“My hero,” I breathed as he pointed his gun into the hall and looked both ways before stealthily motioning for me and Doofus to follow, like he was the star of an action-adventure flick. With me giggling at him and him shushing me as if I really were his airheaded heroine, we made it downstairs and stepped from an enormous, gleaming kitchen into a three-car garage.
His SUV, so familiar to me from seeing it parked every day at school since he’d gotten his license last year, looked out of place in the vast space next to a Porsche. The SUV seemed so … normal. Like Nick: normal but not. He didn’t mind an Irish setter dripping melted snow on his bedroom carpet or hopping into the back of his SUV. Yet his SUV was parked in the garage of a mansion.
You know what else was perfectly normal? The missing third car. His parents had separated, just like Liz’s parents had divorced three years before. The Krieger Meats and Meat Products fortune did not solve everything. I tried not to stare back at the empty space on the other side of the Porsche as the garage door tipped out of the way and the SUV pulled into the light snow.
Snowflakes zoomed around in the headlight beams, defining them far out in front of us, almost all the way down the hill to the gate. Nick turned on the windshield wipers, but he hardly needed them. The snowflakes weren’t substantial. The breeze of the wipers shooed them away like fireflies during a Tennessee summer.
He pushed another button, and the gate majestically opened for us before we even reached it. He didn’t mean anything by this motion, I reminded myself. He drove through the gate a few times a day. He didn’t give it a second thought. He had no idea that, to me, he seemed to be rubbing in how rich he was and how powerful his parents were. This was what had separated us in the seventh grade, when he’d half-believed Gavin that a girl wouldn’t date him without his family status behind him. This was what separated us still.
And yet, in a strange way, I’d never felt closer to him. The SUV crunched through gravel onto the main road, where it swished through slushy snow. But inside it was warm, and a rock ballad from the Poseur CD whispered about true love lost. This should have been a date. Instead of him taking me home after I came to check on him and got run inside by killer cats, he should have been taking me back to my house after we’d watched a movie together at his. He would come inside. My parents would go to bed, and Josh would take a hint and abandon video-bowling to go upstairs and read a book. (I could dream, couldn’t I?) Nick and I would be alone with the smoldering embers of a fire. And then we would—
“—get out?” he was asking me.
I blinked at him across the dark SUV. “I beg your pardon?” I hoped to God I hadn’t been discussing any of this out loud.
“Are. You. Going. To. Get. Out?” he asked more distinctly. We’d already parked in front of my house, with the SUV’s heater still bathing us in warmth against the snowy night outside. “You haven’t said a word the whole five-minute drive here. Are you sick?” He reached across the cab and put his hot hand on my forehead.
I laughed and pulled his hand down. But I didn’t let it go. I kept it there in both my hands, on my knee. And he didn’t pull it away. We watched each other for a quiet moment.
“I’m glad this happened,” he said softly.
He was so handsome in the soft and snowy moonlight. I wanted him to be talking about our relationship: He was glad we’d finally gotten together. But after everything that had passed between us this week, doubts still lurked at the back of my mind about whether he seriously liked me, or he intended to date me twice and dump me like all his other girlfriends, or the whole thing was just a joke to him. I hoped it was for real, and I didn’t want to talk about it too much and ruin the lovely illusion that we were a couple. So I said noncommittally, “Me too.”
“Because I’ve been trying to get you back since the seventh grade.”
I must have given him a very skeptical look.
He laughed at my expression. “Yeah, I have a funny way of showing it. I know. But you’re always on my mind. You’re in the front of my mind, on the tip of my tongue. So if someone breaks a beaker in chemistry class, I raise my hand and tell Ms. Abernathy you did it. If somebody brings a copy of Playboy to class, I stuff it in your locker.”
“Oh!” I thought back to the January issue. “I wondered where that came from.”
“And if Everett Walsh tells the lunch table what a wicked kisser you are and how far he would have gotten with you if his mother hadn’t come in—”
I stamped my foot on the floorboard of the SUV. “That is so not true! He’d already gotten as far as he was going. He’s not that cute, and I had to go home and study for algebra.”
“—it drives me insane to the point that I tell him to shut up or I’ll make him shut up right there in front of everybody. Because I am supposed to be your boyfriend, and my mother is supposed to hate you, and you’re supposed to be making out with me.”
Twisted as this declaration was, it was the sweetest thing a boy had ever said to me. I dwelled on the soft lips that had formed the statement, and on the meaning of his words. “Okay.” I scooted across the seat and nibbled the very edge of his superhero chin.
“Ah,” he gasped, moving both hands from the steering wheel to the seat to brace himself. “I didn’t mean now. I meant in general. Your dad will come out of your house and kill me.”
“He won’t,” I murmured against Nick’s neck. “He came home while I was gone and went to bed early because he’s so pooped.” I glanced at my watch to make sure. “Yeah. He teaches four Pilates classes on Thursdays.” Then, just to be mean, I did a real number on Nick’s neck, like I would want him to move his mouth on my neck. I had to be careful or I would give him a hickey. Served him right for playing hard to get.
“Damn it,” he grunted in frustration. He put his hand in my hair and pulled my head back. Our eyes met for a second. I saw how frustrated he was, and how hot for me, and something else between his dark brows.
And then he kissed me. His mouth was on mine, covering mine and making me feel small. His tongue swept inside. He pulled my nape with his big hand to adjust me to exactly where he wanted me. The air in the SUV flashed too hot and then cold as he kissed me. His other hand slid up my thigh.
I would never have admitted this to anyone, and I would only put up with it for so long. But this was the part of a relationship with Nick I’d dreamed about and longed for: Nick in control of me.