by LJ Evans
“Jake rejecting your kidney. That had nothing to do with you.”
“Oh, I know that,” I said, but then I looked down from his eyes to his hand. I did know that. I mean, I did. Then, some days the guilt overwhelmed me. I’d thought so many times that if he’d gotten a different kidney, the story would have had a different ending.
He squeezed my hand. “I’m not sure you do.”
I pulled away and lied the lie I always did. “Seriously. It’s not a big deal. We’ve all kind of moved on. But you asked, so I told you.”
“I did ask,” he said. “But I also know what it’s like to live with guilt.”
His eyes were on the road, and he wasn’t smiling, but I also couldn’t really imagine the happy Derek I’d seen over the last couple days being weighed down with the guilt inside me. Even though I’d glimpsed a quiet side to him here and there. The guilt that weighed me down was like a whole train, and he didn’t seem to be carrying that much baggage.
Silence filled the car for a little while again while some newbie country singer sang something that was more pop than country.
“I’m really glad I bought the car,” he said, and I couldn’t help but be drawn to his face again. I saw a gravity there that really kind of wrecked my heart all over again because I knew he didn’t mean because he liked sixties muscle cars. He meant he was glad because now my family had someone keeping it safe that understood what was beneath the red paint and beefy motor.
Suddenly, all of it was a little too much for me: this crazy, journey, the responsibility, the serious look on Derek’s face. So, I did what I always did when the world was too much, and that was to pull out my book.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I was going to read. There’s nothing else to do.”
He put a hand to his chest. “Ouch. Nothing else to do.”
I ignored him and looked down at the book, only to be drawn back to his face by his question.
“What’s it about?”
“Um. It’s Pride and Prejudice.”
“And?”
I wasn’t quite sure that he wasn’t joking. “You know. It’s Pride and Prejudice. By Jane Austen.”
“Oookaay?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. You don’t even know who Jane Austen is, do you?” Holy bejesus, what was I doing in a car with some guy who didn’t even know one of the most famous writers of all time?!
“I know who Jane Austen is. The writer chick from the eighteen hundreds. I just haven’t read anything of hers.”
“Do you even know how to read?”
“Ouch again.”
“Okay, musician boy. Who’s your favorite author?”
“Current or classical?”
I shrugged.
“Well, my man Will had a lot to say in iambic pentameter, which was pretty much music in those days, so he’s gotta be up there.”
“That doesn’t say anything. I mean, anyone can throw Shakespeare out there and sound impressive.”
“I’m trying to be impressive, then?” he asked with a twinkle back in his eye that made him hard to resist, but which I was also relieved to see after the seriousness of before. It also made me realize that he’d done it on purpose. The shift in conversation to shift the mood.
“I didn’t exactly say that.”
“You did,” he smirked. “If I’m trying to be impressive, I see that I’ll have to say someone more current but noteworthy. Hmm. How about Robert Ludlum? No. He’s still dead. Plus that’s really a spy novel, which doesn’t seem like your kind of thing.”
“Excuse me?”
“Well…” He twirled a hand toward my Pride and Prejudice.
“So, girls who read Jane Austen are only into romance novels and erotica?”
He swerved, and I clutched the door handle. “Jesus!” I breathed out.
“I swear to God, you’re going to be the death of me. You can’t say things like that and expect me not to react.”
“What?” I frowned, trying to think about what I had said.
He burst out laughing. “Erotica. Do you really read that?”
I could feel the red creep into my face because I hadn’t really thought about it when I said it. “I read everything.”
His eyes met mine, and the car swerved again, and I had to put a hand out toward the wheel before he quickly straightened it out.
“Is Pride and Prejudice erotica?”
My turn to laugh. “God no.”
“Thank God.”
“Why would it matter?”
“I don’t think I could drive knowing that you were reading porn,” he said with a look on his face that made me turn pink all over again.
“Erotica isn’t porn.”
“Isn’t it?” He met my eyes with his own, flashing something at me. Something that made me all fuzzy inside. Three weeks, I told myself. Holy button holes! I was going to be spending three weeks with this.
He was right after all. Erotica was probably pretty close to what was in those PlayBabe magazines. But I hadn’t read PlayBabe even though I’d protested that I read everything.
I shrugged in half-agreement. “Maybe. But Jane Austen is definitely not that. Her work first came out in serials in the English newspapers, so definitely not gonna be erotica.”
He reached over and turned off the pop station that was supposed to be country. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“Read it out loud. At least we’ll both have something to do rather than listen to that shit.”
And that’s what I did until we stopped for lunch. Read Jane Austen aloud in my dead brother’s Camaro with a sexy musician behind the wheel while I was curled up in my shorts and another Harry Potter t-shirt. It should have felt like I was on an alien planet, but instead, it felt like I was home.
♫ ♫ ♫
At lunch, we met up with the rest of the band. They were driving the tour bus, which was just an oversized motor home with the name of their band, Watery Reflection, painted on the side. But who was I to tell them that it wasn’t a real tour bus?
They all greeted me like I was already a member of their group with hugs and jokes that put me immediately at ease. I hadn’t been sure what they would think of me tagging along. I got to meet Rob Colt, their drummer, for the first time. He was a lean machine of a man with naturally white-blonde hair. He seemed like he couldn’t sit still and was bouncing a knee in the booth as if he needed to be somewhere else. Plus, the guys were still harassing him about his wife, Trista.
“Is she meeting us in Oklahoma City?” Owen asked.
“Yeah, but she isn’t ready to divorce me yet, so you can’t have her,” Rob threw back.
“You’ll screw up bad enough eventually,” Owen said with a grin.
I was having a hard time imagining this bantering was serious, but they had said yesterday that Owen had a thing for Rob’s wife, so who knew.
“So, Mia, Derek hasn’t scared you away yet?” Rob asked, turning to me as he shoved his club sandwich into his mouth.
“Is he supposed to be scary?” I asked.
The boys all laughed.
“You’ll see. Don’t let that jovial clown nature of his trip you up. Underneath, he’s all emotional drama,” Mitch said, and Derek threw a french fry at him.
He was grinning at them, but I wondered. He seemed generally happy. Almost insanely so, but he’d also gotten fairly serious with me, including that vague reference to understanding guilt.
“Dude, you know that isn’t even true. He just writes that sappy shit so the ladies will throw their panties at him,” Lonnie responded.
“You guys are not helping my cause at all,” Derek said with a sad shake of his head.
“Were we supposed to help you? You should have sent out a text,” Owen joked. “I already sent one to Mia warning her off.”
Derek punched him in the shoulder and then turned to me. “Whatever you do, do not, and I re
peat do not, give your phone number to any of these bozos.”
“Well, we’ll need to text her while you’re driving. You know, safety first,” Mitch chimed in.
“She can just answer my phone for me,” Derek said. Was he really worried about the band having my number?
“Are you sure? Maybe some panty-throwing lover girl will be texting you.” Lonnie laughed.
“I do not give my number to any panty-throwing girls,” Derek said firmly and then all but pushed Owen out of the booth to stand up. “We gotta hit the road, folks. We’ve got a few more hours till we hit Fort Smith.”
Fort Smith was where we were stopping for the night. I guess the boys weren’t the type to do eleven-hour days in the car, which made me wonder why I really needed to be along for the ride, but at this point it was too late to question it. Truth was, I didn’t want to go back. Not yet. I had given myself three weeks to live a different life. To be somebody other than just Good Girl Mia.
Back at Jake’s Camaro, I said I’d drive, but Derek said no way, he wanted to hear more about Elizabeth Bennet. I just shrugged, curled up in the passenger seat, and kept reading.
We got to Fort Smith in the early afternoon. It was a decent size town, on the Arkansas River, but didn’t seem to have much in the way of hotels. Derek said we were staying at a Courtyard, which suited me just fine. We’d spent the night at plenty of them when we’d traveled for Jake and Cam’s sports events over the years. They were predictable.
When we got to the hotel, I grabbed my own bags, and Derek tried to protest, but I just stuck my tongue out and moved away. He wasn’t happy about it, but after I’d stuck my tongue out, he didn’t fight me. Instead, he stared at my lips. I breathed deeply and headed toward the entrance.
When we got to the check-in counter, it finally hit me that I didn’t have a reservation. Not one that I knew of, anyway. Derek just walked up, handed his credit card over, and the guy said he had two adjoining rooms ready for us. He handed Derek two keys, and then we rolled away while the other band members got checked in.
“Did you change your reservation for me?” I asked as we waited by the elevator.
“Well, technically my manager did, but yes.” He shrugged.
“I can pay for my own room. I can pay my own way through all of this,” I told him.
“You’re helping me out. I told you my manager would pay you. It isn’t a paycheck or anything. Is room and board gonna be okay?”
“You’re kidding, right? I get to go on this crazy adventure with… your band, plus you’re putting me up? I really think I’m the one who should be paying you.”
As soon as the words were out, I wanted to thunk my Pride and Prejudice against my forehead because Derek got that sexy grin on his face again. Before he could say anything, though, I just waved my finger at him.
“Don’t even. I have to be really careful what I say around you.” But I had a smile on my face too.
“I’ve been telling you that!” he laughed.
We got to the hotel room doors, and he handed me one of the keys.
“We’re gonna go down the street for food later. You’re coming, right?”
In so many ways, I wanted to say no. That I’d just spent an entire exhausting day in the car trying to ignore how strong his magnetic pull was on me. Plus, there was my two nights of no sleep. I wanted to say that I needed to rest if I was going to drive the Camaro tomorrow, but his eyes and his smile were really too darn irresistible. Yikes! I was so in trouble.
“Sure, just knock on the door when you’re ready to go.” I smiled weakly and then headed into my room.
I could hear him through the adjoining door, banging around and starting the shower. I jumped in the shower too and tried to scrub away the tiredness. I looked in the mirror and decided that I needed to do something to make myself look better than I felt, so I straightened my long locks, which I didn’t do very often, and actually put on a light coat of makeup. When I went to my suitcase, I wasn’t sure what to put on. Should I just put on more shorts and a t-shirt?
I knocked on the adjoining door. Derek opened it so fast that it almost felt like he’d been on the other side, waiting. He just stared at me. It was suddenly awkward for the first time. Almost like he didn’t know who I was.
“Um. Sorry to bother you. Was wondering where we were going. Are my shorts and flip flops going to be okay?”
He just stared some more.
“Hello?”
“Jesus Christ!” He ran a hand through his hair and closed his eyes.
“Okay. Sorry I bothered you.” I turned to close the door, but he grabbed my arm quick as a lightning bolt through a southern storm.
“God, sorry, stop. Don’t fly away.” It was all mumbled. “Give me a sec to catch my breath.”
I looked around him into his room. Was he working out? Was there another girl there? Ugh. What the hell was I doing?
“You seriously have no idea?” he asked, and he moved till he was a breath away from me. The smell of him, that smell that was almost like honey and wood polish, wafted over me, making it hard to breathe.
I was looking at his chest. Really, that’s where my eyes naturally went when we stood next to each other. He tipped my chin up at him, and those gray eyes met mine in a way that wedged my toes into the hotel carpet.
“Miss Mia, my god, you stop my heart.”
I closed my eyes and laughed, trying to shake the nickname that had flown from his mouth. Trying to shake my reaction to his blurt.
“Stop it,” I breathed out because his intensity was too much.
He seemed to sense that he’d overwhelmed me, and he lightened the mood instead of persisting.
“You’re wearing a towel, Miss Mia. A damn towel!” he chuckled.
I looked down in disbelief. Holy potato peels! I’d gone to his hotel room in a towel! Idiot, idiot, idiot! I was surprised he didn’t think I was throwing myself at him like that long line of girls that people mentioned but he denied having. My body wanted me to throw myself at him. God, it did. But Good Girl Mia wasn’t that far gone. She was still there putting up the good fight. I blushed a deep red.
“Ugh. I’m so sorry, what a dork!”
I backed away again, and he let me go, but he followed me into my room.
“How do you keep doing that?” he asked as I backed away toward the closet and my suitcase.
“What?” I asked, rifling through the handful of clothes there.
“Surprising the shit out of me!”
I looked up at him, and he was grinning again. Thank God. “If it makes you feel any better, you keep surprising me too. Or maybe it’s more like I can’t believe the imprecated malarkey I do around you.”
“Did you just say imprecated and malarkey?”
I had. Because who didn’t love a good word whether it was an old-time word or not? “Yes. Do my big words make you uncomfortable, pretty boy?”
He chuckled and moved toward me again so that I was now stuck up against the door of the closet. “You’d have to do a helluva lot more than that to make me uncomfortable.”
He caught a strand of my hair in his fingers and slowly began to twirl it. Straightened, my hair was mid-back in length, but he took that one strand and curled it until he had it wrapped so much that his finger could rest against my cheek.
“I’d like to see that,” he said with a voice so deep and sexy that I swear my body was instantly a pot of mush.
“See what?”
“You. Trying to make me uncomfortable.”
We stood there. His hand on my cheek, and me unable to move because of my imprisoned hair. Little did he know that while I’d read a lot about things that I could do that might make him uncomfortable, there was no way I’d ever be able to actually do anything like that. There was no way my brain would ever shut off long enough for that to happen.
Even right then, when I wanted so badly for him to kiss me, I couldn’t overcome all t
he walls, and barriers, and warning signs in my brain to take action on it. I waited to see if he’d make the move I couldn’t. I was a mixture of disappointment and relief again when, instead of easing toward me, he let go and backed away.
From my suitcase, he pulled a summer dress. I only had a couple, but I’d thrown them in because they weren’t business apparel. The one he chose was so girly that it was almost too embarrassing to wear. It was all flowers and lace, but made of cool cotton which you needed in the summer in the South.
“Wear this,” he said. He put it in my hands and backed away. He sat down on the bed. He was waiting for me. I wasn’t sure I could move. I looked down at the material in my hands and down to my curled toes before I took a deep, calming breath and headed into the bathroom where I put on the dress and stared at the flushed, straight-haired girl in the mirror. I didn’t even look like me to myself.
He knocked on the door of the bathroom. “You ready? The boys are getting hungry, and believe me, you don’t want to see Mitch when his blood sugar is low.”
I opened the door in response. He took me in again, head to toe, and whistled. “Damn, Miss Mia. Just damn.”
I smiled, because who couldn’t smile at that? Some gorgeous BB talking to you in that way, with a nickname he had now called you three times in the span of five minutes. A nickname that sounded so sweet that it could make its own sweet tea. No one could resist that for long. No one.
I slipped on my flip flops again, grabbed my bag, and met him at the door. We walked to the elevators in silence.
Down in the lobby, the boys did their own whistling, and Owen tried to put his arm around my shoulders, but Derek shoved him off. They all laughed and catcalled, but it only made me smile more. Derek didn’t grab my hand, but that was okay. It was like I was Phillips again and not Miss Mia.
We walked down a few blocks to Wishbone’s Music and Chicken Joint. It sounded so authentically southern that I thought that was why Derek had picked it, but when we got there, I saw that they advertised live music on certain nights, so maybe he had played there before.
Tonight, there was no live music. Instead, tonight was karaoke night.
Need I say more? Because karaoke, alcohol, and southern food are a combination made to be together, like chips and salsa. There were just a few things I was good at in life. The ones most people knew about were baking, reading, and being the serious girl. The one thing not many people knew about me was that I was also good at karaoke.
