The Edge of Never, Wait For You, Rule: Scorching Summer Reads 3 Books in 1. J. Lynn

Чтение книги онлайн.

       Seventeen

      When I could hold my eyes open long enough, I did stare up at the rain pelting down on me. I’ve never looked at it like that, straight up into the sky, and while I flinched more than I could actually see, when I could see it was absolutely beautiful. Like each drop rocketing towards me was separate from the thousands of others and for a suspended moment in time, I could glimpse it and see its delicate facets. I saw the gray clouds churning above me and felt the car shake when the wind from the traffic pushed against it. I shivered even though it’s warm enough to swim. But nothing I saw or felt or heard was as warm and fascinating as Andrew’s closeness.

      I scream and laugh as we race to get back inside the car minutes later.

      The door slams shut and then his does after mine.

      “I’m freezing!” I shudder out a laugh, pressing my uplifted arms between my breasts with my fingers tightly interlocked and my chin pressed against them.

      Andrew, smiling so hugely that it stretches his entire face, shivers once and flips on the heat.

      Instinctively, I try to forget that I had lain against his arm, or that he put it out there for me to begin with. I think he tries to forget, too, or at least not to make it obvious.

      He rubs his hands together, trying to get warm as the heat blasts from the vents. My teeth are chattering.

      “Wearing wet clothes sucks,” I say with shivering jaws.

      “Yeah, I’m with you on that one,” he says, stretching his seatbelt around and clicking it in place.

      I do the same, though like always, after being in the car so long I’ll end up slipping out of it so that I can find another comfortable seating position.

      “My toes feel slimy,” he says, looking toward his feet.

      My whole face crumples. He laughs and then reaches down and pulls his shoes off, tossing them in the back floorboard.

      I decide to do the same because even though I won’t say it, my feet feel slimy, too.

      “We need to find a place to change,” I say.

      He puts the car in drive and looks at me. “There’s a backseat,” he says, grinning. “I won’t look, I swear.” He puts his hands up for assurance and then grips the steering wheel again, pulling back onto the freeway when he has an opening between traffic.

      I scoff. “Nah, I think I’ll wait until we find a place.”

      “Suit yourself.”

      I know he would totally look. And, well, it wouldn’t bother me much …

      The windshield wipers are swishing back and forth full blast and it’s raining so hard that it’s still difficult to see the road out ahead. Andrew leaves the heat on until it starts to feel like a sauna and he turns it down after checking first to see if I’m good with it.

      “So, Hotel California, huh?” he asks, grinning over at me with deep dimples. He reaches out and presses the button to choose another CD and then keeps pressing until he finds the song. “Let’s see how much you know.”

      His hand drops back on the wheel.

      The song begins like I always remembered with that eerie guitar, slow and haunting. We look at each other back and forth, letting the music move through and between us, waiting for the lyrics to begin. Then at the same time, we raise our hands as if knocking on the air one, two, three with the beat and we start to sing with Don Henley.

      We get fully into it, line after line and sometimes we switch off, him letting me sing a line and then he sings one. And when the first chorus comes, we sing together at the top of our lungs, practically shouting the lyrics at the windshield. We squint our eyes and bob our heads and I pretend I’m not mortified by my singing. Then the second verse comes and our taking-turns starts to get a little tangled, but we totally have fun with it and only trip-up a couple of times. And we say ‘1969!’ loudly together. Then we lose a little of the passion to sing and just let the music funnel through the car instead. But when the iconic second chorus comes around and the song slows and becomes more haunting, we get serious again and sing every single word together, looking right at each other. Andrew hits ‘alibis!’ so flawlessly that it sends shivers up my arms. And we both ‘stabbed the beast’ together, pumping our fists at our sides and getting into it.

      And that was how the drive was to wherever for the next several hours.

      I sang so much with him that my throat became sore.

      Of course, all of it was classic rock with the occasional early nineties: Alice in Chains and Aerosmith mostly, and none of it bothered me one bit. I actually loved it all and the memory it was creating in my mind. A memory with Andrew.

      We find a rest stop off the freeway in Jackson, Tennessee, and take full advantage of it. We slip inside the restrooms to change out of our wet clothes, which we’ve been in for longer than either of us realized. I guess our fun together in the car with my less-than-stellar singing and him pretending he loves it distracted us from everything else.

      He’s dressed before me and already waiting inside the car when I stroll out wearing the only thing I had left in my bag that was clean: the white cotton shorts and varsity tee I like to sleep in. I only brought one bra and I happened to be wearing it when I was being rained on so it’s completely wet still. But I’m wearing it anyway because there’s no way I’m getting in that car with him bra-less.

      “I am not wearing these shorts for your benefit,” I say, pointing sternly at him as I crawl back inside the car. “For the record.”

      The corner of his mouth lifts into a grin.

      “Note taken,” he says, jotting it down on a pretend tablet.

      I lift my butt from the seat and grasp the end of my shorts, pulling them just a little so they aren’t crawling up my crotch and to cover a little more skin on my thighs. I start to kick my black flip-flops onto the floorboard until I see how saturated the floor mat is and decide to leave them on. It’s a good thing the seats are leather.

      “I’m gonna have to find some more clothes,” I say.

      Andrew’s wearing jeans again and his black Doc Marten boots, and another plain gray t-shirt, lighter in color than the last one. Like anything, it looks good on him, but I kind of miss his tanned muscled calves and the black and gray Celtic tattoo on the ball of his ankle.

СКАЧАТЬ