A shiver courses down my spine.
“Are you . . .” Heidi’s voice coming up behind me startles me, and I jolt up. I shuffle backward away from the car, but her thinly arched eyebrows are already raised. “Holy shit, Kylie, you’re sniffing the seat.”
“No, I—” But she pokes her head into the car and breathes in.
“Ooh, that does smell good. Wonder what you’re thinking about right now.” She climbs into the Suburban through the back door and plops down in the middle seat, folding her skinny arms across her chest. Cal snorts from the row behind her, and even though her eyes narrow dangerously, she ignores him. “This will be fun,” she says to me, a little too cheerfully.
Instead of holding back the nervous laugh building in my chest, I let it out as I slide my sunglasses over my face. There’s nowhere near enough sunshine today to need the oversized aviators, but they’ll help me sleep on the ride. At least that’s the plan.
“I sure as hell hope this’ll be good,” I say.
“There’ll be music. What’s not fun about music?”
Cal says something to her from the backseat, and though I’m not 100 percent positive, I’m pretty sure it’s “And the dicks attached to the guys who play it.” Whatever it is was, it earns a hissed “Fuck you” and the bird from Heidi.
Biting the inside of my cheek, I rub the back of my neck. I’m already dreading the fact that I’ll be forced to listen to Heidi and Cal’s back and forth until the end of the week, three days from now.
When I spoke to Heidi about my plans to travel along with Wyatt and Cal this morning, she promptly volunteered herself for the trip. “You don’t have to do that, babe. I don’t have a choice, but you do,” I told her. “Catch your flight and get back to sexing up drunk guys.”
She responded by ripping her itinerary into tiny pieces and dropping them into my hand. “You’re stuck with me now.”
“You do know that you can just print another one, right?”
Flipping her chestnut waves over her shoulder, she had pressed her lips together. “It’s, what, only four days counting today? And it’s not like the phones are going anywhere. It’s my fault that you have to be with them, so I want to go.”
Though I should have, I didn’t tell her the sad, twisted reality of it all.
There is a part of me that’s thrilled that I’m going along for the ride, that’s ecstatic that I’ll have these few extra days with Wyatt just so I can get everything off of my chest. Even if he will be busy driving and performing the majority of that time, we’ll have the opportunity that had been taken away from us last night.
But then there’s part of me that aches inside, that knows prolonging my time with him will just slice my heart open a little more. He hadn’t told me the exact plan for this trip until this morning, and when he did I was speechless for a long time. The first leg of our trip is the same route that we took eight years ago, when I realized that I loved him. It’s the same route where I’d gone from the girl who coped with her insecurities by physically hurting herself to the woman who’s spent the last several years carving even deeper wounds—emotional scars—into her body.
Wyatt’s breath on my neck separates me from my thoughts. I face him with a forced smile on my face. “Ready?” he asks.
I tip my head back before I answer him, glaring up at the overcast sky through my sunglasses. “Yeah, I am.” Taking a small step toward the car, I say, “But fair warning: If you end up asking me to chauffeur you around, I might break that pretty blue Kramer of yours over your head.”
He inclines his head toward the back compartment of the SUV, where his Kramer guitar is safely stored. “I’m not Lucas, beautiful.” He returns his attention to me, grabs my waist firmly between his hands, and lifts me off the ground into the Suburban.
“I’m capable of lifting my leg high enough to use the step bar.”
“Trust me, I know exactly how high those legs will go.” Before he closes my door, he winks. “By the way, Ky, you couldn’t hurt that pretty blue Kramer, even if you tried.”
Using the rearview mirror, I catch Cal and Heidi stifling laughter from their respective rows. “Stop encouraging his bull,” I say a little too sharply. But at least they’ve found common ground. It just blows that it’s in the form of the tension crackling between Wyatt and me.
Wyatt slams down into the driver’s seat, pops open the biggest Monster energy drink I’ve ever seen, and starts the ignition. He glances over at me wearing a grin that’s far too sexy. “Let’s do this shit.”
“Let’s,” I say sarcastically.
I’m silent as he pulls out of the hotel parking lot. Because he hates GPS systems, he has to turn around at a gas station a quarter of a mile up the road. “Babe, you do know that Garmin isn’t actually watching every move you make, don’t you? There’s no camera in the console recording every messed up thing you say. So, trust me, if you use the damn GPS I swear everything will be alright.”
He rubs his tongue up and down the labret in his lower lip thoughtfully before gesturing to the folded piece of paper lodged into one of the cup holders. “If you insist, Ky.”
My nose wrinkles up because he gives in so easily, but I say nothing as I unfold the paper, which turns out to be the location of the Houston hotel. I alternate between punching the address into the GPS and glancing at him. “Done.”