AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“No. No quiero—” Leo shook his head adamantly, his eyes wide with alarm, still staring at Piper. “Mamá. Ya sé, pero—” Piper shifted closer to him, and the closer she got, the more she could hear Leo’s mother speaking in rapid-fire Spanish on the other line. This was clearly about the trip and not about his grandmother. “Yo también los extraño.” Leo raked his fingers through his hair and down over his face before hitting Piper with a grimace and letting out a long breath through his nose. He groaned and muttered a reluctant “sí” into his phone. A happy-sounding squeal came from the other line, and a few more words were spoken between mother and son before Leo hung up and pocketed his phone. He turned to Piper with a jerk of his shoulders. “How long have you known about this?”
“My aunt told me yesterday. Trust me, I am just as thrilled as you are,” Piper snapped.
“What’s going on?” Emma asked.
Leo scowled and ignored her. “We’re going to fucking kill each other. This is a terrible idea.”
“Why exactly are you going to kill each other?” Sam’s eyes flicked repeatedly between Piper and Leo, a wry smile playing across his face. “You seem friendly enough to me.”
“My mom apparently can’t take no for an answer and has set it up for me to hitch a ride back to Archwood with Piper for Thanksgiving,” Leo ground out.
“You two, stuck in an enclosed space for a six-hour drive?” Emma chuckled.
“The sexual tension is going to be off the charts!” Sam exclaimed.
“That’s called hatred, not sexual tension.” Piper shoved Sam’s shoulder.
“Sure, and I’m the King of England,” Sam deadpanned.
“Would you rather be the king of the dead?” Leo muttered. “Because I can make that happen.”
“Mark my words.” Sam raised one finger and switched to a posh British accent. “Something is going to happen on this trip.”
Part Two
You’re my weakness
Twenty
PIPER
The silence in the car was deafening. Besides the brief argument they’d had when trying to play Tetris in the back of Piper’s Mini Cooper with her five bags and Leo’s singular duffel, he had barely spoken a word to her in over an hour, only breaking his silence to ask her a question about the musical or to reply with one-word answers to her questions. The tension felt so thick she was practically wading through mud just to maintain any conversation at all.
Leo seemed to have plenty of things to do during the drive, the most recent of which was poring over the Guys and Dolls script for what must have been the thousandth time given the unorganized tangle of notes on every square inch of margin space. Piper, on the other hand, could do nothing but stare forward at the miles of freeway stretched before them. When she’d finally had enough of the feeling of his eyes occasionally darting to her and away again, she reached for her bag of snacks in the console just for something to do.
“Sunflower seeds?” Leo asked, finally breaking the silence. “That’s fitting.” He had no way of knowing that sunflower seeds were a sore subject, so Piper attempted to keep her voice from dipping into anger or sorrow when she responded.
“Yeah, um, my dad used to always eat them while he was driving to stay awake.” She fought the urge to mutter the obligatory morbid afterthought: a lot of good that did him. She had never seen it in the aftermath, but she imagined when the drunk driver had plowed into her parents’ car, the impact had scattered sunflower seeds all over the dash. “Anyway, it’s a trucker thing, but my brother, Colin—”
“The basketball star?”
“No, that’s Carter. Colin is my older brother, and he’s definitely not into sports.”
“Too many C names.”
“Yep. Colin, Carter, and Cooper because my dad’s name is Cole. And Pearl and I are Ps because my mom’s name is Paisley.” It had been a long time since she’d explained the significance of their names, and she realized too late that she had mentioned her parents in the present tense, as if they were who she was going home to see for Thanksgiving. The thought made her stomach sour. “Anyway, Colin says that the nutrients in sunflower seeds help keep you awake better than an energy drink, and the process of opening the seed with your teeth and working to remove the seed with your tongue gives you something to work on that keeps you alert.”
The blandness of the information helped reign in her emotions. Maybe that was why Colin spoke mostly in statistics. She would swear to anyone who would listen that growing up with Colin had taught her more than school did. She never could understand a damn thing he was talking about when it came to his job, though. Cancer research was reserved for people way smarter than she was, or, rather, tall blonds with wire-rimmed glasses and a propensity to grade their sexual partners with a literal chart they’d created in high school with their tutee-turned-fuck buddy. Carter had swiped a copy of one of the charts back in the day, and it was unsurprisingly thorough. Piper would forever wish she could burn the memory of it from her brain. No one needed to know that their brother enjoyed it when a woman used her tongue to… fucking gross.
What little conversation had passed between them died out when Leo nodded and went about his business, pulling out a textbook from the backpack at his feet. Piper always became violently ill when reading in the car, so it made sense to her somehow that Leo didn’t seem to get carsick. Every fiber of their beings was different, which was further affirmed when she chose a radio station and could see Leo side-eyeing her music choices. Luckily, he stayed silent, or she was going to have to fight him to the death on Taylor Swift.
The music playing through the speakers wasn’t enough to quell Piper’s nerves as they drove on, and having Leo in such close proximity to her made every cell in her body alert, sunflower seeds or not. The fact that he had said nothing about their kiss felt like a declaration that he had either hated every second of it or thought it had been so boring that it wasn’t even worth mentioning. Whatever electric chemistry she had thought they had—and gotten herself off to several times since—must have been fabricated in her head.
So, Piper did what she did best: she overthought. Each replay of the kiss in her head gave her no clues as to how she’d gotten it so wrong. All it did was make her core ache for release again until the question burst out of her like a popped balloon. “It was bad, right?” she blurted, cringing when Leo flinched beside her.
“The… sunflower seeds?” Leo knit his eyebrows.
“When you—we, you know, in the library?” Piper stammered.
