ANDREW
14
SHE’S CUTE WHEN I’M torturing her. Because she enjoys it.
I don’t know how I got myself into this, but I do know that as much as my conscience is ripping into my f*cking ears, telling me to leave her alone, I can’t. I don’t want to.
We’ve already gone too far.
I know I should’ve left it at the bus station, bought her a First Class plane ticket home so she would feel obligated to use it since it cost so much, then call her a cab and had it drop her off at the airport.
I should never have let her leave with me, because now, I know that I won’t be able to let her go. I have to show her first. It’s mandatory now. I have to show her everything. She might get hurt in the end after all is said and done, but at least she’ll be able to go back home to North Carolina with something more to look forward to in her life.
I take the shoebox from her hands and place the top back over it and set it on top of the opened duffle bag. She watches me as I throw open the top dresser drawer and fish out a few clean pairs of boxers and socks and then shove them down inside the bag, too. All of my basic hygiene necessities are in the bag out in the car that I brought on the bus with me.
I hoist the duffle bag strap over my shoulder and look at her.
“Are you ready?”
“I guess so,” she says.
“Wait, you guess?” I ask, stepping up to her. “You either are, or you aren’t.”
She smiles up at me with those beautiful crystal blue eyes. “Yes, I’m definitely ready.”
“Good, but why the hesitation?”
She shakes her head softly to say I’m wrong.
“Absolutely no hesitation,” she says. “All of this is just…strange, you know? But in a good way.”
She looks like she’s trying to untangle something in her head. Obviously, she’s got a lot on her mind.
“You’re right,” I say. “It is kind of strange—OK, it’s a lot strange because it’s not natural, stepping out of the box like this.” I peer in at her, forcing her to catch my eyes. “But that’s the whole point.”
Her smile brightens as though my words rang a little bell inside her mind.
She nods and says with a fun and eager air, “Well, then what are we waiting for?”
We walk back out into the hall and just before we start to head down the stairs, I stop.
“Wait one second.”
She waits there at the top of the stairs and I turn back, passing my bedroom and head toward Aidan’s. His room is as pathetic as mine. I see his acoustic guitar sitting propped against the far wall and I walk over and grab it by the neck and carry it out.
“You play guitar?” Camryn asks as I lead her down the stairs.
“Yeah, I play some.”
CAMRYN
ANDREW CHUCKS HIS BAG in the backseat with his smaller bag and mine and my purse. He’s a little more careful with the guitar, though, laying it neatly across the seat. We hop inside the vintage black car (with two white racing stripes down the center of the hood) and shut our doors at the same time.
He looks over at me.
I look over at him.
He thrusts the key in the ignition and the Chevelle roars to life.
I can’t believe I’m doing this. I’m not afraid or worried or feel like I should stop this right now and just go home. Everything about it feels right; for the first time in a very long time, I feel like my life is back on track again, except on a very different sort of road, one in which I have no idea where it’s going. I can’t explain it…except that, well, like I said: it feels right.
Andrew punches the gas once we hit the entrance ramp and get on 87 going south.
I kind of like watching him drive, how he’s so casual even when he speeds past a few slow drivers. It doesn’t look like he’s trying to show off as he’s weaving between cars; it just looks like second-nature to him. I catch myself getting a glimpse every now and then of his muscled right arm as his hand grips the steering wheel. And as my eyes carefully scan the rest of him, I go right back to wondering about that tattoo hidden underneath that navy t-shirt which fits him so well.
We talk about whatever for a while; about that guitar being Aidan’s and that Aidan will probably blow up if he finds out that Andrew took it. Andrew doesn’t care. “He stole my socks once,” Andrew said.
“Your socks?” I said back with a rather screwed-up expression. And he looked over at me with an expression that read: hey; socks, guitars, deodorant—a possession is a possession.
I just laughed, still finding it ridiculous, but easily letting him slide.
We also got into a really deep conversation about the mystery of the single shoes that lie on the side of the freeways all across the United States.
“Girlfriend got pissed and tossed her boyfriend’s shit out the window,” Andrew had said.
“Yeah, that’s a possibility,” I said, “but I think a lot of them belong to hitchhikers, because most of them are raggedy.”
He glanced over at me awkwardly, as if waiting for the rest.
“Hitchhikers?”
I nodded, “Well yeah, they do a lot of walking so I imagine their shoes get worn out fast. They’re walking along, their feet are hurting and they see a shoe—probably one of those tossed out by that angry girlfriend (I point at him to include his theory)—and seeing that it’s in better shape than the ones on his feet, he trades one out.”
“That’s stupid,” Andrew says.
My mouth parts with a spat of offended air. “It could happen!” I laugh and reach over and smack him on the arm. He just smiles at me.
And we went on and on about it, each of us coming up with an even stupider theory than the one before.
I can’t remember the last time I laughed this much.
We finally make it back into Denver nearly two hours later. It’s such a beautiful city with the vast mountains in the background that look like white clouds at their peaks, sprawled across the bright blue horizon. It’s still pretty early in the day and the sun is shining full-force.
When we make it into the heart of the city, Andrew slows the car to a forty mile per hour crawl.
“You have to tell me which way,” he says as we coast toward another entrance ramp.
He looks in three directions and then over at me.
Caught off-guard, my eyes dart around at each route and the closer we get to having to make a decision on which way to turn, the slower he drives.
Thirty-five miles per hour.
“What’s it gonna be?” he asks with sparkling bright green eyes flecked by a little bit of taunt.
I’m so nervous! I feel like I’m being asked to choose which wire to cut to diffuse a bomb.
“I don’t know!” I shout, but my lips are smiling wide and nervously.
Twenty miles per hour. People are honking at us and one guy in a red car zooms past and flips us off.
Fifteen miles per hour.
Ahhh! I can’t stand the anticipation! I feel like I want to burst out laughing, but it’s being held captive in my throat.
Honk! Honk! F*ck you! Move out of the way a*shole!
It all just rolls off Andrew’s back and he never stops smiling.
“That way!” I finally yell, throwing my hand up and pointing to the east ramp. I squeal out laughter and slide my back down further against the seat so that no one else can see me, I’m so embarrassed.
Andrew flips his left blinker on and slides over into the left lane with ease, in-between two other cars. We make it through the yellow light just before it turns red and in seconds we’re on another freeway and Andrew is pressing on the gas. I have no idea which direction we’re traveling, only that we’re going east, but where it leads exactly is still up in the air.
“Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?” he says, glancing over at me with a grin.
“Kind of exhilarating,” I say and then let out a sharp laugh. “You really pissed those people off.”
He brushes it off with a shrug. “Everybody’s in too much of a hurry. God forbid you drive the speed limit or you might get lynched.”
“So true,” I say and look out ahead through the windshield. “Though I have to come clean—I’m usually one of them.” I wince admitting it.
“Yeah, me too sometimes.”
Everything gets quiet all of a sudden and it becomes the first quiet moment that the both of us notice. I wonder if he’s thinking the same thing, wondering about me and wanting to ask, just as I’m curious about so much when it comes to him. It’s one of those moments that are inevitable and almost always open the door to the stage where two people really start to get to know each other.
It’s very different from when we were on the bus together. We thought that our time was limited then and if we were never going to see each other again, there was no reason to get all personal.
But things have changed and personal is all that’s left.
“Tell me more about your best friend, Natalie.”
I keep my eyes on the road for several long seconds and I’m slow to answer because I’m not sure which part of her I should tell.
“If she’s even still your best friend,” he adds, sensing the animosity somehow.
I look over.
“Not anymore. She’s sort of whipped, for lack of a better explanation.”
“I’m sure you have a better explanation,” he says, putting his eyes back on the road. “Maybe you just don’t want to explain it.”
I make a decision.
“No, I do want to explain it, actually.”
He looks pleased, but keeps it at a respectful level.
“I’ve known her since second grade,” I begin, “and I didn’t think anything could break up our friendship, but I was so wrong about that.” I shake my head, disgusted just thinking about it.
“Well, what happened?”
“She chose her boyfriend over me.”
I think he expected more of an explanation and I intended to give him more, but it just came out the way it did.
“Did you make her choose?” he asks with a subtly raised brow.
I turn around to look at him. “No, it wasn’t like that at all.” I sigh long and heavily. “Damon—her boyfriend—got me alone one night and tried to kiss me and tell me he wanted me. Next thing I know, Natalie is calling me a lying bitch and says she never wants to see me again.”
Andrew nods one of those long, hard nods that show he completely understands now.
“An insecure girl,” he says. “She’s probably been with him for a long time, huh?”
“Yeah, about five years.”
“You know, this best friend of yours, she believes you, right?”
I gaze over at him confusedly.
He nods. “She does; think about it, she’s known you practically all her life. Do you really think she’d just toss away a friendship like that because she didn’t believe you?”
I’m still confused.
“But she did,” I say simply. “It’s exactly what she did.”
“Nah,” he says, “it’s just a reaction, Camryn. She doesn’t want to believe it, but not so very far down, she knows it’s true. She just needs time to think on it and to see it for what it is. She’ll come around.”
“Well, by the time she does, I might not want her.”
“Maybe so,” he says and flips on his right blinker and switches lanes, “but I don’t take you for the type.”
“Unforgiving?” I say.
He nods.
We speed past a crawling semi and move around in front of it.
“I don’t know,” I say, unsure myself anymore, “I’m not like I used to be.”
“How did you used to be?”
I’m not even sure about that, either. It takes me a second to find a way around mentioning Ian. “I used to be fun and outgoing and I…,” I laugh suddenly as the memory tickles my mind, “…and I used to run naked into a freezing lake every winter.”
Andrew’s whole beautiful face twists into a curious, energized smile. “Wow,” he says, “I can just picture it….”
I smack him on the arm again. Always smiling. He pretends it stings, but I know better.
“It was a fundraiser for the hospital in my town,” I say, “and they put it on every year.”
“Naked?” He looks thoroughly confused aside from grinning thinking about it.
“Well, not fully naked,” I say, “but in a tank top and shorts in freezing water, you might as well be naked.”
“Shit, I should sign up for hospital fundraisers when I get home,” he says, hitting the steering wheel once. “Didn’t know what I was missing out on.”
He tames the smile a little and looks back at me. “So why is that something you used to do?”
Because Ian was the one who talked me into it and who I did it with for two years.
“I just stopped about a year ago—just one of those things you fall out of.”
I get the feeling he doesn’t believe there’s not more to it than that, so I jump onto something else to distract from it.
“What about you?” I ask, turning around at the waist to give him my full attention. “What’s something crazy that you’ve done?”
Andrew purses his lips in thought, looking out at the road. We pass another semi and get around in front of it. The traffic is thinning out the farther away from the city we drive.
“I hood-surfed once—not so much crazy as it was stupid, though.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty stupid.”
He reaches his left hand up and puts the underside of his wrist into view. “I fell off the damn thing and sliced my wrist open on no telling what.” I peer in at the two-inch scar running along the skin from the bottom of the thumb bone and onto his arm. “I rolled across the road. Cracked my head open.” He points to the back right side of his head. “Got nine stitches there in addition to the sixteen on my wrist. I’ll never do that again.”
“Well, I would hope not,” I say sternly, still trying to see the scar through his brown hair.
He switches hands on the steering wheel and takes a hold of my wrist, sliding his index finger over the length of the top of mine so he can use his as a guide.
I pull closer, letting his hand guide mine.
“Right about…there,” he says when he finds it. “Do you feel it?”
His hand falls away from mine, but I watch it for a moment.
Coming back to the issue of his head, I look up and run the tip of my finger along an obvious uneven smooth strip of skin on his scalp and then I part his short hair away with my fingers. The scar is about an inch long. I run my finger over it one more time and reluctantly pull away.
“I imagine you have a lot of scars,” I say.
He smiles. “Not too many; got one on my back from when Aidan clipped me with a bicycle chain, swingin’ it around like a whip (I wince, gritting my teeth). And when I was twelve, had Asher riding on the handlebars of my bike. Hit a rock. Bike flipped forward and sent us both skidding across the concrete.” He points to his nose. “Broke my nose, but Asher broke an arm and had fourteen stitches on his elbow. Mom thought we’d been in a car wreck and were just lying about it to cover our asses.”
I’m still looking at his perfectly shaped nose; don’t see any evidence that it had ever been broken before.
“Got a weird L-shaped scar on my inner thigh,” he goes on and points to the general area. “Not gonna show you that one though.” He grins and puts both hands on the wheel.
I blush, because it really took me all of two seconds to start envisioning him dropping his pants to show me.
“That’s a good thing,” I laugh and then lean up toward the dashboard so I can pull my babydoll Smurfette shirt up just over my hip. I catch his eyes on me and it does something to my stomach, but I ignore that. “Camping one year,” I say, “jumped off these bluffs into the water and hit a rock—I almost drowned.”
Andrew frowns and reaches over, tracing the edges of the small scar on my hipbone. A shiver runs up my spine and through the back of my neck like something freezing racing through my blood.
I ignore that too, as much as I can.
I let my shirt fall back over my hip and I lean back against the seat.
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t drown.” His eyes warm up with his face.
I smile back at him. “Yeah, that would’ve sucked.”
“Definitely.”