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  His gaze came back to hers, eyes narrowed with something. “Mighty eager to get to kissing, Luce.”

  She tried to keep her smugness in place but it slipped. “I just want to know what’s so wrong with me. What about me screams bad kisser?”

  He frowned and took a step forward. “Hey. Stop that. Nothing is wrong with you. You’re just pretty and confident. Guys are intimidated.”

  She snorted to hide the fact that her eyes were welling with tears. It was all so embarrassing.

  “He likes Paige better,” she said, hating the wobble in her voice.

  “Idiot,” he said firmly. “Forget him. Find someone better for your first kiss.”

  “But you said first kisses suck. Why would I want to inflict something crappy on someone good?”

  He laughed and threw up his hands in exasperation. “You’re impossible to talk to. What do you want me to say here?”

  “Nothing,” she said, pushing her hands into her hair and tugging at her ponytail in frustration. “I’m sorry I’m in a bad mood.”

  His eyes softened just a little as he studied her. “Once you get the first kiss over with, you’ll stop being weird?”

  She lifted her shoulders. “Sure. Until I start obsessing over the second one.”

  Reece rolled his eyes then took a step toward her. “Don’t tell your brother, okay?”

  She frowned. “Tell him what?”

  He swallowed and then put both big hands on her shoulders, moving even closer. “And definitely don’t tell your parents.”

  Then he dipped his head, and before she could register what was happening, before she could absorb the fact that Reece Sullivan was about to kiss her, his lips pressed against hers.

  He didn’t linger, but neither did he pull back right away. His mouth stayed on hers just long enough for her to register the kiss, and then he stepped back, and shoved his hands in his pockets.

  She stared at him in mute shock, and he looked everywhere in her room before finally meeting her eyes with an almost defiant look in his. “Okay? Now will you come down to dinner?”

  Lucy nodded even though she was pretty positive that she wouldn’t be able to eat a single thing.

  Reece had been wrong.

  First kisses were absolutely what they were cracked up to be.

  Chapter 5

  Lucy

  “You’re being weird.”

  I shove at the suitcase I’d just loaded, but it doesn’t budge far enough for me to close the trunk. “You’ve been saying that all morning,” I mutter.

  “Because you’ve been weird all morning,” my sister says, joining me in trying to move my suitcase. Only she weighs all of, like, a hundred pounds, and the thing doesn’t budge. Not with the other suitcases, moving boxes, and general amount of crap I have already stuffed in there.

  I stand back up and blow out an irritated breath, pulling the hair tie from my wrist and twisting my hair into a messy bun. “I guess it’s just hitting me that I’m really doing this. I’m moving to another state. Another time zone.”

  Brandi turns, leaning against the suitcase protruding from the trunk, and crosses her long, skinny arms as she studies me. “Nah.”

  “What do you mean ‘nah’?”

  “You’re all on edge because you’re about to spend two weeks with Reece. In a car. Just the two of you.”

  Just the sound of his name sends something through me. I bite my lip and resist the urge to pull my phone out of my back pocket and check the time. We’d agreed to be on the road by seven A.M., so he should be here any time.

  “I still can’t believe he agreed to this after what went down between you.”

  I narrow my eyes. Brandi is the only one—and I mean the only one—who knows about our history, and only because at the time Reece and I had been doing whatever we were doing, she was fourteen to my eighteen, which is just about the most annoying, prying age in the history of adolescent females.

  Although I suppose in some ways, it worked in my favor that she was the one who had caught us kissing once. My brother would have beat the crap out of his friend. My parents would have been…I don’t know…I think their brains would have exploded.

  But Brandi had been in ninth grade when she’d walked in on us, and though she’d been wide-eyed and shocked, she’d also been totally eager to keep a secret “just between us sisters.” I’m pretty sure the sheer drama of it had fueled her for most of high school.

  Six years later, she’s kept my secret, although I’m almost wishing she hadn’t. Maybe if the fam knew about just who and what Reece actually was, they wouldn’t have come up with this ridiculous plan.

  “You could have warned me, you know?” I mutter.

  “There wasn’t time. Truthfully I didn’t know what they were planning until the day of. I mean, I knew they were giving Reece the car, but I didn’t know that he was headed to California or that your car had bit the dust.”

  “Well it’s not like you needed enough time to send a freaking telegram. A quick text, ‘Hey, sis, Mom and Dad are going to try to send you and the biggest dick on the planet on a two-week expedition together,’ would have been great.”

  Brandi looks away, and I narrow my eyes.

  “Tell me,” I say.

  She shrugs and looks back. “I don’t know, I guess I just thought…maybe it’ll be good for you guys. Work things out. Nothing’s been the same since whatever it was went down with you two.”

  Now it’s my turn to look away. Brandi knows that Reece and I were together, but doesn’t know why we broke up. That’s one piece of the puzzle that nobody knows.

  Well, Reece does. Seeing as he was the cause of it.

  “It’ll only be ‘good for us’ ”—I put this in air quotes—“if one of us ends up dead, and that person is him,” I mutter.

  Brandi merely looks at me, her eyes appearing wiser than seems fair for a twenty-year-old.

  “Where is everyone?” I ask, changing the subject before she can psychoanalyze me the way she does everyone since heading off to college.

  Brandi ticks off with her fingers. “Mom’s in the kitchen, packing a cooler for you and trying not to cry. Dad is pretending to fix the perfectly fine shelf in the bathroom, also trying not to cry….”

  “Oh boy,” I mutter on an exhale.

  She nods solemnly. “You broke the family.”

  “Where’s Craig? He can say something stupid and distract the ’rents. His specialty.”

  She shrugs. “He promised to see you off before he headed to work, but since he’s always running late, I wouldn’t be surprised if he meant he’d pass you on the freeway and wave. Is this all your stuff, or is there more upstairs that’s not going to fit?”

  I push Brandi away from my suitcase and resume trying to shove it into the trunk. “I’ve got one more duffel and my laptop bag that need to get in there somewhere.”

  “I’ll get ’em,” Brandi says, all but sprinting into the garage.

  Two seconds later, I realize why she was so eager to be helpful.

  “Nice of you to leave room for my stuff.”

  I take a deep breath and turn, annoyed to see that Reece looks well rested, perfectly calm, and not the least bit frazzled about the fact that he’s about to move across the country.

  With me.

  He’s wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, both of which should be boring, but instead look incredibly good on him. He’s gotten bigger since he was nineteen and I mean that in the best way possible.

  Reece has always been fit, courtesy of high school sports he’d never cared about but always been good at.

  But he’s filled out even more in all the right places: shoulders broad, hips and waist narrow, arms tanned and strong. There’s an unfamiliar tattoo peeking out from the sleeve of his right arm, and my fingers itch to reach out and push up the cotton to see what it is.

  Once, I could have. Once when we were best friends. Once when we were a good deal more than friends. But now…now I’m pretty sure
his skin would burn me. Brimstone, and all that.

  “Is that all you’re bringing?” I ask, my eyes skimming over the cross-body bag slung over his shoulder and the canvas duffel by his feet.

  “A good thing too,” he says, glancing into the overstuffed trunk.

  “We’re relocating,” I say, my voice just a little bit whinier than I want it to be. “We’re supposed to bring all this stuff.”

  “Yeah, well not all of us that are relocating have all this stuff,” he says, a gruffness to his voice.

  I instantly feel the sting, extra-sharp because I suspect Reece is speaking a simple truth rather than trying to piss me off.

  My family’s not wealthy. Not even close. We’re middle-class in the most solid sense of the word, and Christmas gifts often came from secondhand stores.

  Reece didn’t even get that much.

  Dinner might never have been fancy the nights Reece ate with my family (which was often), but the spaghetti, or leftover chicken, or whatever out-of-the-box meal we were having was more than his dad or sister remembered to feed him back home.

  “Move,” he mutters, jerking his chin to gesture me out of the way.

  I don’t budge, and our gazes clash, a silent battle of wills that he wins only by physically elbowing me out of the way.

  Without another word, he begins hauling out everything I’ve put in the trunk.

  “Hey! I need all this,” I say, dodging the garbage bag stuffed with bedding.

  “Well then, shut up and let me figure out how to fit it all in here,” he says, hauling out an enormous suitcase like it’s nothing.

  The sleeve of his T-shirt rides up a little higher, distracting me, but I can’t quite see what the tattoo is.

  “Why’d you agree to do this?” I ask, relenting and helping him pull the last of my haphazardly packed stuff out of the car so we can reload it.

  “Agree to what?”

  I roll my eyes. “The car trip.”

  “Well, way I see it,” he says, resting his hands on his hips as he surveys the stuff that is now all over the driveway, “you crashed my trip. Your folks offered me the car if I could fix it up, and I needed a way to get out of here. Wasn’t counting on you.”

  I bite my lip, feeling a little stab of guilt. My parents love Reece, almost like a son, but it bothers me a little that they think nothing of foisting their daughter on him. It wasn’t quite reneging on their promise to him, but it’s sort of a bum deal.

  “I can back out,” I say quietly. “Get a plane ticket.”

  He bends down, picking up the largest of the cardboard boxes and easily setting it into the trunk before maneuvering it toward the seats I’d folded down. “You wouldn’t get to see your boyfriend then.”

  Oscar. Right.

  It’s more than alarming that I’ve barely thought about him in the two days since learning that Reece and I’d be making this trip together. Heck, half the reason I wanted to do the road trip in the first place was to stop by Miami, and now I’m just…I don’t know.

  I’d told Oscar the good news that the road trip was back on, but I’d deliberately misled him on the timing. I want to surprise him. I’ve been planning it for weeks, although nowhere in my imagined scenarios of seeing Oscar’s happy, surprised face was there Reece Sullivan lurking in the background.

  Reece picks up the box near my feet, then gives me an incredulous look as he manages the weight easily. “What the hell’s in here? Air?”

  “Yup, just stuffed a whole lot of air in there, Reece. Never know when you might need it.”

  He rips open the top flap, then gives a grunt of disgust when he sees the pillows inside. “Take them out.”

  “They were expensive. Down. They’re coming.”

  “Your down pillows can still come, but there’s no reason they need to be in the box. We can shove them around the other stuff.”

  “Have you thought about the sleeping arrangements?” I blurt out, ignoring his command about the pillows, and watching as he continues to load the trunk, somehow making everything fit a hell of a lot better than I did.

  He doesn’t pause, doesn’t even look at me, which is mildly insulting. “When I planned the trip, I saved up enough for cheap motels. I’m assuming you did the same.”

  He’s right. I did save up, but it’s a little jarring the way he doesn’t even seem to joke about us saving money and sharing a room.

  Sharing a bed.

  I chew my lip again. “I just feel bad, knowing you probably planned for a few nights on the road, and I planned for two weeks.”

  “What Lucy wants, Lucy gets. Isn’t that the way it works?”

  “I’m trying to be decent here, Reece,” I say. “I’m saying I can help pay for your room, some of the nights, since I know it’s my fault we’re extending.”

  His blue gaze is murderous when he glances over at me. “I don’t want your money. I don’t want anything from you. Haven’t in a long time.”

  My own temper snaps right along with his. “Yeah, I picked up on that. Because what I was giving out, you could find from some other girl if you wanted to, right? Oh wait. You did want to.”

  He tosses his own stuff in the trunk before slamming the station wagon hatch shut. “Go tell your family goodbye. Let’s get this nightmare on the road.”

  Right. Right. Because heaven forbid we put off the inevitable of finishing what we started years ago: destroying each other.

  Chapter 6

  Reece

  Craig Hawkins has been my best friend since we were in fourth grade.

  It started like this.

  Some mean girl named Katie or Kelly or Kimmy was giving me shit for the fact that my mom had accidentally grabbed one of my sister Trish’s My Little Pony Band-Aids instead of the Power Rangers one I’d requested, and then slapped it on the scrape on my forehead like it wouldn’t ruin my budding manhood.

  (Yes, that was back when the biggest problem in my life was the pattern on my Band-Aids, but you should still feel sorry for me, because the humiliation was real.)

  Anyway, Craig stepped forward with an impressive swagger for a nine-year-old and told Kelly or Katie or whatever her name was to knock it off.

  I returned the favor the next day, sharing some of the chocolate peanut butter cup my mom had snuck me as a snack even though we weren’t supposed to bring peanut snacks, because some kid probably had an allergy. (Probably Katie/Kelly/Kimmy.)

  Anyway, a friendship formed over Band-Aids and nut products is apparently forever, because we’ve been best friends ever since.

  I’d do just about anything for the guy.

  Now, I’m betting this is the part where you think that I’m all torn up about betraying his friendship by hooking up with his little sister, but it’s not like that.

  I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like he knows. At least I’m pretty sure he doesn’t. But neither is this that cliché big-brother story where Craig threatened to castrate any guy who dared check out his little sister, leading me to hide my lust for years, until I finally gave in, seduced the hot sister, and now spend my life feeling guilty.

  Craig’s a good big brother, but he’s never been the overprotective type. That was always my gig. Everyone’s always known not to fuck with the Hawkins girls, but not because Craig would kick their ass—but because I would.

  And yes, it applies to both girls—I’d kill anyone who ever tried to hurt Lucy or Brandi, but really Lucy was always the one on my radar.

  At first it was an age thing—Brandi’s five years younger than me, and of course I looked out for her when I could, but our paths never crossed much outside the Hawkinses’ home.

  Lucy, though, being only a year younger, has always been in my peripheral vision. Well not always. For a while there, she wasn’t peripheral, so much as all I could see.

  But anyway, eventually I started looking out for Lucy, not just because of proximity, but because of well…necessity. Not that she needed a guardian so much as she always sort of felt
like mine, and I protect what’s mine, you know?

  Shit, where was I going with this?

  Craig. Right.

  Though Craig always made the requisite comments about telling the pigs in high school to stay away from his little sister, he’d never said a word to me. Because he trusted me? Probably.

  But here’s the thing.

  He should have said something. I don’t blame him for what happened, obviously, but I’ll confess that sometimes I wish that, just once, he’d done the whole I love you like a brother but touch my sister and I’ll kill you thing.

  I’d have listened. Maybe. Maybe.

  He never did that—never said a damn word.

  So I did touch his sister, despite my better judgment, and the whole thing blew up in my face like dynamite stuffed in a shit cake.

  Fifty percent her fault, fifty percent mine.

  One hundred percent devastating.

  “You okay, man?”

  “Yup.” I’m grateful for my shades so Craig can’t see the lie in my eyes.

  “We appreciate you doing this,” he says, lowering his voice so Lucy can’t hear us. Not that there’s much risk of that. It’s hard to hear much of anything over Mrs. Hawkins’s wailing.

  “It’s no problem.”

  Another lie. It’s a huge problem. It’s bad enough that I have to spend two weeks with her. Worse that it’s in such close quarters. Worst of all, we have to stop and see fucking Oscar on what’s supposed to be a trip to my new life.

  “Spock’d kill me for saying this, but I’m a little relieved her piece of shit car broke down before the trip. None of us thought that car had a chance in hell of making it out of Virginia, much less to California.”

  “And you think Horny does?” I say, nodding with my chin at the brown—yes, brown—station wagon.

  “Fifty-fifty shot,” Craig says, thumping the roof of the car. “Weird to think this will probably be the last time I see the car where I got my first score. Remember Amy Pearson?”

  I do. Small tits, great ass, redhead. Red other areas too.

  (And don’t look at me that way. She and Craig were never serious, and I didn’t hit that until a year after he hooked up with her.)