“No you’re not.” He sounded exasperated. “Your parents—”
“Have already considered it.”
That stopped him.
“So you can take your stupid jacket ’cause you’ll probably freeze without it. What’s your body fat percentage? Negative point-zero-zero—oomph.”
He’d knelt down and flung the coat over my shoulders. Not looking at me, he pulled the coat tighter and said, “You’re so damn stubborn.” Though he tried to hide it, he shivered. “Come on, let’s go.” He offered a hand and I took it, using the other to keep the jacket on.
Strangely, he didn’t let go of my hand when we got back to the truck. As an experiment, I squeezed a little. He squeezed back.
The old man peeked around the hood and smiled when he saw me wearing Miles’s jacket.
“Well, it looks like your battery might need a little juice,” said the man. “I’ve got jumper cables, should only take a second.”
He popped the hood of his car and pulled a pair of jumper cables out of his trunk, and after a bit of instruction on his part, he and Miles set to work. I almost fell asleep standing up, and Miles had to prod me out of my stupor when it was time to go.
“Thanks again,” he said to the old man. Miles’s voice was weak, brittle.
“Really, it was no trouble.” The man smiled and waved, stowing his jumper cables again. “You kids enjoy the rest of your night!” He got into his car and drove away.
Miles stared after him, a small crease between his eyebrows.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, one hand on the passenger side door handle. Miles shook his head.
“It’s nothing, I just . . .” He made an exasperated noise, his shoulders drooping a little. “He made me think of Opa.” He walked around to the driver’s side and got in.
“Oh, wait.” I shrugged the jacket off, climbed into the truck, and handed it across the seat to him. “Seriously, your lips are turning blue. I’ll be fine, really,” I added when he started to protest. He feigned reluctance well as he slipped the jacket back on.
“He told me to give it to you,” Miles said after a solid minute of staring out the windshield.
I was about to make a joke about how good that was, because someone needed to teach him some manners, but then I saw the look on his face.
“Let’s go,” I said softly. “We shouldn’t be too far from home, right?” Miles nodded and threw the truck in drive.
Chapter Thirty-three
Twenty minutes later I had to start talking to keep Miles awake. My lengthy lecture on the Napoleonic Wars (one of Charlie’s favorite subjects) was cut short by the familiar streets of town and what I could only describe as a message from God.
The Meijer sign.
“Stop for a minute,” I said, turning around to look at the store.
“What?”
“We need to go to Meijer.”
“Why?”
“Trust me, we need to go to Meijer. Pull in and park.”
He swung into the parking lot and drove as close as he could get to the doors. I almost had to drag him out of the cab and into the store.
“I work here all the time,” he whined, yawning. “Why did we have to stop?”
“You’re a baby when you’re tired, you know that?”
I pulled him toward the deli counter. His coworkers gave us odd looks as we passed by. Miles waved them off. The main aisle was empty.
Miles nearly crashed into the lobster tank when I stopped in front of it. He blinked once, stared down at it, then looked at me.
“It’s a lobster tank,” he said.
I took a deep breath. Now or never.
“It’s the lobster tank,” I said. “Your mom told me you remembered.”
Miles looked back at the tank, the water reflected in his glasses. At first I thought I’d been wrong, that the odds had been too high, that maybe my mother had been right this whole time and I had made the whole thing up. But then he said, “Do you do this all the time?”
“No,” I replied. “Just today.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “You smell like lemons.”
I rose up on my toes.
He turned, his hands finding my waist, his lips finding mine like he’d been preparing himself for this moment.
Saying I wasn’t ready for it was an understatement.
I wasn’t ready for the emotion, and I wasn’t ready for the way his long, chilly fingers worked their way under my jacket and sweatshirt and shirt and pressed into my hips, raising goose bumps on my skin. Everything around us drifted away. Miles groaned. The vibration rippled through my lips.
The heat. How did I not notice the heat? There was a furnace between the layers of clothing that separated us.
I pushed away. He breathed heavily, watching me with alert, hungry eyes.
“Miles.”
“Sorry.” His huskier-than-usual voice didn’t sound sorry.
“No—I—do you want to come back to my house?”
He hesitated for a moment; in his eyes, I saw him working out the meaning of my words. It took him so much longer to figure it out than a math problem or a word puzzle. Those he got immediately. This took all his brain power.
I had to believe he’d been born with this confusion, this inability to understand people, because the alternative was that he’d been conditioned to think no one would ever suggest something like this to him, and he simply couldn’t process it when someone did. And that was too sad to believe.
“You . . . you mean . . . ?” His eyebrows creased.
“Yes.”
His breath hitched. “Are you sure?”
I let my fingers wander to the waistband of his jeans. “Yes.”
Chapter Thirty-four
We didn’t talk on the way to my house. Miles’s knuckles were white against the steering wheel, and he kept glancing over at me every few seconds. I knew this because I kept glancing over at him, too. Something wiggling and strange tunneled through my stomach, half excitement, half terror. When he pulled up the driveway and reached over to unbuckle his seatbelt, I held him back.
“Wait. Let me go in first. Drive down the street some, then walk back. You know which window is my room?”
“No.”
I showed him. “Come to the window. I’ll let you in.”
I marched up to the front door, perimeter checking the yard as I went, trying to be as casual as possible when I stepped into the house and flipped the bolt behind me. I kicked my shoes off in the hallway and tiptoed past the family room.