It should have been simple enough.
But my eyes glanced over at Austin again. Did I really want to go on this journey with him? Did I really want to ride in this vehicle while I was teetering on anger’s edge with Austin unconsciously fueling the flames?
What the fuck was I going to do? Leave him on the side of the road and drive off without him?
Of course, I wasn’t going to do that shit.
I turned left.
And tried not to let my irritation grow.
I didn’t trust easily. Neither did Austin. But for some unexplained reason, some magical aligning of the stars, we had been thrown together. He didn’t want to trust me, yet he did. He didn’t want to open up to anyone, but he opened up to me.
There were so many things about him that would have triggered some sort of alarm in my brain, and made me take caution and look at him with a sharper eye.
He was reserved and cocky. Soft with hard edges. Messy and calculated.
Plainly put, he was a disaster. A perfect disaster. A jumble of contradictions put together so elaborately he couldn’t be anything other than beautiful.
Austin was everything I would have stayed away from. But maybe… he was also everything I needed.
The phone started to ring, snatching me from my thoughts.
I answered without even thinking.
“Hello?”
“You’re not Austin,” the voice on the other end said. Male. Young, late teens to early twenties. Thick Southern drawl.
“No, I’m not. He’s… napping. Is it an emergency?” I tried to keep my voice calm. I had to get as much information out of this person without him realizing that was what I was after.
“Uh…” He sounded hesitant. “Have him call me when he gets up.”
“And who am I supposed to say you are?”
“His brother,” he said flatly, which made me cringe. I could tell this wasn’t a call he wanted to be making. In fact, that tone said he’d rather be calling anyone else. He’d rather be anyone else's brother. I hoped some of the edge I’d heard was because he was annoyed that he got me instead of Austin and not so much the other stuff.
“I’ll have him call you when he wakes up,” I assured him.
“Yeah,” he grunted before ending the call.
If Austin’s brother had the number for this phone, it couldn’t have been that he was hiding things and being shady. Logically, that made sense in my head. Or was I trying to convince myself of that because I’d developed feelings for him, deep ones?
I stared at the long stretch of road ahead of me, most of which disappeared at the end of the glow from the headlights.
This was going to be another long day. Well, more like a long night that was going to turn into a long day.
“Please, don’t hurt me,” I whispered.
I drove on, silence my only comfort.
26
Austin
“I’m thirsty,” I said as I came out of what felt like a thirty-year-long sleep. My lids were heavy, so I didn’t even bother trying to force them open.
“Here,” a rough voice said as I felt something gently press against my chest. I wrapped my hands around the cylinder, quickly realizing it was a bottle. “Full disclosure, it’s half-full and I don’t know whose it was. They’re likely dead, so it’s not like they’ll be coming back for it.”
