“What’s it gonna be?” he asks with sparkling bright green eyes flecked by a little bit of taunt.
I’m so nervous! I feel like I’m being asked to choose which wire to cut to diffuse a bomb.
“I don’t know!” I shout, but my lips are smiling wide and nervously.
Twenty miles per hour. People are honking at us and one guy in a red car zooms past and flips us off.
Fifteen miles per hour.
Ahhh! I can’t stand the anticipation! I feel like I want to burst out laughing, but it’s being held captive in my throat.
Honk! Honk! Fuck you! Move out of the way asshole!
It all just rolls off Andrew’s back and he never stops smiling.
“That way!” I finally yell, throwing my hand up and pointing to the east ramp. I squeal out laughter and slide my back down further against the seat so that no one else can see me, I’m so embarrassed.
Andrew flips his left blinker on and slides over into the left lane with ease, in between two other cars. We make it through the yellow light just before it turns red and in seconds we’re on another freeway and Andrew is pressing on the gas. I have no idea which direction we’re traveling, only that we’re going east, but where it leads exactly is still up in the air.
“Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?” he says, glancing over at me with a grin.
“Kind of exhilarating,” I say and then let out a sharp laugh. “You really pissed those people off.”
He brushes it off with a shrug. “Everybody’s in too much of a hurry. God forbid you drive the speed limit or you might get lynched.”
“So true,” I say and look out ahead through the windshield. “Though I have to come clean—I’m usually one of them.” I wince admitting it.
“Yeah, me too sometimes.”
Everything gets quiet all of a sudden and it becomes the first quiet moment that the both of us notice. I wonder if he’s thinking the same thing, wondering about me and wanting to ask, just as I’m curious about so much when it comes to him. It’s one of those moments that are inevitable and almost always open the door to the stage where two people really start to get to know each other.
It’s very different from when we were on the bus together. We thought that our time was limited then and if we were never going to see each other again, there was no reason to get all personal.
But things have changed and personal is all that’s left.
“Tell me more about your best friend, Natalie.”
I keep my eyes on the road for several long seconds and I’m slow to answer because I’m not sure which part of her I should tell.
“If she’s even still your best friend,” he adds, sensing the animosity somehow.
I look over.
“Not anymore. She’s sort of whipped, for lack of a better explanation.”
“I’m sure you have a better explanation,” he says, putting his eyes back on the road. “Maybe you just don’t want to explain it.”
I make a decision.
“No, I do want to explain it, actually.”
He looks pleased, but keeps it at a respectful level.
“I’ve known her since second grade,” I begin, “and I didn’t think anything could break up our friendship, but I was so wrong about that.” I shake my head, disgusted just thinking about it.
“Well, what happened?”
“She chose her boyfriend over me.”
I think he expected more of an explanation and I intended to give him more, but it just came out the way it did.
“Did you make her choose?” he asks with a subtly raised brow.
I turn around to look at him. “No, it wasn’t like that at all.” I sigh long and heavily. “Damon—her boyfriend—got me alone one night and tried to kiss me and tell me he wanted me. Next thing I know, Natalie is calling me a lying bitch and says she never wants to see me again.”
Andrew nods one of those long, hard nods that show he completely understands now.
“An insecure girl,” he says. “She’s probably been with him for a long time, huh?”
“Yeah, about five years.”
“You know, this best friend of yours, she believes you, right?”
I gaze over at him confusedly.
He nods. “She does; think about it, she’s known you practically all her life. Do you really think she’d just toss away a friendship like that because she didn’t believe you?”
I’m still confused.
“But she did,” I say simply. “It’s exactly what she did.”
“Nah,” he says, “it’s just a reaction, Camryn. She doesn’t want to believe it, but not so very far down, she knows it’s true. She just needs time to think on it and to see it for what it is. She’ll come around.”
“Well, by the time she does, I might not want her.”
“Maybe so,” he says and flips on his right blinker and switches lanes, “but I don’t take you for the type.”
“Unforgiving?” I say.
He nods.
We speed past a crawling semi and move around in front of it.
“I don’t know,” I say, unsure myself anymore, “I’m not like I used to be.”
“How did you used to be?”
I’m not even sure about that, either. It takes me a second to find a way around mentioning Ian. “I used to be fun and outgoing and I …” I laugh suddenly as the memory tickles my mind, “… and I used to run naked into a freezing lake every winter.”
Andrew’s whole beautiful face twists into a curious, energized smile. “Wow,” he says, “I can just picture it …”
I smack him on the arm again. Always smiling. He pretends it stings, but I know better.
“It was a fundraiser for the hospital in my town,” I say, “and they put it on every year.”
“Naked?” He looks thoroughly confused aside from grinning thinking about it.
“Well, not fully naked,” I say, “but in a tank-top and shorts in freezing water, you might as well be naked.”
“Shit,
