AllFreeNovel
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“No.” Matt swept his finger over the screen of her phone. “No atmosphere.”
He said it without judgment, but privately Allie added the Duh she deserved.
“You still don’t have any bars.” He tossed her cell back on the wagon’s green vinyl upholstery. They jounced through a pothole, sending the phone skittering to the floor as Matt reached for the oh-shit bar. Their sheepdog, Roscoe, whined in the backseat.
“You wanted to come with us,” she muttered irritably. But a glance in the rearview mirror told her that poor Roscoe had curled up in a ball of misery. She eased her foot off the accelerator. Matt’s knuckles were white, and she was being ridiculous, even by her own standards.
There was no reason to expect May to be at the store, or even to hope she’d left another message. She’d said she was on her way. She would get here when she got here.
Allie managed the rest of the drive over the rutted gravel road at a more reasonable speed, and soon enough the store and gas station came into view. As she pulled into a parking spot, Matt put his hand on her knee. She cut the engine.
“Hey,” he said. “You okay?”
She unbuckled her seat belt and covered his hand with her own. “Yeah, thanks. I’m just kind of … discombobulated by this whole thing with May.”
“You seem distracted.”
Allie managed a little laugh. “I’m always distracted.”
He smiled.
She remembered thinking, when they first became friends, that Matt had the best smile of anybody, ever. Totally open, it was a pure reflection of his unblemished awesomeness. His eyes, too—but these days, she had trouble meeting his eyes.
“More than usual,” he said.
She shook her head. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay.”
“With the wedding coming …” He trailed off. Not a question, but an open invitation to tell him what was going through her brain. A promise that he’d understand, whatever it was.
And he would. Whatever she said, whatever she did, he’d be understanding and lovely—and God, how could she tell him how much she hated that sometimes? How impossible it was to imagine spending her life feeling like the bad one? The petty one, the craven one, the moody one—name a fault, and she had it. Not Matt, though. He was a better person than her by every possible metric, and damn him, he was even better-looking than she was.
His only fault was loving her.
“You’d tell me, right?” he asked. “If there was something really wrong.”
“Of course,” she lied. “Always.”
He leaned in to kiss her, and she kept her neck loose. She kept her mouth soft and welcoming. She muffled the part of her that had always whispered doubts about Matt and had resorted lately to dialing up the volume to a full-on klaxon ah-oooooo-gah noise every time he kissed her and she had to force herself to let him do it.
She had to work so hard to want him, and that was her fault. One more fault that Allie possessed and Matt didn’t.
When he said mmm and scootched closer, she closed her eyes and hated herself.
When his hand smoothed up her arm and cupped her shoulder, his thumb rubbing back and forth over her collarbone through her T-shirt, she hated herself even more.
She hated herself all the time, lately.
Something wet poked behind her ear, warm and insistent.
Matt placed his palm against Roscoe’s neck and pushed him into the backseat. “Damn dog,” he muttered. But he was smiling.
Always smiling.
Allie looked away, out the windshield, and caught a glimpse through the storefront window of someone tall, with pale hair. She flung herself from the car so fast, she startled Roscoe, whose claws scrabbled over the seat in his excited confusion.
“Where’s the fire?” Matt asked.
“May’s in there!”
