AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“And yours?”
I looked over at him as he navigated through the trees. “My what?”
“Your tell? For if you ever get abducted.” He shot me a quick glance before he went back to concentrating.
“Um…” I thought about it. “‘I hate John Cusack’.”
“Well I don’t love him, but that seems a bit harsh, Barlow. What did he ever do to you?”
I laughed. “No, that’d be my tell.”
“John Cusack?”
I nodded. “Yep.”
“Okay. Well, Carter will be devastated.”
I smiled as he threw the car in park and jumped out of the cab, and I followed suit. “Oh, Mason knows about my love for John.”
“He’s a better man than me, then.”
“I get the impression you don’t know who John Cusack is…”
“Oh, what gave it away?” His face popped up over the tray and I grinned at him and shook my head.
He walked around the back of the ute and beckoned for me to join him. He pulled the tailgate down and turned to me. When he’d been holding his hands out for a while, I looked down at them in confusion.
“Do you want a hand up, or not so much?” he asked.
I looked back at him and finally got what he was asking. I nodded and he put his hands on my waist and lifted me up onto the back. We froze for a moment, him standing between my legs, his hands on my waist. A flutter ran through me and my skin broke out into goose bumps.
I couldn’t see wonderfully since he’d just turned the headlights off and my eyes weren’t used to the moonlight yet, but I was glad of that. I wasn’t entirely convinced of what I’d see in his eyes if I could see them properly. But that antsy feeling was back, if slightly different than before. I smiled and shuffled backwards.
He pulled himself up into the back with ease, sending my imagination into overdrive as I watched his body move and eliciting a whole bunch of weird feelings in me that I ignored furiously.
He lay down, then looked at me. “You okay?”
“I should be asking you that, surely?”
He shrugged and held up the blankets for me to wriggle under them next to him.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked.
“I want to not talk about it.”
“Okay.” I said with a nod and we lay there in the dark, snuggled side-by-side under his blankets.
Eventually, he was the one who broke the companionable silence.
“Barlow?”
“Lombardi?”
“You ever feel like just everything’s going to shit, no matter what you do?”
I did. More than I would have liked. “Yeah, I guess…”
“Like, you’re just going along in life and you get thrown a curveball and you have to re-evaluate everything.”
