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Chapter 12
“Uh, I don’t know,”I said, and the car behind him honked again.
“Jesus fuck!” he roared and motioned out his window to drive past. “Go around me, you brain dead fucking cunt!”
The car did, it raced past at last and I clicked my seatbelt on as Ryker asked again, “Where to?”
“Just drive,” I said, nervous energy rolling through my body like static electricity. I hadn’t seen Ryker since the night of the costume party, since that time with Kingston. I’d been a virgin then, and now I wasn’t. It was strange how life seemed to unroll around you whether you were in control or not.
“As you wish, princess,” he grinned and I felt his charm radiate off him in a most appealing way.
God, he was sexy in that dangerous bad boy fashion I never knew I liked.
He put it in gear, it was an old fashioned stick shift, and hit the gas. The truck rumbled forward and I watched Ryker shift a couple more times before settling on a cruising speed.
When he held the gear shift in his hands, I couldn’t help but stare at how his muscles and tendons played under his tattooed skin. He was dangerously attractive and he definitely knew it.
“What were you running from?” he asked me with a lopsided, lazy smile as we drove.
“I was just running,” I replied. “Not from anything.”
“Everybody who runs is running from something,” he laughed. “Either you’re running from a predator or you’re running from your feelings.”
“I was actually running for no other reason than to feel good,” I said. “Maybe for the first time ever, actually.”
“Oh really,” he said and shot me a sidelong glance. “Something change for you recently?”
And I laughed. How could I sum up everything I’d been through this past week without sounding like a lunatic.
“Way too many things,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about them, my head has been full of them lately. Just drive, let’s go see something beautiful. Take my mind off it.”
“I see something beautiful,” he said. “I don’t need to drive anywhere to see it, it’s right in front of me.”
“Your truck?” I asked and smiled, feeling bashful over his flirtatious energy.
“Not my truck,” he said, completely serious. “I mean you, Everly Hayes. How the hell are you so gorgeous? I can’t explain it.”
“Good genes, I guess,” I replied. “Besides, you’re kinda cute yourself.”
“Cute,” he laughed and ran his hand through his jet black hair, with half of it dyed dark red now. “Now that’s not a word used to describe me since I was running in diapers at preschool.”
“Well, get used to it. I’m going to call you Cutie McRyker,” I said, and I loved how he laughed as if I was the most clever girl he’d ever met. He was really cute, I wasn’t telling a lie. He was savage, brutal, exacting in his depravity, covered in tattoos and had many, many piercings. And yet, like this, he was really cute.
“Sounds like a plan, as long as you don’t mind me calling you Everly McSexy,” he replied.
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Why not?”
Our banter game was on point.
“I know you said to take you somewhere beautiful, but I’m going to take you somewhere meaningful, if that’s okay with you,” he said and turned off the main road onto a side road that lead to the quarry and a place with white cliffs overlooking the town.
“Meaningful?” I asked. “I know this is the way to Hanson’s Quarry, it is really pretty out there. But why is it meaningful?”
“It reminds me of home,” he said and turned off the paved road onto the winding gravel side road. “This here reminds me of the road to my house, it’s set quite a ways off the paved street. I grew up in a small house, a shack really, but I have good memories of it.”
“You grew up poor, didn’t you?” I asked him.
He didn’t seem offended by the question, so I didn’t feel bad asking it.
