He shook his head.
“Thanks,” I told him as I flipped the visor down and then opened the panel for the lit-up mirror. I tried to ignore the nerves in my stomach as I swept my hair into a low ponytail and started wiping below my eyes with the side of my finger.
I could feel him glance at me. “You already look nice.”
I blushed and flipped the visor closed like a little kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar. “You only get one first impression—”
“What?”
“You only get one first impression,” I repeated myself, pretty sure I was still blushing. “I don’t want them to not like me.”
Aaron’s mouth screwed up and his forehead furrowed as he shot me a glance out of the corner of his eye. “They’re not going to not like you, Ru.” Then he slid me a full look. “You don’t have to be nervous. You meet your friends’ friends all the time, I thought.”
One explanation after another backed up inside my throat, and I couldn’t pick one that made me sound less lame and self-conscious, but I had to. I tried to reason with myself that he already knew nearly all the worst things about me and I was still here. What was a little more embarrassment after I’d already called him gorgeous? “But these are your friends,” I explained, hoping he’d understand what I meant.
Which was that he was special to me. More special than he should have been. But there was my newest truth out in the open.
And Aaron must have known what I was trying to tell him, because he smiled so tenderly, so freaking sweetly, like you’d look at a puppy being cute, that I felt like a nut cracked in half. “You’re my friend. I want you to like them too. I told them not to make a mess before we got back.”
He…
“Don’t worry, all right?” he said in that gentle, calm voice that could have made him a Ruby Whisperer. When I didn’t respond, he reached over and touched the side of my arm with the back of his hand briefly. “All right?”
“All right,” I agreed, even though my stomach was still all knotty and uneasy, and it wasn’t all because of his friends.
Luckily, he didn’t say anything else as we drove for all of six minutes longer before he turned left into a neighborhood of massive, colorful beach houses, one right next to the other. We drove passed aqua, blue, green, and white homes, but it was a bright purple house on stilts he headed toward. To one side was a small, fenced-in pool, and on the other side of where he parked was a silver Alero. Aaron shot me another calming smile as he opened his door and got out. I only felt a little nauseous as I got out too, hopping down. Aaron was already opening the back door as I pulled my bag out from the front and tossed it over my shoulder, looking around at the rest of the homes and listening for the waves that had to be close by.
“Come on,” he said, snapping me out of looking around, as he stood there with his hand extended toward me.
Neither one of my sisters would have taken it. I knew that.
But they were them and I was me, and I didn’t wait until he realized I had to think about it before I took the two steps I needed to get to him and slipped my fingers through his, like we’d done this a thousand times in the past. His fingers were cool and rough and his palm was broad, and somewhere my subconscious was aware that these hands might have done something that wasn’t nice or tender, that Aaron had lived in dangerous places for a long time and might have done things he would never want to talk about.
But I took his hand anyway and wrapped my fingers around his, hoping mine didn’t feel as warm and clammy as they would have with any other human being in this situation.
The tiny smile that came over that beautiful mouth made the lines at the corners of his eyes crinkle, and for one moment, I couldn’t believe his crap about how he claimed he wasn’t in the business of smiling. I couldn’t see it. He seemed so good-natured and thoughtful and warm, I couldn’t see him for anything else but the man who went out of his way to make me comfortable.
He didn’t say a word as he tugged me toward a white door in the center of the carport area below the house, opening it with the hand he’d been using to drag my bag behind us. Aaron didn’t let go of my hand as he led me into a mudroom and then reached back to drag my suitcase in and close the door behind us. He kept right on holding it while we walked up a flight of tiled white stairs that weren’t really wide enough for two adults and a suitcase, but we made it work somehow as anxiety at meeting people who had been in Aaron’s life for decades filled my thoughts and stomach even more than they already had.
He smiled at me lightly on the next landing when he dropped my bag off besides the stairs with a “Your room’s on this floor. I’ll show it to you after we find everyone.” Then we were back going up the stairs, and it was subconscious when I squeezed the fingers still entwined with his, this man I’d barely just seen for the first time three hours ago.
Aaron didn’t let go when we made it to the third floor, which opened into a huge living area painted in a bright blue with sea-themed frames and knickknacks highlighting white furniture. It was the sound of voices talking over each other that had me glancing to a big kitchen tucked to the right, further into the wide-open layout. I sensed Aaron perk up, his spine straightening, and something about him in general just changing. There were two men and two girls standing around the white kitchen island, arguing.
One of the men, the tallest of the two, who might have been stunning if I hadn’t seen Aaron first, happened to glance up just as he finished saying, “I don’t want pizza either, but it’s the only thing open,” and spotted us. A grin immediately crept across his sharp face. I almost paused, but when Aaron kept walking, so did I.
“Where have you been?” the man asked, almost immediately, looking back and forth between Aaron and me, not being very shy or sneaky about it.
My friend, who had been nothing but soft spoken with me, tightened his hold on my palm. “We stopped to eat. I texted you.”
The handsome stranger opened his mouth for a moment before slamming it closed. He reached into his front pocket and pulled out a cell phone, then frowned down at it in the time it took us to stop a few feet shy of the island, where the rest of Aaron’s friends were doing the same thing I would have done. Looking at the odd person out. Me.
“I had it on silent,” the man admitted with a laugh.
If Aaron screwed up his mouth into a smirk, I wasn’t positive. What I was positive of was how hard he smacked his friend on the shoulder. “Told you. You barely woke up?”
The second man, with light brown skin and bright green eyes, nodded as he gazed directly at the hand I was clutching, his eyes seeming to sharpen and narrow enough so that I started loosening the grip I had on Aaron’s hand. He held my hand tighter. “Not all of us can run on three hours of sleep like it’s no big deal,” the green-eyed man commented, still watching that spot between Aaron and me.
My friend made a dismissive noise in his throat as his hand slipped out of mine all of a sudden, and before I had a chance to snatch for it again, he moved it… and settled his palm on my lower back. The next thing I knew, he was leading me forward as he shifted to the side, giving me room to stand beside him directly in front of the island. I hadn’t even realized I was standing partially behind him.
“This is Ruby. Ruby, this is…”
I didn’t mean to zone out as he pointed from one man to another and then moved on to the two girls, but I did. One of them was a younger girl in a cast, and the other was older than me. They were both smiling genuinely… at least I hoped it was genuine. All I could do was freeze there and breathe as I stood and listened to one name after another, going in one ear and out the other.