Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 96178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
“Hands on the wheel!” Fitz leaned across the console, taking over the steering, and managed to get a glimpse of the speedometer. “Ren! You’re going thirty-five miles an hour!”
“Because they’re scaring me!”
A man in the truck beside them was shouting obscenities out his window. A kid in the backseat of another car flipped them off as his mother drove past. The warm spring breeze that had lulled him to sleep now whipped into the car, adding chaos to the cacophony.
“Okay, listen, we’ve got to work together. We’re going to get over into the right lane. Come here, Ren. Put your hands back up. I can’t steer the car from here.” Ren lifted her shaking hands and wrapped them around the steering wheel.
“Let’s give it a little more gas, Sunshine.” He put his hand on her thigh, pushing her leg down to lean on the accelerator, but when Max sped up, the person to their right sped up, too, vindictive and unwilling to let Ren ease in front of them.
“Oh, come on!” Fitz yelled out the window.
A car swerved around them on the left-hand side, the driver shouting, “MORONS!”
“Why are these people in such a bad mood!” Ren cried.
A truck with a bed full of onions in front of them suddenly slammed on its brakes, making Ren swerve to the left to avoid hitting the bumper as onions tumbled out, bouncing all over the road and even into the car. “I don’t want to die! I’ve never eaten tiramisu!”
“Tira—?”
“I’ve never seen the northern lights!” she sobbed. “I’ve never been on a plane! I’ve never been kissed! I want to be kissed someday, Fitz! I don’t want to be the girl who was killed by onions and never ate tiramisu and never got kissed!”
In the pandemonium, his brain stuttered over that one, and for some reason, he burst out laughing, pushing down harder on her thigh to encourage her to keep going. Fitz had been unable to sleep because he’d been thinking about nothing but kissing her. Go figure. Those unkissed lips were precisely what got them into this predicament.
An exit was nearing, and Fitz knew this stretch well; if they didn’t get off soon, they’d be stuck here without another option for miles. “Check the mirror,” he said. “Can you get over?”
A watery hiccup, and then, “I think so.”
“Good. Turn on your blinker. Move to the right. There you go. That’s it, they’re letting you in.” Her hands shook on the wheel, but her chin was set in determination as she eased Max into the right lane. “We’ll get off at this exit.”
Fitz stared at her profile, feeling something powerful well up in him. Awe. He was in awe of her.
Out of nowhere, a semi came up behind them, air horn blasting as it rocketed past. Fitz unleashed a screaming laugh as Ren veered to the exit, slowing at the bottom of the slight hill and steering off to the side of the road.
“It’s not funny!” she yelled, but then she broke and was laughing, too, tears welling in her eyes as her entire body started to shake. “It’s not funny,” she said again, this time with less conviction, and her laugh turned less trembling and more joyous and…
God, she was so pretty.
Fitz reached down and pulled an onion from his lap, and she laughed even harder. There was enough adrenaline pumping through his veins that he was tempted to just reach over, put his hands in her hair, and kiss her.
Somehow, he resisted, but he did reach across the console and cup her face, meeting her eyes. “You okay?”
Ren nodded. “I think so. Did we almost die?”
“Goonies never say die.”
Dust settled around them, and when she smiled, her cheeks filled his cupped palms. “You’ve seen The Goonies?”
“Every true movie fan has seen The Goonies, Sunshine. Do you realize we’ve just survived the Clueless on-ramp scene and lived to tell the tale?”
“You’re right.” She laughed, closing her eyes, and Fitz remembered the way Mary used to lean in and kiss each of his closed eyelids when he was scared.
He searched around for the cynicism he needed, the pessimistic reminder that this was all a terrible idea, but the call went unanswered. What he was feeling had wiped it all away, and the only thing he felt was hope.
He let go of Ren’s face, reeling in an epiphany that made him feel lightheaded. He’d been wrong last night. A chance to be with Ren—for three months, a week, a day, an hour—was worth the risk of getting hurt. For her, he would willingly walk toward that blind turn. But he couldn’t do it without her knowing the truth about him.
He just had to figure out how to tell her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
REN
By her own admission, Ren was the most romantically inexperienced twenty-two-year-old in the world, but even so, she was pretty sure a concrete wall would be able to read the flirtation in Fitz’s eyes today. He said she could keep driving if she was up for it, but after their near-death experience, Ren eagerly handed him the keys. Back behind the wheel, Fitz teased her about the freeway adventure, but he did it sweetly, with laughter and glances from those happy, crinkly eyes. And he touched her. He touched her so much that she wondered whether she’d imagined the way he’d bolted away from her touch last night, feigning a coughing fit. She’d lain awake in bed, curled away from him, torturing herself by sifting through every embarrassing thing she’d done that day, when he’d clearly been trying to tell her that they were only friends.