Curiosity has the knot in my belly loosening and I ask, “What do you mean?”
“The tire blowing, the winding road. Fuck the fucking trees.” He clamps his teeth together and shakes his head sharply. “What I did was fucking stupid.” Blazing brown eyes on mine. “I’m so sorry, Kylie. I wasn’t thinking.”
Phantom fingers wrap tightly around my heart and squeeze. “Colt,” I murmur. “That wasn’t your fault.”
“How do you know?” he mutters. “I’ve been fucking with your tires for months and?—”
I move toward him, do something else that only Colt seems to unlock—I touch him and don’t feel fear.
“It was a brand new tire,” I tell him. “After your most recent…mischief”—I slide my hand from his shoulder, back up to his jaw, the spiky bristles of the stubble there grounding me in the now. Or maybe it’s just that touching him is addictive—“the tire guys insisted on doing a full workup. I got four new tires.” A beat as I grin up at him. “With locking caps.”
His eyes come to mine.
Still blazing.
But not in fear and anger.
In…
Something else that I can’t name.
Because if I do, if I admit I’m feeling the same thing, I don’t think I’ll be grounded here in the present.
I’ll be right back in the past.
He covers my hand with his own. “You won’t need those for me.” Gentle bleeding into his eyes as he peels my hand from his cheek. “Not any longer.” A kiss to the center of my palm. “Not ever again.”
My lungs hitch.
“Now dinner, baby.”
Another hitch as his fingers wrap around mine and squeeze. He shoves his free hand into his pocket and I know he’s searching for his phone, ready to make good on that promise to order in dinner for us.
“Dinner is in the crockpot,” I say, tilting my head toward the kitchen. “I just need to bake off the bread and serve it up.”
He sniffs. “Is that the deliciousness I’m smelling?”
I grin. “Does it do something to your hockey street cred to use words like deliciousness?”
“Probably.” A shrug. “But there’s always something to be given shit about, so I don’t give a fuck if they tease me about the proper usage of words like deliciousness.” He winks at me. “Especially when whatever it is that I’m smelling is exactly that.”
“What else do the guys give you shit about?” I ask as I move into the kitchen, giving him a silent order—ha!—of my own (that being to hang my school bag on its proper hook).
(He does).
“How about I tell you after you tell me why your day was such a day?” He moves over to me as I pull the bowls down, snag the ladle from the drawer I keep it in.
“It really isn’t that big of a?—”
“What temperature do you want the oven at?”
“Wh-what?” I ask, spinning from the sudden change in conversational topic.
“For the bread, what temperature?”
I blink. Then again.
“Never mind,” he says, snagging the loaf of grocery store garlic bread. “I can read.”
