All I end up finding on the ground is the pack of cigarettes Luke dropped. I pick them up and tuck them into my pocket. The only other place to check is in the strip club and I don’t think it’s a good idea to go back in there.
I drag my hand across my face, deciding whether stay here and help Luke or bail out on the situation and hitchhike back to campus. I’ve hitchhiked a few times, wandered around a desolate highway more than once, and slept in the streets. But something is pulling me back to the truck, almost like I feel guilty for leaving him there. I don’t know where the feeling’s coming from. I’ve never cared about anyone before, but then again no one’s ever given me a reason to care about them. And no one’s ever made me feel safe. I don’t want safe—I need danger—because it’s easier.
As a car zooms by, I realize that just like everyone else who’s ever entered my life, Luke is just someone who will be gone by morning when he wakes up with a hangover, unable to remember what happened between us. So I hike up the road beneath the stars and the moon, with my arm out to the side and my thumb up. The possibilities of what could happen float through my mind like they always do. I could get run over. Picked up by some creeper, maybe the one on the phone. Be beaten. Murdered liked my parents. Is death in the cards for me tonight? Is that what I’m searching for?
Eventually, a sleek red car slows down and pulls up beside me. The headlights light up the darkness in front of me as I open the door and climb in. The cab smells like pine trees and there’s garbage on the floor. The driver, a thirty-something, slightly overweight, bald guy, smiles at me as he turns the steering wheel toward the road. The imaginative side of my brain wonders if he’s the guy who’s been calling me.
“Where you heading to, sweetie?” he asks as he flips on the brights, the road ahead getting brighter, yet it feels like I’m falling farther into the dark.
I stare at him, noting that his voice doesn’t sound like the guy’s on the phone. I wonder what he’ll want from me in exchange for the ride. Will he want me to suck his dick? Will he hurt me if I refuse? Try to hit on me? Or is he simple just a nice guy giving a girl in need a ride. “I’m not sure,” I mutter as he drives down the road.
“Not a problem, gorgeous,” he replies. “I know just the place where we can go, if you want to have some fun?”
I don’t respond and contentment settles in my chest as I step farther and farther into the unknown, just like I have been since I was six.
Chapter 7
Luke
I open my eyes to the stained ceiling of my truck and my body feeling like it’s been run over. My head is throbbing and my eyes sting against the sunlight shining through the window. It’s not the first time I’ve woken up in a situation like this and I’m sure it won’t be my last.
I know not to sit up quickly otherwise I’ll end up hacking up my lungs, so I take my sweet time getting upright and then move for my pocket where my cigarettes should be, but they’re gone. I start to feel the anxiety of addiction stir awake as I reach for the glove box where I keep an extra pack for emergencies just like this. Once I get one lit up and the smoke saturates my lungs, I feel a little bit better and I quickly check my insulin. Something about doing it registers a memory of Violet… helping me check my insulin… Violet giving me pills. I rarely let anyone know I’m a diabetic, not wanting to reveal my weakness, and if someone does find out, it’s usually by accident. If I’m remembering correctly, which it’s hard to tell, I’d willingly asked her for help and she willingly gave it.
I’m so confused and all I want to do is get out of here and go take a shower, wash last night off me. I pat my pockets, not surprised that my keys aren’t there—I have a thing for losing keys when I’m drunk. But my phone’s gone too and that pisses me off because I don’t have an extra one of those. Irritated at myself, I gradually climb out of the truck and head for the gas tank where I hide a set of spare keys for situations just like this.
Last night’s events start to crash over me. I drove out here because I’d heard rumors of how the bouncers like to get rough with guys if they messed with the strippers and I wanted a fight without the worry of cops getting involved. What I didn’t plan on was Violet walking in and saving my ass. I can barely recollect anything about it other than her leading my stumbling ass out of the club and to my truck. I have no idea where she went afterward or why she’d shown up in the first place and I’m not sure whether to track her down and thank her or get pissed off at her for ruining my brawling moment.
As I open the gas tank and remove my spare set of keys I take a long drag off my cigarette, the sweet taste of the nicotine calming me. Rubbing my eyes, I climb back in the truck and drive toward my dorm. At first I’m planning on just going straight to my room, but I keep thinking about Violet and how I have no idea where she went last night. The strip club isn’t in the best part of town. What if something happened to her? Why do I care? I don’t usually care about girls that come in and out of my life, and I definitely shouldn’t care about Violet. I don’t do relationships at all. Letting someone in like that, means actually letting someone in, letting them be a part of my life, which means giving into things they want, letting them have control over things. I don’t want to let people into my life so I can slowly go back to that place I lived in when I was a kid, doing things I hated, hating the person that I was and hating the person who made me that way.
Apparently I’m not thinking clearly, though, and I make a last-minute right instead of left when I arrive at the intersection and turn into the parking lot to the side of her dorm building. It’s the tallest of the dorm buildings at the University of Wyoming and it blocks the sunlight flowing over the mountains. The yard in front of the dorm is pretty much empty, the few people wandering around look like they’re only there to clear out the rest of their stuff. The inside of the building is even emptier. And quiet. It reminds me that I only have a day or two left to get my stuff out and move to wherever I’m going.
When I get to Violet’s dorm room, I expect it to be cleared out like the rest of the building. But I hear some extremely angry music playing through the door that I doubt Callie’s listening to and I knock.
The music turns down and then Violet opens the door. Her damp hair runs over her bare shoulders in waves and again she has no makeup on. The outline of her red lacy bra is visible through her top and she has a floor-length black shirt on. Her cheek is also really swollen and red, but her expression is neither surprised nor happy to see me. Just neutral like always. I want to look equally neutral but my body comes alive at the sight of her and for some reason the idea of kissing her seems so tempting and oddly familiar.
“You’re alive,” she jokes flatly with an arch of her eyebrows as she stands just inside the doorway.
“Don’t act too happy to see me.” I lean against the doorway with my arms crossed, aiming for relaxed but I’m too hung over to get all the way there. “What happened to your face?”
She touches her cheek with her fingertips. “I told you last night that I got into a fight with a wall.”
My forehead creases as I attempt to recollect her telling me. “I don’t remember that… and I don’t really think that’s what happened. I didn’t…” I trail off, squirming uneasily as the weight of her gaze becomes almost unbearable. “I didn’t hit you, did I?” I’ve never hit a girl before, but, shit, I was really wasted and upset last night and I can’t remember hardly anything.
“No.” She doesn’t seem alarmed or upset or anything really. Just indifferent. She moves back, leaving the door open and I’m not sure if she wants me to come in or not. “Where’d you find your keys?” She changes the topic as she roams over to a desk in the corner, which is cleared off. Her entire room is actually; the beds only have a mattress on them and the posters on the walls have been taken down. She must be leaving soon, probably to go back home or wherever it is she came from.
I swallow the lump in my throat, thinking about how I have to go back where I came from soon, too. “I keep a spare set in the gas tank.”
She glances over her shoulder, elevating her eyebrows. “And you couldn’t have told me that last night when I couldn’t find them?”
I shrug and finally cross the threshold, stepping into her personal space. “I swear I did, but then the next thing I know I’m waking up in the truck by myself, the sun is up, and you’re gone.”
She pulls the desk drawer open and reaches inside it. “Yeah, I’m not one for sleeping in trucks with guys who like to hog the entire seat.”
I sit down on the mattress, wishing I’d gotten a shot or two in before I came here. At least then, my headache would be gone. “You could have put me in your car, you know, and driven me back with you.” I’m half joking, because I don’t really care. I’ve slept in the front seat of my truck more than once and I’m sure I’ll do it again.
She retrieves a prescription bottle out of the drawer, reads the label, then tosses it into an open box on the floor. “I didn’t drive back.” She grabs her iPod off the dock on the desk, the last thing left in her room. She throws it into the box and then leans over the desk to unplug the dock.
“Then how’d you get back?” I ask as I stare at her ass. God, the things I’d like to do to that ass.
“I hitchhiked.” She stands back up, drops the dock in the box, and kneels down on the floor. She adds a purple teddy bear from her bed, then gathers her hair out of her eyes, and grabs a roll of tape from the desk. She folds up the top of the box and stretches a line of tape over it, sealing the last of her stuff.
“You hitchhiked?” I say, unfathomably. “Are you serious?”
She presses down on the strip of tape, securing it in place. “It’s not that big of a deal.” She chucks the tape aside and then stands up and pretends to check to make sure she’s packed up everything, when really I think she’s avoiding looking at me. “Do you see anything else lying around?”
I continue to gape at her. “So let me get this straight. Last night after you put me in the truck, you walked down the highway until some guy picked you up and gave you a ride here.”
Her eyes land on me. “Who said it was a guy?”
I scan her body over. So God damn sexy it’s ridiculous and her skin is so ridiculously soft… an image of me touching her in the truck pushes up in my head. Me lying on top of her. My hands all over her. Is it real or from a dream? “Am I wrong?”
She narrows her eyes, ready for a fight, but then puffs out a breath, surrendering. “Yeah, it was. So what? Nothing happened.” She thrums her fingers on the sides of her legs as she looks around the floor.
I get to my feet. “You should have just stayed in the truck. Do you know how dangerous hitchhiking is?”
“About as dangerous as starting a fight at a strip club when you’re by yourself.” She walks over to the box and picks it up, steadying it in her arms. “And you’re welcome for saving your ass.” She props the box on her hip and then looks at me like she’s waiting for me to say it.
“You shouldn’t have hitchhiked,” I say instead, and then snatch the box from her, gazing at her lips, recognition clicking in my head… kissing her, drowning in her taste.
At first she looks like she’s going to snatch the box back from me, her hands rising toward it, but then she drops them back to her side as I move out of her reach.
“And thanks for pretending that you were pregnant with my child and crying over bills,” I say and then the rest comes rushing back to me. I kissed her. In my truck. I felt her and tasted her because I needed to and wanted to. And she helped, not by kissing me but by checking my blood sugar. Shit. “And for helping me with, you know, the pills and stabbing my finger with the needle.” The last thank-you is harder to say.
The corners of her lips quirk as she folds her arms over her chest. “I’m surprised you remember what happened at all.” She pauses, like she’s waiting for me to say something about the kiss.
I back toward the door with the box in my hand. “I’m actually good at drunk remembering.” I wink at her, trying to play it off, because I can’t go there. I’ve never stuck around afterward and had to endure the awkwardness of the morning after. Granted, we didn’t have sex, but still I touched her breast and slid my fingers up her legs.
She offers me a small smile. “I’m sure you are.”
I feel this heat swell inside my chest at the sight of her smile and it feels both good and bad at the same time. I’ve never flirted with a girl like this before. I usually give them like an hour and use little effort, just enough to charm her, get laid, and leave. Building too much of a connection defeats the purpose of what I’m trying to accomplish with sex and that’s to control a few moments and forget all the moments I didn’t have control. Things have crossed that line between Violet and I, especially after last night. I can’t have sex with her without feeling bad afterward, which means it would be next to impossible to bail after I got what I needed from her. But the thing is I want to slip inside her so bad it’s seriously becoming hard to control.
“I have a question,” she says, grabbing a bag off the bed and draping the handle over her shoulder.
Her tone makes me wary. “Okay.”
“I thought,” she starts but then reconsiders. “I mean, I thought diabetics were supposed to give themselves shots.”