I'd been holding. I rubbed at my wrist, trying to get feeling back in my hand.
“Are you okay?” Josh asked gently, glancing over at me.
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
The Lamborghini continued to slow, but I couldn't see the blue truck anywhere behind us. “Getting locked up for going twice the speed limit would really put a damper on my road trip,” Josh said wryly.
I tried to smile, but I couldn't quite manage it.
“Hey,” Josh said, reaching over and taking my hand. “I'm sure that was just some stupid stunt.”
“Who the hell pulls a stunt like that?” I asked, my voice shrill.
Josh shrugged. “Probably some asshole teenagers who thought it would be funny,” he said. “They picked us out because of the car, nothing else.”
“That car's been following us since LA, though,” I insisted.
“Like I said, they're probably just going the same direction as us for the holidays,” Josh soothed. Something about the way he averted his eyes from me had me feeling ill. Did he know something I didn’t?
“But we took extra days in Vegas!”
Josh sighed, his thumb stroking gently over my knuckles. “I'm sure it's nothing,” he maintained. “We'll call the highway patrol as soon as one of us gets a signal, but there's nothing else we can do.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, wishing I could calm down. But despite Josh's reassurances and his soft touches on my hand, I was still shaken.
I got reception on my phone just then, and I quickly dialed the highway patrol number. “Hi, my name is Kylie Summers, and I'm driving along I-80 between Denver, Colorado and Lincoln, Nebraska,” I told the man on the other end.
“And let me guess, you need a tire changed,” the man said. “We can send someone out there right away. Do you know what mile marker you're at?”
“No, that's not the problem,” I said. “It's, just a little while ago, this blue truck started tailgating our car. Even when we sped up, it still kept creeping closer to us. And it was honking like crazy.”
“Is there a chance they were trying to get you to pull over for some reason?” the man asked, sounding bored.
“To kill us, maybe!” I said, unable to stop myself. Josh's hand tightened around mine.
But the highway patrolman just laughed. “I'm sure that's not what they were trying to do,” he said. “But we'll see if we can track down the vehicle, in any case. Can you give me a description of it?”
“It's this really ugly blue truck,” I told him. “It's been following us since California.”
Josh gave me a disapproving look when I said that, and I knew it was probably because he didn't think it was the same vehicle. But the more I thought about it, the surer I was that it was the same one.
“Do you happen to have a license plate for it?” the patrolman asked. “I'm afraid 'ugly blue truck' doesn't narrow it down enough.”
I sputtered. In my panicked state, I hadn't thought to get the license plate number. Now that I thought about it, I wasn't sure that it had a license plate on the front of it. Or maybe they'd just been too close behind us for me to be able to see that low on the vehicle.
“I don't know the license plate number,” I admitted, biting my lower lip. “But there can't be too many trucks like it out there on the 80,” I insisted. “It's pale blue, not quite baby blue but almost there, and it's got all sorts of dents in it. And rust, lots of rust. And it's older.”
“Did you get a look at the driver?” It was a reasonable question.
“No. The windows were tinted, and it’s not like I was driving right beside him.”
“Seems odd. What type of car are you driving?”
“We're in my friend's Lamborghini,” I told him. “I can give you the license plate number for that one, if you need. And my phone number, in case you need to contact us again.”
“Are you telling me that your Lamborghini couldn't outpace an old blue truck on a flat stretch of highway 80?” the man asked, and I could practically hear him rolling his eyes. I didn't have a response for that outside of frustration.
“I don’t know what to tell you. If any of this made sense, I wouldn’t be calling you, right?” I held back a growl.
“Look, my best advice for you is to stay ahead of it,” the man finally said, sounding a bit exasperated. “We'll look into the situation, but as I said, there's not much that we can do, especially since there wasn't an accident.”
“Right,” I said, swallowing thickly. “Thank you for your time.” I hung up the phone and looked over at Josh, feeling tears prick the corners of my eyes.
“It's going to be fine,” Josh said. He grinned. “I'd pull over and help you calm down, but then they might catch us again.”
I shook my head. “Not funny,” I whispered.
Josh kissed my knuckles and wisely didn't say anything else.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Josh
I fell back across the hotel bed in Lincoln the moment that we entered the room. “God, I'm exhausted,” I groaned, draping an arm over my eyes.
Kylie shut the door with a soft snick, and a moment later, she was burrowing against my side, her head resting on my chest. I put an arm around her shoulders, feeling how tense she still was. I didn't want to let on how spooked I had been when that truck had come up behind us, because no matter how spooked I had been, I knew that she was far more freaked out.
I lightly stroked my hand across her back, wishing that there was something I could say to dispel her tension. But the best thing to do was probably move on and refrain from mentioning the incident.
“Driving like this is hard work,” I told her. “I can't even tell you how sore my arms and my hands are.”
“I could drive,” Kylie said, not for the first time.
“Oh no,” I said, shaking my head. “You are not driving my baby.”
Kylie pulled away from me and propped herself up on her elbows, looking down at me. “Is this some sort of sexist thing?” she asked. “Should I be offended?”
“I wouldn't even let a professional race car driver, male or female, behind the wheel of my Lamborghini,” I told her. “I don't mean anything by it. I'm not critiquing your driving skills. But there's no way in hell you're driving my car. No matter how worn out I am. I just wish we had more time, so we could take a rest day.”
“It's probably better that I'm not driving,” Kylie mused, a faraway look in her eyes. “I don't even know what I would have done today if I'd been driving when that truck came up behind us. I definitely wouldn't have been comfortable driving as fast as you did.”
“I wasn't particularly comfortable going 140, either,” I admitted. “I just did what needed to be done to put some distance between us.”
“Yeah,” Kylie said. She shook her head and smiled at me. “Anyway, I guess it's just boys with their toys, huh?”
I started to respond, but my phone rang just then. I answered it without looking to see who it was. Of course, it was Mark.
“All right, Josh, it's that time,” he said, with no preamble. “I need you to get yourself here tomorrow. I've scheduled a full set of meetings for you over tomorrow and the next day in our office. We should have everything figured out by the following day, and then we can all sign the paperwork and process it into the system before the holidays. How does that sound?”
“I need a 100 percent guarantee that I'm not wasting my time,” I said.
“You're not wasting your time,” Mark assured me, and from the mischievous note to his voice, I had a feeling that what he was really saying was that the guys in the office had agreed that they needed my investment. They just wanted to meet with me in person so that they could make sure they were getting the best deal possible for them.
Fair enough.
“I'll be there,” I promised Mark. “Tomorrow.”
�
��See you tomorrow, then,” Mark said, hanging up the phone.
When I hung up as well, it was silent in the room. Kylie was carefully not looking at me.
“So that's it, then?” she asked, picking at a loose thread on the comforter.
“That's it, then,” I sighed.
I wanted to say something more to her, maybe to apologize, but at the same time, I didn't want to restart the argument that we'd had earlier. Anyway, I had nothing to apologize for. I had been upfront with her that I might need to leave for work, and there was no reason why I shouldn't leave for this.
Kylie started to say something and then broke off, staring glumly down at her hands. I wondered if she was trying to make me feel guilty so that I would stay. But finally, she simply nodded. When she looked up at me, her eyes were clear, hiding any emotion that she might be feeling.
“Well, at least I'll get a free first-class flight out of this.”
“Probably two of them,” I told her with a wince. “I doubt you'll be able to fly direct from Lincoln to New York, unfortunately. More likely, you'll have to go through either Chicago or Minneapolis. But I'll get my travel agent to figure out all the details for you.”
“Of course you have a travel agent,” Kylie said, rolling her eyes.
“I don't use her very often,” I said defensively.
“I've never flown first-class before,” Kylie continued, and I could tell she was trying to look on the bright side.
I also knew, from past experience, that whenever Kylie was trying this hard to look on the bright side of something, it meant that she was actually really upset. It happened whenever she went through a breakup, or when she failed that communications paper during our junior year of college. I hated that I had been the one to make her upset, but I didn't know what I could do to fix it. I couldn't promise to stay.
“You're in for a real treat,” I told her instead. “All you can drink, plus comfortable seats and good food. You'll love it.”
“Sounds great,” Kylie said.
“And next year, we'll go on that cruise,” I told her jokingly. “It'll be more fun than the road trip anyway. No assholes in a blue truck behind us.”
Kylie smiled wanly at that. “How are you going to get your car back to LA?” she asked. “If you're so keen on not letting anyone else drive it.”
“I'll have it shipped,” I said carelessly, wondering why she cared. “They take cars like that on trains all the time.”
“I'm surprised you trust it on a train,” Kylie said.
“Come on, don't get me thinking up horror stories about things that could happen to my car,” I scolded teasingly.
Kylie smiled and continued picking at that loose thread. I could tell she wanted to say something else, so I waited for her to go on.
“What if you left it here and bought us both round-trip tickets?” she asked. “We could meet back here after the holidays and drive back.”
I sighed. “First of all, I don't like the idea of leaving a fancy car in Lincoln, Nebraska for any longer than I have to,” I told her. “But beyond that, I'm not sure that I can commit to coming back out here and driving home.”
“I know your hands are tired, but I'm sure if you gave them a few days off, they'd be back to normal,” Kylie said. “And we could go through Denver on the way back. You said that you wanted to spend more time there, didn't you?”
“I did say that,” I acknowledged. “But I'm not sure what my work schedule is going to be like after the holidays. I know you think that I've been working a lot on this trip, but I've been working a fraction of what I would normally work in a week. And that means that I'm already starting to fall behind on things. I don't want to start the new year with that feeling. I think it would be best for me to head back home and get my affairs in order again.”
Kylie bit her lower lip. “What happens to us, once we're back in LA?” she asked.
“You mean, are we still friends with benefits, once we're home?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Kylie said, barely audible.
I sighed and ran a hand back through my hair. “Kylie, this has been fun, but I don't know what's going to happen once we get home,” I told her, even though I hated to think that this might be the end of whatever it was that we'd been doing over the past week. “I'm going to be busy. And I bet you are as well. You're taking a lot of time off your art, coming on this trip. We weren't in very close contact before the trip, and I have to assume that after it's over, things are going to be just the same. I'm sorry, but I think we're just going to have to play it by ear.”
The main thing was, this was starting to hurt in ways that I never could have expected. Every time we fought, it drove the knife a little deeper, a reminder of why we could never work out.
Kylie looked even more upset at that, but she nodded bravely. “We're still friends, though, aren't we?”
“Of course we're still friends,” I said, the question surprising me. I pulled her into my arms, hugging her tightly. “Kylie, nothing that happens between us will ever change the fact that we're friends.”
“Pinky promise?” Kylie asked.
“Pinky promise,” I agreed, linking pinkies with her and causing her to giggle, albeit somewhat tearfully.
“Okay,” she said.
“I'm just going to call my travel agent so that she can work on getting those flights booked, and then why don't you and I go have some dinner?” I suggested. “I'm starving.”
“I'm not very hungry,” Kylie said, sounding uncertain. She paused. “I know I should be, but I'm still so worried about that blue truck.”
I kissed her chastely. “I'm sure they're long gone by now,” I told her. “What are the chances that they'd stop in Lincoln anyway? It's not like there's much here.”
“You're right,” Kylie sighed.
I pulled out my phone and called up Elise, walking out to the balcony as I did so. “Hey Elise, this is Josh Green. I need a couple flight tickets booked for tomorrow.”
“Ooh, decided to go on a last-minute holiday for Christmas?” Elise asked, sounding excited. “And when you say you need a couple tickets booked, do you mean that you've finally got yourself a girlfriend?”
“Of course not,” I said, even though saying those words hurt. I looked back into the room, where Kylie was still sprawled across the bed. “One's for an old friend of mine, from college. You remember Kylie. I think I've mentioned her before.”
“Of course you have,” Elise said. “Where is she going?”
“From Lincoln, Nebraska to New York City. It doesn't matter which airport she flies into there, just try to minimize the amount of time that she has to spend in transit, if you can.”
“Mhmm,” Elise said. “And you'll be joining her in New York?”
“No, I'll be flying to Boston,” I said. “I'm in Nebraska as well at the moment, but I need to head to Boston for work. I'm about to move on a very important deal, and I need to be there in person to ensure that it goes smoothly.”
“Sounds intriguing,” Elise said. “But now, how did you get to Nebraska without letting me book anything?”
She was teasing, and I laughed. “We drove, actually. That's the other thing that I'm going to need you to figure out: how to get my car from Lincoln back to LA.”
“That shouldn't be a problem,” Elise said. “I know just the company for it. I assume I can authorize the payments onto your regular card?”
“Of course,” I said. “Thanks for your help, Elise.”
“I'll have all the confirmation documents sent over to you as soon as I have them,” Elise promised.
I sighed and stared out over the town, leaning my hands against the railing on the balcony. Then, I went back inside, where Kylie was still prone on the bed. I felt bad, ending the trip on this note. She wasn't ready for the road trip to be over yet, and she was freaked out about the situation on the highway that afternoon.
And there had been that flicker of disappointment when I'd told her that I didn't kn
ow how much I'd see her once we both got back to LA.
I shook my head and held out a hand to her. “Let's go get something to eat,” I said. “I know you're not hungry, but maybe you'll feel better once you've got some warm food in you.”
“Okay,” Kylie agreed softly, taking my hand and letting me pull her to her feet.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Kylie
I didn't know what to think anymore. Josh and I had had a quiet dinner, and it was as though there was nothing wrong between us. But I was annoyed. I was having a good time on our road trip, and now it was over. Just like that.
I felt like I had lost out to Josh's work, like I was less important than whatever it was that he was investing in. His work got his full attention. His work was how he planned to create a legacy. People who didn't even know him would one day come to his funeral and talk about how he had saved their lives or their kids' lives through his wise investments. And what would Mandy and I have to say about him? That we had a good time smoking pot and eating shitty burgers with him back when we were in our early 20s? No one wanted to hear about that.
It was the relationship part that hurt me more than anything else, though. Not that we were actually in a relationship.
I had really fucked that one up. I never should have phrased it as friends with benefits from the start; that had limited things. I wanted more than that. But I didn't know how to tell him that now. Especially not since he seemed so uninterested in even a friends with benefits situation. I'd thought that maybe we'd be able to keep this going, once we went back to LA. But he had other things on his mind.
I swallowed hard as I watched Josh finish up yet another phone call. He glanced over at me. “You doing okay?” he asked. “You can turn on the TV if you want to. It's not going to bother me.”
