One hand still resting on the roof, he bends down, leaning into me.
“I missed you, Hitman.”
And with that, he slams the door shut.
It’s just one small, simple line, but the way he says it sparks something wild in me. No matter how many conflicting parts of me there are, all of them respond to this guy the exact same way.
He slips behind the wheel, turns up the radio and winks, while I tilt my seat back, reaching one hand out the window, letting the wind brush over my skin as I close my eyes. Music is blaring through the speakers, and Lewis Conley is right there next to me, yet somehow… I feel at ease.
“I’m g—”
“Quiet time,” I say, holding up my hand. “Just drive.”
I let the music wash over me for some time. Too much time, as it happens—I can feel the miles drifting by, and we’re nearing the PT office. My eyelids flutter open. And that’s when I realize he’s going the wrong way.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Yellow,” he says, without missing a beat.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Not, like, hard-core yellow, though—more of a mellow yellow.”
Hey, that’s my thing!
He’s teasing me, I realize.
“I don’t like where this is going…”
He clears his throat. “When you were in the hospital, I told you I planned to set a few things straight. You weren’t ready to hear me out, so I gave you a month—enough time to figure out that life without me straight-up sucks.”
Oh, honey… You think I needed a whole month?
“You’re pretty sure of yourself, Conley.”
“I tried to be cute. Gazed into your eyes every time I came down to the shop—that kind of thing. But it wasn’t working. So, I’m stepping things up a gear.”
My heart flutters in my chest, but there’s no way I plan on letting my guard down. He’s put in the work, and everything he’s done since the crash has definitely helped even out my edges. But we still have a whole lot of baggage we haven’t even looked at.
He sighs. “What you heard me say to Adam when I got back from Atlanta… You’re missing a bunch of context. All those times I said you were helping me blow off steam? That’s exactly right—that’sexactlyhow it was.”
Deep, man.I bang my head against the window in frustration.
“That’s really insightful,” I say flatly. “Can I get out now?”
“At the same time,” he continues, “I was wrong. I wasn’t getting it—I mean,reallygetting it. I didn’t want to think it was anything more than hooking up. The way I wanted to see it, that rebellious streak of yours was the perfect way of balancing out how hard-core my schedule is. You were like some kind of fleeting moment; like coming up for air, or something. An opportunity to be someone different, just for a while.” He glances at me. “It was good, it was easy. It was pretty spineless of me, too. I freaked out, and I was wrong, Amy. There’s nothing fleeting about you—nothing at all. Sure”—he shrugs—“Ineed you when I’m about to lose it. I like how it feels—being inside you when everything around me is spinning out of control. You’re like this breath of fresh air when I’m suffocating. You make me laugh when I’m pissed.”
Slowly, I turn to look at him, my lips parted in surprise, and he gazes back at me, before focusing back on the road.
“You scare me sometimes, too—but I’ve got a feeling that with time, I can tame you.”
“You’ve been trying to keep me under control from the start,” I hear myself say.
“I was trying to keep you under control because you stand for everything I’ve denied myself. But the truth is, we make perfect sense.”
The breath is snatched out of my lungs. I’ve been waiting so, so long to hear him say this, and now that it’s actually happening, he’s saying more than I ever dreamed of. He’s right. Everything he says is true. Suddenly, all those thousand different parts of me fall into place, and for the first time, I know what it means to be whole.
“All those times I wasn’t there for you… I fucked up.” He shakes his head. “And you know, there’ll be other times when I’ll just be too damn busy to be the perfect boyfriend.”
