Well,fuck.
I flexed my fingers on the steering wheel as awareness stretched between me and Jay, taut as steel cable. Chet might as well have been riding on the roof because Jay and I were the only two people in the car from that moment on.
All the anger I’d harbored for years morphed like a butterfly in a chrysalis into hot, exquisitely painful pins-and-needles anticipation, like a rush of blood to a vital part of myself that had gone numb years ago.
He saidlovein the song. Had he really loved me? Did he still?
I needed to know.
I kept my eyes focused on the blacktop stretching out in front of us, but inside I was reborn as my seventeen-year-old self, feeling like summer had truly started because the Rollinses had arrived on the island. I wanted to be alone with my favorite person. To reassure myself that we still understood each other the same way.
When the first notes of Chet singing Jay’s words came out of the speakers, I shut off the radio entirely. I didn’t want to hear Chet’s cover of this song. I wanted to hear it the way Jay wrote it.
The way he wrote itfor me.
“Let’s listen to something else for a bit,” I suggested.
I had so damn many things I wanted to say to Jay in that minute that I low-key wanted to pull over and give Chet cab fare. Or buy him a damn car.
Except I was also now weirdly invested in getting him back to his girlfriend. In making sure that they got a chance totalkthe way Jay and I had been too immature—and then too damn stubborn—to do.
The way Jay and I were damn sure going to.
Today.
Right after I kissed the shit out of him.
“Or actually.” Jay’s voice was huskier than usual. Softer, too. Arousing as fuck. Like he was thinking the exact same thing I was. “Maybe we should figure out something nice that you can do for Chrissea, Chet. For your six-month anniversary. Maybe plan something really special.”
“Yeah, okay. Shedoeskeep saying ‘Actions speak louder than words, Chester.’” Chet pursed his lips. “And she knows I hate it when she calls me Chester. So… maybe flowers?”
“Does she like flowers?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“No.” Jay tapped his lip with one long finger. “And if you want her to take a chance on a future with you, I think you need to show her that you know her.Reallyknow her. Like, what’s her favorite thing, aside from you? What does she do to make you feel important? Maybe give that feeling back to her somehow.”
Chet scratched his scruffy cheek and thought about this so hard I expected to smell smoke rising from the back seat. “Chrissea… she likes picnics. First time I told her I wanted to be her man was on a picnic.”
“Okay, then,” Jay enthused. “Picnics! So you can—”
“And she likes owls.”
Jay blinked and grimaced. “Er, okay. I’m not sure that anything bird-related conveys affection. I personally wouldn’t bestow a bird on my worst enemy. But if you’re sure she’s into that kind of thing…”
“Oh, she is!”
Jay turned to me expectantly. Like Iknew the first thing about owlsorrelationships?
“Jeez, I dunno. Get her a stuffed owl?” I ventured. “Write her a song about an owl? Take her to visit an owl? Learn how to say ‘I love you’ in hoots?”
Jay covered his mouth with one hand and looked away, clearly fighting laughter. “Well,” he said finally. “I think it’s clear who therealDr. Phil around here is.”
The urge to kiss him hit me like a tidal wave, a hundred and ten times harder than anything I’d felt for him even as a horny teen, like maybe because I’d been damming it back so long, the need had built up. My eyes raked over his gorgeous face, his broad shoulders, those muscled thighs…
The rumble of the wake-up strip on the side of the highway shook me out of my reverie, and I put all of my attention back on the road.
Beside me, Jay opened his mouth to say something.
