It was him. Crap on a stick, it was really him. My hands were shaking just a little as I looked at his driver’s license one more time before handing it over, thisishimthisishimthisishim going around and around my head, stealing the power from my lungs as I told him the one thing I hadn’t exactly been planning on admitting as my voice practically shook, “I thought you weren’t coming.”
Aaron—not some faker who had hacked into his account and decided to come kidnap me out of all the other people in the world that he could find—shook his blond head, still frozen in place even though his features seemed to be bouncing back and forth between a smile and an expression that might have been a surprised one or a confused one, but I didn’t know him well enough to be sure.
“I thought—” He cleared his throat, making me drag my eyes toward his bobbing, very tan Adam’s apple. “I was standing over by the lot, waiting. I didn’t know….”
He was disappointed. He was disappointed, wasn’t he?
“You don’t look like I thought you would,” were the words he used to break the silence. His pronunciation was slow, calm. He blinked in the middle of his sentence as his chest went wide with an inhale and just as quickly deflated with an exhale. I stopped breathing as those dark brown eyes of his roamed over my face and down my front all over again. His mouth did that wavering thing again, fluctuating, indecisive before settling into a weak smile as his eyes bounced all over me one last time. His voice was as wary as his smile as he said the five words we’d said to each other so many times over the last few months, a reminder of our friendship, a reminder that he’d invited me to come here. “You know what I mean.”
He was disappointed. That’s what he meant. What was new? I should have known. Should have expected….
I didn’t fight the urge to blink or suck in a breath through my nose that sounded choppy and broken into syllables that it wasn’t capable of. My heart started beating faster, nervous, more nervous than I thought I’d probably ever been before, and that had been really nervous. Tears prickled in my eyes like they had moments ago, but I didn’t let them fall. I wouldn’t. Somehow, someway I managed to clear my own throat and tell him more softly than I would have liked, “I told you I don’t look like my mom or my sister.”
The man I was sure was named Aaron made a sound that resembled a huff, almost like a laugh, but the next six words out of his mouth made me flinch. “No. You don’t look like them.” And then, while I was pinching my lips together again at the brutality of his honesty, telling myself not to cry because he’d done this to himself by thinking I was lying, he really did laugh as he took a step forward, his eyes suddenly so bright and focused, that face of his I’d just been shocked with, lit up. “You hungry?”
He asked it like it was nothing. Like he hadn’t just confirmed something I’d accepted a long time ago but never got that much easier to accept. Like I didn’t have one little tear I desperately wiped at in the corner of my eye.
“What’s wrong?” Aaron asked immediately as his eyebrows knit together, by some miracle making his gorgeous face look even more handsome, even after he’d basically admitted he’d thought I was something or someone else and was trying to process it.
I was such an idiot.
My vision went blurry, and I could sense the anxiety in my sternum and belly. “This feels weird,” I told him honestly, nervous, nervous, nervous. More nervous by the second. By the millisecond. I tried sucking in a breath that wasn’t there.
“Ruby, what’s wrong?” came his concerned question as I looked down at the ground, fisting my hands at my sides.
I swallowed. I told myself to keep it together. Reminded myself that I’d known this was going to happen and that I wasn’t going to be disappointed. So I lied as I wiped at my face again, forcing myself to look at him as I spoke. “I thought you changed your mind and I was deciding what to do…”
Those dark eyes, so at odds with his coloring and hair, widened. There was no hesitation on his face when Aaron took another step forward, a frown growing across his mouth and practically radiating throughout his entire body. “I wasn’t going to change my mind,” he claimed, steadily. His irises bounced back and forth between one of my eyes and the next, the line of his jaw going tight. “Are you all right?”
I sucked in a breath through my nose, shrugging, and gulped, reaching up to rub my palm over my breastbone. I couldn’t be having a panic attack. I couldn’t. But I tried to take another breath and there was nothing there. There was nothing there and my hands had begun sweating at some point and feeling like they were covered with ants, and my heart was beating like crazy and— “I feel like I can’t catch my breath…”
Aaron’s head jerked, and I’d swear his face paled. The four steps he took forward were immediate, leading him to stop directly in front of me before I even realized it. Aaron Hall, who was even more gorgeous than I ever could have imagined, was in front of me and I was freaking the hell out.
I was freaking the hell out.
Because I was frustrated and let down and trying so hard not to be. I wasn’t good at this crap. I should never have come.
When his hand reached for my arm, he didn’t hesitate for a second as his fingers wrapped around the delicate skin on the inside of my elbow, and before I knew what was happening, he was steering me toward a bench I hadn’t seen, one arm going over my shoulders like it was the most natural thing in the world. And the entire time he did that, he said, “You’re fine, Ruby, you’re fine. Breathe, breathe…” over and over again until my butt hit the bench and he was stooping in front of me.
And I was still losing it.
I made a circle over my heart, swallowing, feeling like an idiot but at the same time like not an idiot because this guy who said he was Aaron, and acted like Aaron and sounded like Aaron, was crouching by my knees after making me think I was on my own in a city I’d never been before because he’d changed his mind.
Hands I hadn’t even realized were cupping my knees, gave them a squeeze. “Hold on, okay? I’ll be right back.” Another squeeze. “Right, right back,” he promised me as I sat there. I blinked and felt a third squeeze, and then he was up on his feet and gone, jogging somewhere I wasn’t sure of because I didn’t keep watching him.
I rubbed the skin over my heart, my fingers clammy over the exposed skin above my shirt. My hands weren’t shaking, but it sure felt like the rest of me was. A part of me wanted to decide I’d changed my mind, go back inside the terminal, buy another ticket, go home and pretend this hadn’t happened. I could just tell everyone— I just barely thought of “everyone” before the word fell like a wet blanket over my entire nervous system.
I couldn’t go back home. No way. My family would never let me live this trip down. They’d think something bad happened or think that I couldn’t handle going somewhere by myself and that would be it. No one would ever let me forget it. Most importantly, I would never, ever do anything that made me squirm ever again. That was the whole purpose of this trip. I wanted to do this. I’d wanted to come. I wanted to be here, and it had nothing to do with them.
I didn’t want to go back.
If I did…
Everything was fine. It was okay. I hadn’t been left. Maybe I wasn’t what he was hoping for, but he was here. Aaron was here.
Aaron who was so good-looking my eyeballs could have started hurting in the three minutes we’d been face to face if I hadn’t been flipping out internally. And it wasn’t a big deal that he didn’t look like what I’d pictured. That if I’d known he looked the way he did, maybe I wouldn’t have been making jokes about his butthole.