Текст книги "Such a Rush"

Автор книги: Jennifer Echols

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

twelve

As soon as we reached the party, it was like my triumph had never happened. Walking to the door of Francie Mahoney’s parents’ mansion, Molly caught up with Alec and asked him who he remembered from her classes. She must have assumed, probably correctly, that Alec would recall these people, whereas Grayson would not, or wouldn’t admit it.

“Does she know the whole school?” Grayson asked me quietly as we fell in behind her and Alec.

“Yes,” I said. “Molly’s so popular that she’s not even worried about being popular. I’ve never seen a popular person before who wasn’t trying really hard at it. But she’s rich and smart and interesting and she doesn’t give a shit.”

“She sounds perfect.”

“She is perfect,” I said. “I want to be her. Not be like her, but be her, like in a creepy roommate movie.”

He laughed, the genuine relaxed laugh I’d heard from him a few times. “I don’t know everybody. And I didn’t when I lived here, either.”

“Did Alec?”

“Yes,” he said as we walked through a huge front door into the party.

Molly was instantly surrounded by her friends, who screamed over her and wanted to know who she’d brought. She introduced Alec—didn’t they remember him? Didn’t they? And they did!

Didn’t they also remember Grayson? Maybe not. He was acting polite enough, though, so several girls who couldn’t fight their way into the circle around Alec settled for the circle around Grayson. Molly’s friends hardly noticed me, which was good. Their eyes might slide over to me, but they didn’t dare flare their nostrils or, worse, pointedly look me up and down. Not with Molly standing there. They went back to talking to Grayson.

I wished for a drink. I didn’t particularly want to get drunk. I definitely didn’t want to be hungover when I had an airplane to fly the next day. Grayson was right about that. But forced to stay here with these people, I would have preferred to nurse a beer in a corner and bond with some geek I hardly knew from history class, who was plastered. It was easier to make a good impression on plastered people. As it was, I stood in the same circle with Grayson, or sometimes with Alec, and listened to what these drunk girls had to tell them. I grinned so I wouldn’t look unhappy.

After several years of this, I snuck up behind Molly and whispered that I was going to find a soda. I was parched from my long, hot flights that day. “Come with?” I asked hopefully.

“No, I’m good,” she threw at me before turning back to Alec and the girls. Alec didn’t even glance at me. Grayson did, though, over several girls’ heads. He probably thought I was going to get wasted. I would let him worry.

I wandered through the crowd standing on the expensive hardwood floors and lounging with their feet up on the white sofas. I’d almost reached a wide doorway that I assumed led to the kitchen when Francie Mahoney herself caught up with me. She was about a foot taller than me even in my stilettos, and she had a tall friend with her. When she took me by the shoulder and rudely whipped me around against the wall, I had to fight down the urge to run between their long legs like a rabbit cornered by dogs.

“You’re here with Alec?” Francie asked me. “The cute one?”

I felt my brows go down, perplexed that she thought Alec was the cute one. I supposed I understood why she would think this. Alec had the face of an angel. A girl might think he was sexier than Grayson if she’d never seen Grayson move, walking with barely contained energy across the tarmac. “Yes,” I said.

“But I heard you were dating Mark Simon,” she said.

I wondered how she’d heard this. Mark was about as far as possible from popular, and her crowd did not keep up with his crowd. Only their own. “No,” I said.

“Yes,” she insisted. “I heard he moved into your trailer with you.” She smiled at me, teeth large and white, lips glossy red, but her words dripped sarcasm. It was hard to say which part of this scenario held more derision for her: moved into or trailer.

Girls like her slept with boys. They even slept over with them when they could get away with it. But they and their boyfriends would stay at home with Mommy and Daddy until they were safely ensconced in a college dorm. And girls like her did not live in trailers.

At school I avoided these girls by arriving late on the bus so I didn’t have to hang out before school, leaving early on the bus so I had no opportunity to hang out after school, and skipping lunch. It was unintentional but lucky that I’d neglected to turn in my homework throughout middle school and landed in the stupid classes, so I never encountered these girls in their college-track experience. In the unlucky event that I ran into them in the women’s bathroom, I played deaf.

But at school, they hated me only in passing. Now they wanted to take me down. I was in possession of the beautiful blond boy who had stolen their hearts long ago and moved away. They didn’t like it.

I couldn’t tell them the truth: “Yes, I shacked up with Mark Simon, and now I’m dating Mr. Popularity from another school.” Even “Yes, I had shacked up with Mark Simon, but now he’s moved out” sounded hopelessly trashy, and “It’s none of your business” would verify I had something to hide. Briefly I considered taking the offensive with “You are a bitch,” but these girls would tell everyone what I’d called them without explaining what the provocation had been, which would make me seem, if possible, more trashy.

So I squinted at Francie and said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but what have you been eating? You’ve got something stuck in your teeth.”

She blinked at me, straightened, and inserted one manicured fingernail between her front incisors.

“Let me see,” said her friend, whose name was Tara, I thought. My only interaction with her was that she had tried to trip me with her tennis racket in the locker room in PE.

“Check in the mirror,” I told Francie. “It looks like gristle.” I stepped past her, which I could do easily now because she was headed to the bathroom. She must have suspected I was lying, but she wouldn’t waltz away through a party without verifying that.

“Your lipstick looks like blood,” Tara called after me.

I said something back to her that was a comparison between her own lipstick color and her twat. Molly would have been proud of me.

“Hey!” Francie said so loudly that I stopped, and so did everybody else around us in the grand living room.

“Don’t go into that kitchen,” she said. “The drinks are for invited guests only.” The two of them laughed and turned for the bathroom again.

I stood there in the passageway with eight people staring at me. I couldn’t continue on my path toward the kitchen, because one of these people might be a friend of Francie’s, or just an asshole who would go rile her up and tell her I’d defied her order. Then there would be a bigger scene. But I couldn’t slink back to hover at Molly’s feet, either. Undecided, I stuck my chest out, then realized I was sticking my chest out.

I had only six more weeks of high school, I told myself. Six more weeks. Six more weeks.

And then what? If high school was supposed to have been the time of my life, what did I have to look forward to?

“God, what have you done now?” Molly hollered, catching me by the arm and dragging me into the kitchen with her. “I can’t take you anywhere.” She crossed the room like she owned it. At the sink she scooped ice into a plastic cup, poured me a soda, and handed it to me. Then she drained the dregs of her own plastic cup that somebody must have brought her. She made herself a soda. Looking around the kitchen, probably for Grayson, she sloshed in a generous helping of bourbon.

“Spill it,” she said. “Grayson told me Francie watched you leave and then followed you. He said it was like an old Western.”

I told her what had happened, expecting her to congratulate me on my twat line.

Instead, she put her hands on her hips and said, “I don’t see why you’re upset. Ten years from now, you’re going to be an airline pilot.”

Without even thinking, I reached one hand to the cabinets to knock on wood.

Molly didn’t stop talking. “In ten years, do you know what Francie’s going to be?”

“A presidential candidate?”

She pointed at me. “An ignorant, frightening one? That’s good! But no. With her holier-than-thou attitude and her level of mean, she’s headed for only one thing. Pastor’s wife.”

I laughed.

“At a really big church,” Molly went on, “so I don’t know what you’re snickering about like you’re all that with your big, bad airline pilot self.”

I nodded as if I believed her, because Molly did not like to hear that I didn’t believe her. “I should leave. It’s Francie’s party, and I’m not welcome here.”

“Why don’t you just go outside?” Molly said this absently while she looked over my head, waved at a friend, and moved in that direction. I couldn’t tell whether she was just trying to get rid of me, her whiny companion at this fun party, or whether she understood who sat outside at these parties. The trash sat outside: the boys invited by popular girls because they might bring weed. Maybe Molly was telling me to go out there with the trash and box my weight.

Molly had already snatched up her drink and gone to hug her friend. I let myself out a side door in the kitchen so I wouldn’t have to go back through the house and face down Francie again. Carefully I stepped across the lush lawn kept alive artificially by an expensive sprinkler system. The grass lay loosely across a bed of sand, not a good walking surface for stilettos. I should have watched the ground as I made my way along the side of the house, but I held my head high in case anybody was looking out a window. The storms that had been approaching all day and freaking Grayson out were finally close now. The wind tossed the tops of the palm trees. Though a gust might start cold, it ended warm on my bare arms and legs. I hoped we would get rain only, none of the tornadoes that had been creeping up the map all day.

Among the cars parked anyhow on the driveway and in the yard underneath the palm trees, a cluster of pickup trucks and the faint scents of tobacco and pot told me where the trash was. A couple of boys sitting on the trunks of cars whistled to me as I passed. I smiled brilliantly at them. As I neared the pickups, I recognized Patrick perched on a tailgate. I’d never thought I’d feel so relieved to see Patrick. Someone to talk to! I hoped he didn’t bear me any ill will for threatening to shove beer cans up his ass.

Apparently not. “Hey, girl,” he called as I approached. “You look niiiiiiiice.”

“Ha-ha,” I said, hefting myself onto the tailgate beside him.

“Toke?” he asked.

“No thanks.”

“Smoke?”

“Yes,” I said with relief. I took the cigarette he shook out of his pack and let him light it for me.

After one puff I knew I wasn’t going to smoke it. I felt sick, and I could hear Mr. Hall scolding me. I had promised him.

“You’re making the news tonight,” Patrick said. “I heard you’re here with that pretty boy, Alec Hall.”

That sounded about right. “You know him?” I asked.

“Played ball with him a long time ago,” Patrick said. “He’s not your type.”

“Oh, really?” I laughed. “Who’s my type, Patrick?”

“His brother,” Patrick said. “Grayson? We used to be pretty good friends. You and me, we like playing with fire for some reason.”

“Hm.” I’d held my cigarette so long without inhaling that the fire had died out, and the wind had blown the ash away. I tossed the long butt into the cup Patrick was using as an ashtray. On second thought, I wished I’d thrown it down in Francie’s driveway for her parents to find. They probably cared whether she smoked.

“Grayson and Mark are kind of similar,” Patrick said. “It’s like they don’t have an off button, you know? It’s fun to watch that fire, as long as you don’t get burned.”

“I don’t think Grayson and Mark are anything alike,” I said, watching Mark emerge from the cab of his pickup nearby in a cloud of pot smoke.

Following my gaze, Patrick said helpfully, “Oh, there’s Mark now. You know what? He’s still pissed about the whole thing with you, and then when he heard you were here with Alec… wow. Maybe you should g—”

I was already hopping down from the tailgate, my heels sinking into the sand. That slowed my exit. In two steps Mark crossed the space between us. He grabbed my bare upper arm, pulled me back the way he’d come, and pushed me into the cab of his truck.

I never stopped moving. I slid on over to the other side of the cab and reached down to open the door.

He gripped me by the arm again and pulled me back toward him across the seat so I couldn’t reach the door handle. “Leah, come on. I just want to talk to you.”

I stopped squirming, because pulling away from him was what hurt. I sat still and took a deep breath. I was more angry with him for pulling me around than scared of what he might do to me. He had never hurt me—other than grabbing me—or forced me to do something I didn’t want to do. I’d seen men treat my mother a lot worse than this a hundred times, and I tried to remember what she’d done in this situation.

Started dating them again, that’s what.

“Listen.” Mark put his hand on my bare knee and stroked all the way up my thigh to my shorts. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said. I see now that you were right about Brenda. I broke it off with her, and I won’t do anything like that again if you’ll let me come back. I’ll talk to my uncle about letting you fly for him too.”

I shouldn’t have considered this offer seriously. Not when he’d dragged me to his truck. But he was stoned. He didn’t realize he’d hurt me.

And the more I’d thought about Mr. Simon’s job over the past few days, the more I’d wondered whether Grayson had told me Mark had made it up just so Grayson could get me to work for him instead. When it was a matter of finding a cheap employee, I didn’t think Grayson would stoop to that level. Now that I knew Grayson needed my help to keep Alec in town, for whatever reason, I was sure Grayson would stoop to that level. Which might mean Mr. Simon’s job had been real all along.

“You can’t move back in with me,” I said. That had been the worst part of being with him. I wouldn’t have gotten so angry at him in the first place if there had been less of him.

“I won’t. I’m getting my own place.” He gripped my knee harder. “Just come by the hangar tomorrow morning.”

“I can’t do it tomorrow,” I said. “I’ve got another job.”

“Oh, right,” he said, “with those Hall assholes, over spring break. What kind of job is that, Leah? My uncle says they’ll last another week or two without the old guy around. My uncle will hire you permanently.”

He should have stopped when he was ahead. Now I was thinking about working for Mr. Simon permanently. Working with Mark. Being trained with Mark. Dating Mark under the constant threat of having my job taken away if I did something he didn’t like. I’d been ready to give his job another try as soon as I could get out of this tangle with Alec and Grayson, but now I was having second thoughts.

“Come on, Leah,” Mark whispered. His eyes were dark. He was there, when the other boys were inside the house with Molly and had forgotten me. He leaned closer to kiss me. I might have let him, except that he was squeezing my arm so hard.

The driver’s door opened. Mark yanked my knee for a handhold as he was dragged out. He hit the cab of the next truck and bounced off with his fist already coming around, barely missing Grayson, who slammed him in the jaw. Boys in the surrounding trucks yelled and scrambled toward the fight.

“Hey!” I squealed, clambering across the seat. I didn’t want these boys to beat each other up. Then there would be nobody left to employ me. “Grayson, Mark didn’t mean any harm. He was just—”

“Get out of the truck, Leah,” Grayson commanded me without looking around at me. He watched Mark. His hand was balled in a white, bloodless fist. “Go back to the house.”

“Fuck off, Hall,” Mark yelled, wiping blood from his mouth with one hand. “Leah, you stay right there.”

Running footsteps sounded behind the truck. “Grayson!” Alec called from a distance.

Grayson didn’t turn around for Alec either, but a second later, Alec and Patrick burst into the ring of boys that had formed to watch the fight. They dashed between Grayson and Mark. Alec caught Grayson from behind by both arms, spun him around, and shoved him in the direction of the house. The ring of boys parted to let Grayson through. Patrick put one hand on Mark, who slouched unsteadily against the cab.

Now that Grayson was gone, Mark leaned around Patrick and told Alec to fuck off instead. Alec stood there with his muscular arms crossed on his chest. He didn’t look like a pretty boy anymore. Patrick had called him that and I had silently agreed… but in the face of Mark calling him every filthy name he could think of, Alec looked grim and didn’t back down.

Alec turned to me and said sternly, “Go after Grayson. Make sure he gets to the car and waits for me there. You should know better than this. You have to keep him out of this type of thing or we’ll all end up in jail. I’ll fight Mark if I have to, but Grayson will kill him.”

thirteen

Alec shouldn’t have worried. Grayson was standing behind Mark’s truck with his hands on his hips, breathing hard. The instant he saw me, he stepped toward me like he’d been waiting for me. He grabbed my arm to pull me away from the fracas.

I stopped dead in my tracks. “Hey,” I said.

I didn’t have to explain why. As soon as I exclaimed, he realized he was grabbing me in exactly the same place Mark had grabbed me. Patrick must have told Grayson what happened. Patrick might even have gone to get him from the party. Grayson let me go immediately and spread his fingers as if consciously not making a fist. But he said, “Keep walking.”

By the time we reached Alec’s car, Alec was right behind us.

“Did you take care of it?” Grayson asked.

“Patrick talked him down.” Alec turned to me. “Are you okay?”

“Sure.” I’d been rubbing my arm unconsciously. I put my hand down.

Alec ran his fingers back through his hair, messing it up for the only time I’d seen, other than yesterday when he took the hose to it in the hangar sink. “Why were you talking to Mark?” He sounded exasperated with me, another first.

“I didn’t want to come to this party,” I said in my defense. “Y’all knew it. Molly knew it. She told you. You brought me anyway. The girl who lives here told me I wasn’t welcome. I asked Molly if we could leave and she told me to go outside.”

The boys exchanged a look over my head. “I’ll go get her,” Grayson said, obviously wanting me to have some alone time with Alec, my hero who had saved me, sort of, after Grayson saved me first. Grayson took a step toward the house.

Alec put his hand on Grayson’s shoulder to stop him. “I’ll get her. You’re too mad.”

As Alec walked toward the mansion, some boys ambled up the driveway from the direction of Mark’s truck. They stared pointedly at me. Grayson crossed his arms and glared at them until they looked away.

Still watching them, he opened the front passenger door of Alec’s car. “Get in.”

He closed the door behind me and got into the backseat. The hot night had been cooled by the stormy breeze, but the car was like a sauna. Down the driveway toward Mark’s truck, a radio blasted rap music and then quieted.

“Are you drunk?” Grayson asked.

“No,” I said haughtily. “That, among other things, is a condition of my employment.”

“Stoned?”

“No.”

“Then why did you get within a hundred feet of Mark?”

“I didn’t know he was out there,” I said. “And I can’t imagine why he’s still after me.” The massive front door of the mansion opened. Alec and Molly stepped out. The way they tossed sentences at each other and jerked their heads away, they looked like they were arguing. I wondered what Molly and Alec had to argue about.

“Have you seen yourself in those shorts?” Grayson asked me. “I’m beginning to think you really don’t know.”

I leaned around the headrest to face him in the backseat. “Know what, Grayson? That nobody will hire me just as a pilot? That all my flying jobs come with a side order of sexy times? Yeah, I’m beginning to figure that out. Not that you’re to blame.”

“God!” Molly was saying to Alec as she got into the backseat and he sat down in the front. But as soon as Alec started the engine and rolled down the windows to let the heat escape, Francie skittered out of the mansion with her minions behind her, pointing toward the car.

“Go, Alec,” Grayson said quietly.

Francie’s long, straight, glossy locks bounced around her shoulders as she stopped by my door and screamed through the open window at me. “What are you trying to do, start a fight and bring the cops to my party? This is why I don’t invite trash.” She peered past me into the car. “Molly, this is why I don’t invite your trashy friend. Do not bring her near me again.” She called across me to Alec, “You’d better be careful. You’ll definitely catch something.”

Her friends behind her laughed. More and more people were streaming out of the mansion to hear what Francie would say to me: all the girls who were actively mean to me in the hall and the bathroom and PE, the whole reason I never ventured to the lunchroom, and now a lot of other people too, who had never given me a second glance but were realizing now who the trashy girl was that everybody had been talking about. I’d felt safe at school when those girls and certain boys weren’t around. Now I wouldn’t be safe anywhere.

As my world crumbled around me, I opened my mouth to insult Francie back. I had no idea what would have come out. Through long years of practice, I was pretty good in these situations, though there was no way I could hurt her as badly as she’d hurt me. Making fun of a girl for being rich didn’t have the same zing as bullying her for being poor.

Before I could say anything, Molly exclaimed “Francie!” in a truly shocked tone.

But Alec drowned her out. “That is a nasty thing to say.” His voice was louder than I’d ever heard it when he wasn’t trying to talk over engine noise. “This town has gone to seed since I left.” He hit the button to close all the windows. As a glass barrier rolled up to protect me from Francie, he threw the car into reverse to back out, then jerked it forward.

I watched Francie in the side mirror. She posed on her lawn, gaping in shock, half the school behind her. Her dear friend Molly couldn’t shut her up, but an adorable boy from a different town had been able to make her see herself for what she was. Or, more likely, he’d just embarrassed her into silence temporarily.

As he turned from the driveway onto the main road, he bit out, “What did you bring Leah here for, Molly?”

“I warned y’all Leah didn’t want to come!” Molly said. “I told you that’s why she was dressed that way, and you didn’t seem to mind then.”

“You didn’t tell us that girl would come after her,” Alec said.

“I’ve never seen Francie act that way!” Molly protested. “I knew she didn’t like Leah, but I thought that was because Leah can be kind of brusque, in case you haven’t noticed. Did Leah tell you what she said to Francie’s friend inside earlier? It was a doozy.”

“That’s because Francie followed Leah.” Grayson was speaking for the first time. “I told you that before. It was obvious they were waiting to corner her. That’s why I sent you after them.”

“Well, what do you expect?” Molly snapped. “Did you think Francie would welcome Leah to the party and compliment her on her cute outfit? Leah’s dressed like a hooker.”

“Hey,” Alec said disapprovingly. At the same time, Grayson said, “I think she looks nice.”

I turned around in my seat and glared at Grayson, furious with him for manipulating me and getting me into this whole ill-fated date in the first place. “I hope you’re enjoying this.”

He stared back at me, lips parted, brows raised, looking almost apologetic.

I shifted my go-to-hell look to Molly. “And I’m sorry you’re not enjoying it. You told Grayson and Alec last night that you decided to be my friend instead of sticking with Ryan because I’m so fun and brazen for a poor girl. Now you’re saying you don’t want me to dress like a whore and stick up for myself when you drag me to a party thrown by your bitch friend who hates me and calls me trash to my face every time she sees me. You need to make up your mind, girlfriend, how you like your charity case.”

Delicate brows pulled low in a scowl, Molly took a long breath. She was going to tell me I was right. She didn’t want to be friends with me anymore. My heart was breaking already, but I wasn’t going to be used as anybody’s emotional punching bag—not Francie’s, not Molly’s.

Only Grayson’s. And only while he made me.

Instead, Molly slapped her hands over her face and burst into tears. Her sobs were loud at first. She tried to contain them, holding her breath, and ended up with a case of the hiccups.

Grayson could have slipped an arm around her to comfort her. I didn’t want him to, but that would have been humane. He chose the low road: “This is so awkward. You’re still coming to work tomorrow, right, Molly? I told you, no drinking this week, and no drama.”

“Really?” I shouted at him. “I’m about to lose my best friend and it’s still about work for you?”

“Yes, it’s about work for me,” he said. “I’m your boss.”

At the same time, Molly wailed, “You’re not about to lose your—” She hiccupped. “Please, Leah, you’re not about to lose your—”

“Molly, you would deserve it if you did,” Alec muttered. I could tell from the way he was looking in the rearview mirror that he was watching her.

“And what about you, Leah?” Grayson accused me. “You didn’t tell us Mark Simon would be at the party.” I felt his hand on my shoulder. “You promised me he wouldn’t come after Alec.”

I turned around again and frowned at Grayson. “I promised you no such thing. I told you Mark wasn’t dangerous.”

“He came after you, and Alec and I had to save your ass. In effect, he came after Alec.”

“Alec and you did not exactly have to save my ass,” I muttered at the same time Alec said with uncharacteristic bitterness, “Shut up, Grayson.”

We rode in silence for several minutes, except for the country music on the radio, and Molly hiccupping.

“I don’t know what you girls have going on with each other,” Grayson said quietly. “I think it would help if we all were more honest with each other.”

Molly snorted.

I glared at her, terrified all over again that Grayson would guess I’d told her about seducing Alec. Grayson glared at her too, and Alec continued to stare hard at her in the rearview mirror.

“Pardon me,” she grumbled.

The closer we got to her house, the more I worried. I still believed I was her charity case. But whatever her motivation for calling me a friend, I called her a friend because I was more myself around her. I relaxed more, laughed more. I wasn’t willing to throw that away over one party. Our relationship was a delicate balance. I shouldn’t have tipped the scales by telling her how I really felt.

At her house, she got out and slammed the car door without a word. I got out too and reached for her hand. She didn’t swing it playfully as we walked to her front door, but she didn’t pull away, either. On the porch, I closed the distance between us and hugged her. “I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry,” she said so somberly that I believed her. “I honestly didn’t think Francie would do that. And even if she did, I had no idea you cared.”

Fair enough. Molly was so popular that girls never told her to leave their parties. She probably hadn’t been trying to be mean to me. She simply had no clue what my life felt like, and she never would.

“I’m drunk,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She backed up and put her hand on the doorknob. “I will have regained some of my IQ points by tomorrow, and we’ll talk.”

“Deal.” I laughed, so relieved that the Molly I loved was coming back. But as I gently closed the door behind her and walked to Alec’s idling car, I knew everything was all wrong. We’d never had an argument like this before, not since we became friends in the first place. Something had come between us. It had to do with the boys. And we’d broken the most important unspoken rule of our bond. We shouldn’t have told each other we were sorry.

Back at the car, Alec covered my hand with his on the seat between us, not like flirting with me but like comforting a friend, and I gave him a small smile.

Grayson immersed himself in his phone all the way to the airport. We dropped him off at the hangar. He didn’t climb into his truck immediately. He unlocked the side door of the hangar.

“Is he really staying here that late to finish paperwork?” I asked Alec.

“He did last night,” Alec said. “Tonight he’s worried about the airplanes in the storms.”

On the short drive from the airport to the trailer park, I tried and failed to think of something to say. The night had been full and there was plenty to discuss, but every subject seemed touchy between Alec and me.

And I was so bone-tired. Maybe flying all day had fatigued me. Spilling my guts about my lack of a family. Unsuccessfully skirting Francie. Fighting with Mark. Nearly losing Molly. Pining after Grayson and hating myself for doing it.

“May I walk you to your door that is too an actual door?” Alec asked.

I laughed, trying not to sound nervous. I didn’t want to kiss Alec anywhere, but especially not at my door. “Can we stay in the car for a minute instead? The dog will calm down eventually. If we’re standing outside, he won’t.”

“Okay.” Alec parked in the dirt clearing and turned off the engine. Into that silence, the noise of the trailer park flowed: the pit bull having a fit at the end of his chain, the wind tossing the trees and making the joints of the metal trailers screech, a couple standing in the road and cursing at each other. Staying in the car parked in the dirt yard was awkward. I should have told Alec to come inside the trailer. But I wasn’t going to do that.

He cleared his throat. “I wanted to ask you something.”

Uh-oh. Every time Alec had asked me something tonight, I’d wished he hadn’t.