going home yet!”
He’s unfazed by my shouting at him.
“Why don’t you want to go home yet?” he asks calm and intently. “Might as well spill your fucking guts because I’m not leaving you alone in this bus station, especially not after what happened.”
I cross my arms tight over my chest and stare out in front of me. “Well then I guess you’ll be sitting here for a long time until I get on the bus.”
“No. That includes not letting you get on another bus alone to go anywhere. Texas. Ida-fucking-ho. Wherever. It’s dangerous and I can tell you’re an intelligent girl—so here’s what we’re going to do …”
I blink a few times, stunned by his sudden authoritarian arrogance.
He goes on:
“I’ll wait here with you until morning. That’ll give you enough time to decide whether you’re going to let me pay for your plane ticket back home, or if you want to call someone to fly here to get you. It’s your choice.”
I look at him like he’s crazy.
His eyes say back at me: Yeah, I’m dead serious.
“I’m not going back to North Carolina.”
Andrew shoots up from the chair and stands in front of me. “OK, then I’m coming with you.”
I blink, looking up at his intense eyes; his perfectly sculpted cheekbones seem more pronounced from this angle making his gaze even fiercer. A shiver moves through my stomach.
“That’s insane,” I laugh it off, but I know he’s serious and then I say with more severity, “What about your dad?”
His teeth grind together and the intensity in his eyes becomes more forlorn.
He starts to look away but a thought pulls him back. “Then come with me.”
What? No way …
He looks hopeful rather than determined now. He sits back down next to me on the plastic blue seat.
“We’ll stay right here until morning,” he goes on, “because surely you wouldn’t leave with some strange guy from a bus station after dark? Right?”
He turns his chin away from me, looking at me in a questioning sidelong glance.
“No, I wouldn’t,” I say, even though I really do feel like I can trust him—he saved me from being raped, for God’s sake! And nothing about him is giving me the same fears I had when Damon practically did the same thing. No, Damon had something darker in his eyes when he looked at me that night on the roof. All I see in Andrew’s eyes is concern.
But I still won’t leave with him like this.
“Good answer,” he says, apparently glad I’m as ‘intelligent’ as he hoped I was.
“We’ll wait until daylight and just to give you more peace of mind I’ll have a cab drive up straight to the hospital instead of expecting you to get in my car.”
I nod, glad he thought of that. I won’t say that I hadn’t exactly sorted that part out yet. I mean, I already trust him enough, but it’s like he wants to be sure that I don’t, like he’s teaching me a lesson in a quiet, roundabout way.
“And then from the hospital, we’ll catch a cab back here and wherever you want to go, I’ll go with you.”
He holds out his hand to shake on it. “Deal?”
I think about it a moment, confused, yet at the same time utterly fascinated by him. I nod reluctantly at first and then again with more assurance.
“It’s a deal,” I say and place my hand into his.
Honestly, I’m not sure I agree with it entirely. Why would he even do that? Doesn’t he have a life elsewhere? Surely he’s not as miserable with home as I am.
This is crazy! Who is this guy?
We sit together for hours right here in the station and talk about nothing important, yet I love every second of our conversations. About how I gave in and drank a soda and it was the soda’s fault I ended up in the restroom with the man—he laughs it off and tells me I just have a weak bladder. We quietly gossip about the passengers that come and go; the weird-looking ones and those who look dead, as if they’ve been riding a bus for the past week and haven’t been able to sleep. And we talk about classic rock some more, but the argument remains as much a stalemate as it was when we first discussed it on the bus.
He practically died when I said that I’d listen to Pink over The Rolling Stones, any day. I mean, I literally think I wounded him. He put his big hand over his heart and threw back his head in devastation and everything. It was very dramatic. And funny. I tried not to laugh, but it was hard not to when his hardened, over-exaggerated face was practically smiling, too.
And just as we went to leave after the sun rose, I stopped to look at him for a moment. A slight breeze brushed through his stylish brown hair. He cocked his head to the side, smiling at me and waving me into the cab. “You’re still coming, right?”
I smiled warmly back at him and nodded. “Of course.” And I took his hand and slid into the backseat with him.
What I had been thinking about when I looked at him was that I realized I haven’t smiled or laughed this much since before Ian died. Not even Natalie could get a genuine elated emotion out of me and she tried really hard. She went out of her way to help snap me out of my depression, but nothing she ever did came close to what Andrew has managed to do in such a short time and without even trying.
My throat closes up when we step foot inside the hospital, like a wall of blackness came out of nowhere and engulfed me. I stop for a second at the entrance and just stand here with my arms heavy at my sides. And then I feel Camryn’s hand touch my wrist.
I look over at her. She’s smiling so warmly that it melts me a little. Her blonde hair is pulled into a messy braid around to one side, lying freely over her right shoulder. A few strands that escaped the rubber band rest freely down the side of her face. I have this urge to reach up and brush them softly with my finger, but I don’t. I can’t be doing shit like that. I need to get rid of this attraction. But she’s different from other girls and I think that’s exactly why I’m having such a hard time with it. I don’t need this right now.
“You’ll be fine,” she says.
Her hand falls away from my wrist when she sees that she has my attention. I smile faintly back at her.
We follow the hall to the elevator and ride up to the third floor. Every step of the way I feel like I should just turn around and leave this place. My father doesn’t want me to show emotion when I go in there and right about now I’m about to explode with it.
Maybe I should go outside and punch a few trees and get it all
