And now I’m thinking about kissing him, and how close he was only half a minute ago, and damn it.
“Maybe.” I swing my gaze from the ceiling back to Beth, noting how unlike herself she looks standing there without a million bags carrying all of the things she never actually seems to need. She crosses the hallway and stands beside me, laying her head onto my shoulder. “Or maybe I don’t know what to do with myself because I have no idea what’s going on, or what he’s thinking, or”—I nudge her in the ribs hard enough to make her let out an oof noise—“or what he’s doing here.”
She straightens and moves to stand in front of me so she can look me in the eye. She grabs my arms right above the elbows and looks like she wants to give me a good shake.
“Please. That boy has been volunteering at the library three times a week since you guys decided to make out in the History section. And he was volunteering before that, I just never saw him. Once a week.” She does shake me now. Only once, but enough to get her point across. “I checked.”
“Maybe his schedule didn’t give him a lot of free time before,” I mumble, letting my words trail off as I refuse to meet her eyes.
“Ha,” she says. It’s a big, loud noise that, like the shaking, solidifies her point. I sigh and look back down at her. “I’m not saying he’s asked me about you, and I’m not saying I’ve told him how fantastic of a best friend you are, or how you didn’t have a date tonight, and I’m definitely not saying I told him how smoking hot you look in your dress. I’m just saying you maybe should take the night to think about this thing between the two of you.”
“Beth, this thing between the two of us is the very real fact we’re Soulmates. It’s a big thing.”
“Then I think you at least owe it the night to think things through. Together.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“You’re sure your parents will be okay with this?”
I look over at Drew, only an arm’s length away as we make our way to where he’s parked, and shake my head. A strand of hair gets caught on my lips and I wonder if I’m imagining the way he hones in on my mouth as I go to pull it away. Maybe he knows he’s been caught, or maybe I’m imagining all sorts of things right now, but it seems like he moves a bit closer. I can feel the heat from his arm as it swings beside mine and I’m so caught up in wondering if I should reach out for his hand, I almost miss it when his brushes along the back of mine.
I bite the inside of my lip and he looks like he’s trying to hide the deep breath he takes as he twines his fingers with mine. I fail spectacularly at holding back my stupid grin.
“My parents will probably do some sort of victory dance when they get my message.” I shrug. “They practically begged me to stay out all night. Something about changing the locks on the front door and forcing me to have fun. Not… Not that I don’t have fun, I just…”
I don’t want to say I haven’t been having any fun lately. But of course I’ve already said too much. I feel his hand tense in mine, only a touch, and wish I could duck behind my hair and hide out for a while.
Luckily we come up on his truck in time to save me from any further embarrassment. Well, until I realize I can’t exactly separate my legs far enough to climb into the behemoth. Drew surges forward to open the door for me, apparently forgetting how we’re still attached at the hands. I stumble a little and he apologizes, catching me again, his hands landing on my waist to steady me like they did back at the hotel. I’m not normally so clumsy, but the feel of him holding me up really doesn’t make me want to stop.
I blush at the thought, and then even more so when I realize I’m going to have to ask him for help.
“Um… Do you think you can give me a lift?”
His confusion leads to that adorable little knit of skin between his brows, and I smile.
“It’s just this dress not only makes me look like a mermaid, but it also gives me about the same range of mobility as one.”
He laughs and moves in closer. I’m fully prepared to do the brunt of the work, but he lifts me up and into the truck without a second thought. And, believe me, for someone who doesn’t quite have what I like to call a ‘Disney Princess Waist’, he makes me feel like I do and not care how I don’t all at the same time.
I look down at him from my seat, the top of his head only an inch or so below eye level now, with my mouth open and eyebrows pinched together. A very attractive look, I’m sure. He grins and pulls that freaking dimple out of nowhere, leaving me even more speechless as he shuts my door and jogs around the front of the truck.
The interior light fades when he sticks the key in the ignition and I watch the way the shadows slowly take over his face. We stare quietly at each other for a moment before I say something that will probably completely ruin things. Or at least make them more awkward.
“I have to ask…” I take in the look on his face. He seems terrified as he waits to see what comes out of my mouth. “What happened with your dad?”
He barely winces, and I take it as a good thing.
“You don’t know already? Hell, I’m surprised my mom didn’t tell you.”
The dimple is threatening to pop out again, and I decide not to tell him I haven’t spoken to his mother since the day I helped them move. I don’t know if he’s been led to believe otherwise.
“I have exercised a great deal of restraint by not asking.”
“I can see that. The wait must have been torture. We’ve been in the truck for at least fifteen seconds now.” He smiles, one side of his mouth hitched up higher than the other, and I start to feel warm all over. I grin back before he runs a hand through his hair and his expression sobers. “I have no idea what’s going on with him now. Don’t really care. He’s been kicked off the force. From what I’ve heard, his wife left him.”
“She did?” I look over to see him nod. “Good.”
He nods again.
We both sit for a minute, quiet with our eyes locked on the dash in front of us.
“So,” he says adjusting the rearview even though I seriously doubt he needs to. “I should probably explain this is not my truck.”
I lift an eyebrow and completely lose my brain-to-mouth filter. “Let me guess. You stole it and I should expect our next date to take place with that God-awful window back between us?”
Oh my God. What the hell, Libby?
But then, maybe because he’s seen too many romantic comedies—doubtful, or maybe because he has a much better sense of humor than I could have ever hoped for, he laughs. He laughs, and he looks me dead in the eye as he responds. “So, this is a date then?”
Somewhere inside of me is the flirty girl who comes back with asking him something along the lines of whether or not he wants it to be a date. Also inside of me that flirty girl is being held in a headlock by another girl, who is refusing to let me do anything but smile like an idiot and barely hold in a giggle when I blurt out my reply.
“Yes,” I say, maybe a little too loudly, but so what? I think I’ve lived with more than enough ambiguity lately. “It’s a date.”
“Good,” he replies, and then nods down to the center console. “Then you should also know the only reason I’m not holding your hand right now is because I have to shift.”
The giggle creeps out then, but it only makes Drew smile wider so I stop caring about sounding dumb. It’s only a laugh right? A laugh that’s a little on the giddy side. And damn it, I feel pretty giddy right now.
“Understood.” I nod back. “So, who does it belong to? The truck. Also, where are you taking me?”
“My boss let me borrow it. I like trucks and all, but this one’s really…”
“Big?” I offer, nodding out the windshield. Just looking over the hood makes it seem like we’re at least ten feet in the air.
“Yeah, big.” He laughs. “But Beth might have helped me out with my plans tonight, and those plans might be pretty dependent on having a truck handy. But you should know, she was a lot more confident than I was abo
ut there even being plans tonight. I don’t want you to think I assumed you would want to come with me. I know I’ve been kind of a dick. And I really am sorry. Again, I probably should have opened up with that.”
He comes to a stop at an intersection and glances over at me. He looks nervous and maybe even a little afraid of how I’m going to respond. His right hand slips off the gearshift and as soon as it starts to make an arc through the air, on its way to the place on the back of his neck, I reach up and grab it with my own. I look down as I run the tips of my fingers across his knuckles.
“You know… I think I’m okay with you not having to say you’re sorry anymore.” I drop his hand gently, watching it move back to the shifter, and I glance out the window as he makes a turn. I feel the immense need to fill the short silence between us, but I keep my gaze trained on the lights of the buildings we pass by. “Except for the next time you screw up. You can say you’re sorry again whenever that happens.”
And because I’m not looking at him, but out the window instead, I don’t see the split-second decision that crosses his face when he slams on the brakes and pulls over to the side of the road. Nope. I only see the look on his face when I turn and he’s unbuckling his seatbelt and lifting himself up and onto the center console. He cranes his neck so he doesn’t hit his head against the ceiling.
But I do see the way he looks at me as he takes my face in his hands. His fingers tangle into my hair as he brushes his thumbs along my cheekbones, and only a fraction of a second passes before he brings his mouth down to meet mine. And, what feels like an eternity, and could very well have been, later, when we separate for air more than anything else, I see the way he looks at me again.
He rests his forehead against mine for a second before dragging himself back over the console and into the driver’s seat. I’m still breathing heavy when he turns the keys in the ignition and grips the steering wheel tight.
“Sorry,” he breathes out, shifting his gaze back to me, the smile on his face evident in his voice as well. “Should I have waited until the end of the date for that?”
“No.” I shake my head emphatically. Playing hard to get? What’s that? “No, we are fine. We’re good.”
****
And we are good. And the night gets even better when he pulls the truck into an empty, wide-open field that borders the bank of Lake Carson. There’s a campground on the opposite shore that I know will be filled to the brim with people from my school and, if I squint, I can barely make out the light of the bonfire they’ve already got going.
Our side though, our side is quiet and peaceful, and completely devoid of drunken seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds making some of their last high school memories together. And while it doesn’t sound completely horrible, I find I’m much happier with our arrangement.
The toolbox in the bed of the truck, I find out, is filled with an inflatable mattress, blankets, and approximately seven hundred pillows. I recognize more than one of them from Beth’s room and grin at the thought of all of the forts we’ve made with them over the years while sprawled across her bedroom floor, watching movies.
I watch as he lets the tailgate down and absolutely refuses to let me help. Not that I could really. I’m already envisioning another instance of him lifting me into the air as if I weigh absolutely nothing in order to get me into the bed of the truck as it is.
But when he looks down at me from his spot, standing on top of the toolbox as he spreads a quilt over the air mattress, his eyes skimming the length of my body— Well, I don’t regret this dress one bit.
I don’t regret it hours later either when, in between answers for questions I didn’t even know I wanted explained, he props himself up on one elbow beside me. I’m more or less flat on my back, save for the few pillows propped underneath my head. I’m pretty sure my abnormally tamed curls are back in their natural state of disarray, but couldn’t care less as he looks down at me. He bites his lip while he runs a hand first through his hair, and then lets it travel from my waist, down over the curve of my hip.
“This dress does make you look like a mermaid.”
I laugh, and it’s loud and sharp sounding. But I’m kind of delirious and despite having spent more than half of the night with him already, I still have a hard time believing I’m here. So I don’t care. And with the way he watches me as I laugh, I can say with near certainty he doesn’t care about how loud or obnoxious my laugh is either. It seems like he might actually like it.
He gets a serious look on his face and lies back down beside me.
It’s been a while since either of us has fed the fire any kindling, both too wrapped up in talking and, quite frankly, each other, to be bothered with moving. So it’s slowly dying out in its spot a couple of yards from the tailgate, but I can still make out the lines of his face and body in its glow. I let myself study how his hair falls over his forehead, his curls almost as mussed as mine must be. I follow the slope of his nose and memorize the curve of his high cheekbones.
I’d be embarrassed by the way I always seem to take advantage of being able to look at him, but it’s hard to deny the way he’s put together is difficult to ignore. Difficult for anyone else, I suppose. Impossible for me. Especially now that I feel like I’ve been given permission.
“I can’t believe you thought I barely looked at you.”
It takes me a second to figure out what he’s talking about. The conversation we started back at the hotel, before Beth and Ryan found us, seems like it took place ages ago.
“At the risk of embarrassing myself even more than usual,” I say because, screw it, might as well. “I should clarify I was probably too busy looking at you to notice.”
“I feel like I need to tell you this. And I need to get it out, so if you have any questions, can you hold them for the end?”
“It’s like you know me, or something.” I laugh, even though I’m suddenly very, very apprehensive as to where this is going to take us. “Questions are pretty much always a guarantee.”
“I’ve paid more attention than you probably think. You can learn a lot about a person in fifteen-minute increments. Even when they don’t talk about themselves. So, you say I barely looked at you at all, but Libby … I feel like that’s all I could do.
“Let’s take it back to day one. When I walked through that door, you’ve got to understand… It’s a huge understatement to say I had a lot going on. The last couple of days were … not good. And, as far as I knew, the rest of them weren’t going to be any better. But I’d had time to come to that conclusion on my own. I was already thinking about how my little brother’s soccer team was going to have to find a new coach, and how my mother would either have to find a sitter who would stay nights, or cut back on her shifts at work. I was thinking past those things, and past a conviction that was going to change the rest of my life.
“And right before I walked in that door, I was too busy wondering what the kid in front of me, who couldn’t have been much older than Blake, had done to get his ass in the same place as someone who had done … who had done what I had.
“Then the next second, I was almost knocked on my ass because there you were. And it’s not just that I was seeing things I had never seen before. I wasn’t able to think straight, and I swear, if anyone had asked me a question—I wouldn’t have been able to say a damn word. Not a single word.
“And I went to bed that night. And the mattress was thin, and it was too hot because they turn the heat up as soon as you’re allowed under the damn covers there, and I closed my eyes … and instead of seeing what had put me in that place, instead of seeing his face, the way I had every time I blinked, all I could see was you.”
He stops for a second to lift himself back up. Shuffling so his back is upright against the tower of pillows separating us from the cold, metal toolbox. He angles his body to face me, almost hovering over me in a way that makes it difficult to breathe. But difficult in a way I am entirely okay with.
“Red and ivory,
and freckles that looked like constellations I would never get close enough to chart together…” His words taper off and he looks down, his lids heavy, as he lifts his index finger to trace along the line of my collar bone. His fingertip moves slowly over the freckles there, leaving licks of heat across my skin that if I’d been asked before, I would have also included in the category of Things That Only Happen in Romance Novels.
“I was so angry. I don’t know if I’ve ever been so angry before. At myself. At my circumstances. At the world, Libby.
“And I dreamed of you. In all of these colors I never knew existed … and when I see them now”—he nods a little, and when I look behind me, lifting up just enough to see over the side of the truck bed, and spot the sun coming up over the horizon—“I only think of you.”
I don’t know which one of us makes the first move, but he kisses me slow and steady, and when he draws my lower lip into his mouth, I swear all of the blood in my body has been replaced with fire. It’s fire that runs through my veins even when he pulls away. And it’s fire he compares me to as he runs his fingers through my hair, the sun rising in the morning sky and lighting me up from behind.
I want to turn and watch it with him, but once again, the look on his face keeps me from moving.
“And, Libby, you should know… Me not loving you might not be the end of your world, but it sure as hell would feel like the end of mine.”
There’s a pressure building behind my eyes, and in my throat, and even in my heart as I hear him and watch his lips form the words. But really, the pressure in my chest feels more like a pull, and it has me leaning back into him and clawing to get my heart as close to his as possible.
I forget about the sunrise. There will be plenty more in our future.
The End
Evernight Teen ®
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What's a Soulmate? Page 25
