“You can’t get financial aid? I didn’t think loans were that hard.”
“Says the professor’s kid.”
“Sorry. Point taken.” Gaze shifting away, he looked chagrined at his assumption, which softened my response.
“Anyway, yeah, I had some scholarships for Gracehaven, but not a full ride, and even after…everything, the financial aid office couldn’t find the rest I needed. Which shouldn’t have been that big a deal, because like you said, loans and grants are a thing. Except my parents claimed me on their taxes, and I didn’t qualify for this year. Even if I switch schools, the fact that they keep freaking claiming me is a big hurdle. And there’s a small trust from my grandfather, but Dad controls that until I’m twenty-five. It’s a mess.”
“They want to deduct you on taxes after they kicked you out?” Alden’s eyes narrowed, and he looked ready to do battle on my behalf, which was weirdly gratifying. “That’s totally unfair.”
“Yeah, well, life isn’t fair. And I think Dad figures that if I’m not eligible for other aid, I’ll be more likely to come home, agree to go to his school, and agree to their…plans. But that’s not happening.”
“Of course not.” Alden bristling like an indignant rooster was a great distraction from the heaviness of the conversation. “You can’t just give in. And what…be not gay? That’s hardly logical. Or possible.”
“Logic has zero to do with it for him. But thanks.” Desperate to move away from this topic, I gestured to a nearby plaque. “Give me your phone. I’ll get some pictures.”
“We need some of you too. Proof of life and all that.” The tentative smile he gave me, almost as if he wasn’t sure whether he was making a joke, made some tender place deep in my chest vibrate like a guitar string.
“Here, how about a compromise: selfie mode.” I moved in closer to him, close enough to smell the hotel shampoo he’d used and for our arms to brush. But it wasn’t quite near enough to get us both in the frame, so at the last second, I tossed an arm around his shoulders, pulling him against my side. He made a startled squawk and the first picture captured his stunned expression. “Try not looking like I’ve just confessed to cannibalism.”
It was the first time I’d deliberately touched him, and I was surprised at how very warm and solid he felt next to me. The thrum of awareness that had started the day before worsened. The height difference wasn’t so much as to make picture-taking a comedy skit, but it was enough that he felt…right tucked next to me. Too right.
I moved away quickly after the second shot, hitting Send to the professor before I could overthink it.
“Okay? We should probably get back to the car,” I said as I handed the phone back after snapping a few more touristy shots for him.
“Yeah.” He sounded a little off, as if maybe the contact had unsettled him, too, and that wasn’t as reassuring as it could have been. I didn’t want these weird sizzles to continue and wasn’t sure I wanted him noticing either. Maybe if I drove fast enough, I could not only make up time, but also outrun this strangeness.
Chapter Sixteen
Alden
“Did you have to wedge in so tightly?” I complained. Conrad had reluctantly agreed to let me drive the two-hour stretch between St. Louis and our lunch stop in Columbia, but I was more concerned with getting out of the narrow space where he’d parked than any highway interchanges.
“Good luck getting it to fit…” He winked at me, which made me sputter and fumble the keys. “When we park, I mean. Downtown Columbia can be dicey for parking.”
“And you’d know?” My tone wasn’t the kindest, but I couldn’t decide what to make of his teasing, and my confusion made my words sharper than I intended.
“I’ve been there a lot when Dad’s school played one of the smaller colleges. Mizzou is Division I of course, but there are a few other smaller Division II and Division III colleges around there.”
“Ah.” I took a few minutes to focus on getting out of the parking space—a process made harder knowing Conrad was watching—and getting us back on the interstate. A weird but comfortable silence settled over us—Conrad messing around with his phone, me driving, busy St. Louis traffic whizzing by as we passed through the city proper into what felt like endless suburbs. As in Indiana, driving felt easier now, with not quite so many anxieties all competing for attention at once.
“Jasper says hi.” Conrad looked up from his phone right as traffic finally started to thin out. “His sister is still in the hospital, but they think she’s going to make it. He said your mom—the doctor one—called his parents to see if she could do anything. That was nice.”
“Mimi must have told her about the reason for the credit card charge.” I didn’t like how Conrad seemed to want to put my moms on a pedestal. Yes, they could be nice, but that didn’t mean that growing up with them had always been easy. Explaining that, however, was challenging because I didn’t want to seem too ungrateful. “Did Professor Tuttle reply to the pictures we sent of the Arch?”
“Permission to browse your messages?” He was already reaching for my phone, which was in the console, GPS set to the pizza place in Columbia that Conrad was so set on.
“Sure.” It wasn’t like I had anything worth keeping from him. Other than lots of back-and-forth with the moms, I didn’t get a lot of messages. I wasn’t completely friendless, but my contacts tended to be more situational, like my online Odyssey play group, and not the sort of random friends that Conrad probably had dozens of.
“The prof says, ‘So glad to see you two getting along’ and adds that his surgery went well. I’ll reply to see when he gets to go home.”
“Okay.” I wasn’t sure I agreed with Professor Tuttle’s assessment that we were getting along. Getting awkward perhaps. My shoulders rolled, the memory of his arm around me still fresh enough to make my body hum. But we weren’t active enemies at this point, which could be seen as an improvement, I supposed.
“I’m also telling him how you waxed that dude last night and that I’ll send the video as soon as we’ve got free Wi-Fi somewhere.”
“My phone works as a hot spot,” I pointed out, kind of liking him bragging on me.
“Because of course it does,” Conrad huffed. “If I reach around to grab the laptop bag, is that going to distract you from the road?”
“Yes.” Better I answer honestly than lie and endanger us both. But not wanting to be a total drag, I added, “But you can turn on the radio if you’re bored.”
“First letting me eat in the car, now radio. Boy, when you let loose…” Conrad laughed, but it wasn’t a mean sort of laugh—at least, I didn’t think so. It was warm, almost affectionate. He found a mutually agreeable contemporary station after nixing my suggestions of jazz and the news. “We need to remind you that you’re twenty-three, not eighty-two, Grandpa. Pay attention, and I’ll teach you what’s popular with all the kiddos these days.”
“Says the guy who listens to country.”
And so I suffered Conrad’s surprisingly entertaining music education class until we arrived at Columbia, right in time for the lunch rush. Conrad pointed out the town’s famous columns as we looked for a place to park Black Jack. Unlike Conrad, I wasn’t squeezing in anywhere, so we ended up needing to walk a few blocks. As we passed, we did pictures at the columns—remnants from some long-ago building. To me, they looked weird—nothing to support, nothing to hold up. Almost lonely. They needed a purpose.
Conrad, however, had no trouble goofing off around the sad structures, making faces for my camera before leading the way to a large pizza parlor that had an old-fashioned vibe to it—lots of wood and decor straight out of a seventies movie.
“You get us a table,” I ordered as we joined the long line waiting for the counter. “I’m pickier about toppings.”
This also left me to pay, which was my desired outcome. It meant making sure Conrad both ate an
d saved some money, and also ensured that I could get half with cheese and green peppers for me and half with meat lover’s for the carnivore.
I took our ticket to the booth Conrad had snagged by the back corner, almost too private, but nicely insulated from the busy room. He fished out some cash, but I waved it off.
“We’ll work it out later.”
“I don’t need charity.” He glared at me.
“I didn’t say you did.” This was what I got for trying to be nice—him all moody and playing with the straw dispenser and not talking to me while we waited for our food.
But he softened some when the pizza arrived on a little elevated stand. It wasn’t quite New York standard—crust thicker, sauce less spicy, cheese a little less stretchy—but it was still very good, and watching Conrad devour his half was worth suffering through his bad mood over me paying.
“Man, this is even better than I remember.” Each bite seemed to evaporate more of his funk until he was grinning at me again.
“I’m glad,” I said and meant it. There was something about doing things for him that I found deeply satisfying—like a long run or solving a particularly complex equation.
“Thanks.” His tongue darted out to capture some melted cheese before it escaped his crust, and warmth gathered low in my gut, all that talk the day before rushing back with a vengeance, a fresh set of inappropriate thoughts taking over my brain.
“What?” Head tilting, he blinked at me.
“You have some sauce on your face.” No way was I confessing what I’d really been thinking about, but I also wasn’t lying. He had a little smear on his chin that somehow made him more, not less, attractive.
“Where?” He swiped at his lips with a napkin a few times but missed the bit on his chin entirely.
“Oh, here.” I grabbed a napkin myself and reached over to blot the sauce away before I could think through the invasion of his personal space. I hadn’t realized how close my fingers would come to his lips, their softness grazing my knuckles.
He made a low, startled noise that went straight to all the parts that had no business being interested, making my insides dance as I awkwardly shifted on the wooden bench.
“Sorry,” I murmured, my voice a bare whisper as my body tried to figure out what the heck was going on.
“Two can play at that game you know.” His eyes flashed as he did the same thing to my cheek, fingers brushing my skin. Something was happening. A sort of…anticipation. Like when I knew a big turn was coming in the game, a chance to play a card that I’d held since my opening hand. My breath sped up as our gazes met. The moment hung there between us, all charged energy, hands resting too close to each other on the table, eyes holding—
“Stop it, Lance.” A mom chasing a kid came rushing by our booth, and all the energy fizzled away. I should have been relieved by the interruption since I’d had no idea what my next move was supposed to be, but instead, I was irritated, as if I’d lost my chance to win a game I hadn’t even realized I wanted to play.
“We should go.” Conrad’s eyes shuttered. “There’s probably at least one game store in town, but it’s not on the agenda, and we’re already behind.”
“Yeah.” I followed him back to the car, where predictably, he insisted it was his turn to drive.
“I’m better at making up time.”
“Better at speeding, you mean.” I wasn’t sure why I was arguing with him. I didn’t actually want to drive. But something in him pushed all my buttons, both good and bad.
“At least I’ll leave the slow lane.” He slid into the driver’s seat without waiting for my reply.
“Fine. Don’t get a ticket.” I took the laptop with me into the passenger seat and spent the next portion of the trip using my phone as a hot spot to upload video until the cell phone signal fizzled out, exactly like whatever had happened back at the pizza place. Not wanting to deal with Roam, I put both phone and laptop away and turned my attention to the increasingly rural scenery. We’d filled up the tank in Columbia, and Kansas City was our next scheduled stop, which I associated in my brain with barbecue sauce and baseball and little else.
“Are there any landmarks in Kansas City that we should get a picture of?” I asked, shuffling my pages of notes as I studied the billboards.
“Nothing iconic like the Arch, but I’ll think of something.” Conrad sounded distracted, but talking felt better than strained silence.
“Hey, do you hear something?” Conrad frowned, tone turning serious as he signaled to move from the fast lane back to the middle and then the slow lane.
Concentrating, I focused on the car’s noises, anxiety returning all at once as all sorts of terrible scenarios rushed through my head.
“I hear something,” Conrad said again, voice tight. “Steering got wonky on me for a second too.”
“What?” I strained, trying to hear any errant sounds, but I wasn’t a car guy. A glance over at the console didn’t reveal any warning lights. The engine hummed, road noise same as—
Rattle. Thump. Rattle. There. An ominous sound that did nothing to help my anxiety. “That?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s an exit ahead.” I hated the idea of losing time to investigate what was probably nothing, but I also wasn’t an idiot. Conrad took the exit right as the maybe-something noise became a massive thumping, rattling, shaking event.
“What the—”
“Watch out!” The car lurched, each second we were still on the highway an eternity. Sweat gathered in my lower back and my throat tightened.
“I’m trying. I’m not sure… Fuck.”
My pulse bucked right along with the car, frenetic surges of energy. I hated how helpless I felt, unable to do more than hope Conrad made it to the shoulder at least.
Cursing, Conrad gripped the steering wheel with white fingers, struggling to take the exit, car lurching and thumping louder as he slowed down. He barely managed a right turn at the base of the exit as we shuddered to a stop on the shoulder of a tiny country road with nothing but a view of endless rolling green fields. Empty. Desolate. Nothing was around us—no gas stations, no houses, nothing.
“Fucking tire blowout. Fuck.” Conrad rested his head on the steering wheel. His body trembled, and I reached out, some alien impulse leading me to put my hand on his shoulder.
“How do you know?”
“Didn’t you feel that? Thank God, I had it happen once before at way slower speed. We could have wrecked there.”
“Oh.” My mouth opened and closed a few times like a fish. “What caused it? What did you do wrong?”
“Wrong?” Conrad shrugged my hand off, whirling toward me and making me instantly regret my word choice. Stupid anxiety, making me dwell on the wrong things, making my voice way more accusatory as I tried to quiet my trembling insides.
“I did something wrong?” His eyes were shooting sparks of amber. “Did you not hear me? We almost wrecked. And here we are now, safely off the highway, all in one piece. And you want to know what I did wrong?”
“I meant that something made the tire blow.” I managed a more even tone, brain finally slowing enough to use logic, not simply reactive emotions.
“Seeing as how the car is older than me, it could simply be an age thing. Or we could have picked up a nail in Columbia. All that circling side streets you did.”
“It’s my fault?” So much for less emotional. I twisted in my seat, staring him down.
“Quit worrying about fault and start worrying about changing a tire.” Conrad made an exasperated noise, one I supposed I deserved. “The tire blew. Who cares why? Next step is to get to the spare. You want to see if you can find us a how-to video on your phone?”
I had to shake my head. “Can’t. There’s barely any signal. I’m on Roam.”
“Damn it.” He knocked his head against the window.
> “Sorry.” I wanted to say something else, wanted to apologize for letting anxiety get the worst of me again, wanted to thank him for saving our lives, wanted to tell him that I didn’t think he was a bad driver or at fault, but none of that managed to come out.
“It’s okay. Spare tire first. I’ve seen this done before. Can’t be too hard.”
“I thought you said you had a flat tire before?” I was careful this time to keep my tone conversational, not accusing or angry.
“Yeah, but I was on my parents’ insurance back then, and they had Triple A, so I used that.”
“I’ve got that through Mom!” I brightened, glad to finally be useful. I might not be able to formulate a proper apology, but I could at least do this. “I’ll try to get enough signal to call.”
“Awesome. I’m going to work on getting to the spare tire in the trunk while you do that.”
“Okay.” It took a few tries, but I finally connected and explained our emergency to the dispatcher.
“That’s too bad, hon.” She had a soothing southern accent. “Looks like I can have someone to you in about an hour.”
“An hour? That’s not acceptable.” I sounded an awful lot like Mom when lab results were taking too long.
“Sir, I’m sorry, but you’re in a fairly remote area—”
“I know.” Now panic crept into my voice for the first time, anger and shock giving way to real fear.
“I’ll ask them to hurry, but I can’t make promises.” Her tone stayed soothing, but there was a firmness there, too, which strangely helped me to resign myself to a long wait. She was doing all she could. That was all I could really ask.
“Thanks.” I ended the call, then exited the car carefully to go tell Conrad the wait time. But before I could speak, I found him with all our luggage in untidy piles at his feet, shaking his head, muttering more curses.
Conventionally Yours (True Colors) Page 12
