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The Bad Boys of Summer Anthology(14)

By:Selena Laurence


A shiver courses down my spine.

“Are you…” Heidi’s voice coming up behind me startles me, and I jolt up to see her and Cal walking up to the Suburban together. As I shuffle away from the car, he gets inside, moving all the way to the back row, but Heidi doesn’t budge. She raises her thinly arched eyebrows and slips her hands into the front pockets of her floral-print skinny jeans. “Holy shit, Kylie, you’re sniffing the seat.”

“No, I—”

But she pokes her head into the car and breathes in. “Ooh, that does smell good. Wonder what you’re thinking about right now?” She climbs into the Suburban through the back door and plops down in the middle seat, folding her skinny arms across her chest. Cal snorts from the row behind her, and even though her eyes narrow dangerously, she ignores him. “This will be fun,” she says to me, a little too cheerfully.

Instead of holding back the nervous laugh building in my chest, I let it out as I slide my sunglasses over my face. There’s nowhere near enough sunshine today to need the oversized aviators, but they’ll help me sleep on the ride. At least, that’s the plan.

“I sure as hell hope this’ll be good,” I say.

“There’ll be music. What’s not fun about music?” Heidi asks.

Cal says something to her from the backseat, and though I’m not a hundred percent positive, I’m pretty sure he said, “And the dicks attached to the guys who play it.”

Whatever it is was, it earns a hissed, “Fuck you,” and the bird from Heidi.

Biting the inside of my cheek, I rub the back of my neck. I’m already dreading the fact that I’ll be forced to listen to Heidi and Cal’s back-and-forth until the end of the week, which is three days from now.

When I spoke to Heidi about my plans to travel along with Wyatt and Cal this morning, she promptly volunteered herself for the trip. I was quick to point out how unnecessary it is for her to spend her free time with me on the road, and of course, she was quick to argue, claiming that not tagging along isn’t even an option.

“You don’t have to do that, babe. I don’t have a choice, but you do,” I tell her. “Catch your flight and get back to sexing up drunk guys.”

She responds by ripping her itinerary into tiny pieces and dropping them into my hand. “You’re stuck with me now.”

“You do know that you can just print another one, right?”

Flipping her chestnut waves over her shoulder, she presses her lips together. “It’s…what? Only four days, counting today? And it’s not like the phones are going anywhere. It’s my fault that you have to be with them, so I want to go.”

Though I should have, I didn’t tell her the sad, twisted reality of it all.

A part of me is thrilled that I’m going along for the ride and ecstatic that I’ll have these few extra days with Wyatt just so I can get everything off my chest. Even if he will be busy driving and performing the majority of that time, we’ll have the opportunity that was taken away from us last night.

But then, a part of me aches inside because I know that prolonging my time with him will just slice open my heart a little more. He didn’t tell me the exact plan for this trip until this morning, and when he did, I was speechless for a long time.

The first leg of our trip is the same route that we took eight years ago when I realized that I loved him. It’s the same route where I went from the girl who coped with her insecurities by physically hurting herself to the woman who’s spent the last several years carving deeper emotional wounds into her body.

Wyatt’s breath on my neck separates me from my thoughts. I face him with a forced smile on my face.

“Ready?” he asks.

I tip my head back before I answer him, glaring up at the overcast sky through my sunglasses. “Yeah, I am.” Taking a small step toward the car, I say, “But fair warning—if you end up asking me to chauffeur you around, I might break that pretty blue Kramer of yours over your head.”

He inclines his head toward the back compartment of the SUV where his Kramer guitar is safely stored. “I’m not Lucas, beautiful.” He grabs my waist firmly between his hands, and lifts me off the ground, placing me into the Suburban.

“I’m capable of lifting my leg high enough to use the step rail.”

“Trust me, I know exactly how high those legs will go.” Before he closes my door, he winks and says, “By the way, Ky, you couldn’t hurt that pretty blue Kramer even if you tried.”

Using the rearview mirror, I catch Cal and Heidi stifling laughter from their respective rows. “Stop encouraging his bull,” I say a little too sharply. But at least they’ve found common ground. It just blows that it’s in the form of the tension crackling between Wyatt and me.

Wyatt slams down into the driver’s seat, pops open the biggest Monster Energy drink I’ve ever seen, and starts the ignition. He glances over at me, wearing a grin that’s far too sexy. “Let’s do this shit.”

“Let’s,” I agree sarcastically.

I’m silent as he pulls out of the hotel parking lot. Because he hates GPS, he has to turn around at a gas station a quarter of a mile up the road.

“Babe, you do know that Garmin isn’t actually watching every move you make, don’t you? It doesn’t have a camera recording every messed-up thing you say. So, trust me, if you use the damn GPS, I swear everything will be alright.”

He rubs his tongue up and down the labret in his lower lip as if deep in thought before gesturing to the folded piece of paper lodged into one of the cup holders. “If you insist, Ky.”

My nose wrinkles up when he gives in so easily, but I say nothing as I unfold the paper, which turns out to be the location of the Houston hotel. I alternate between punching the address into the GPS and glancing at him. “Done.”

“If a close-up of my dick ends up on YouTube, your ass is mine, Kylie.”

“Didn’t you already claim it as yours anyway?” I challenge in a voice quiet enough for only him to hear, and he nods slowly. “Ugh, just drive.”

I sit back in my seat and press my forehead against the cold window, watching New Orleans fade away, as Wyatt speeds the Suburban onto I-10 toward Houston. I don’t know if he planned the road trip like this on purpose, but if he wanted me to remember everything, he’s succeeded.

Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse at him. His blue eyes are glued on the road, and one of his hands is gripping the steering wheel so tight that I swear I’ll hear the leather split apart at any moment. His expression is suddenly unreadable, and I wish like hell I knew why.

Silently, he reaches past the center console and creeps his hand across my lap, not stopping until his fingertips brush the inside of my left wrist. Gasping, I jerk away as if he’s scorched my skin with fire. I close my eyes, and I can practically feel the way his hand closed around my wrist when we left New Orleans all those years ago. It was before Your Toxic Sequel— at the time, Falling Anarchy—made it big, and I was huddled up against him in the backseat of Sinjin’s Ford Expedition. I can hear the words he whispered to me, just as clear and startling as ever.

“Does Lucas know?”

“God, no.”

He let go of my arm and moves his hand to my thigh, squeezing just a touch too hard. The pressure makes my heart race, but in a good way. This isn’t the first time Wyatt McCrae has touched me, but I know from this moment on, I’ll consider it the beginning. It’s not an accidental brush or an awkward hug from my brother’s best friend. This is something else entirely, and it’s both confusing and intoxicating.

“So why the fuck do you do it?” he demands, catching me off guard.

I stare at him, open-mouthed, for what seems like an eternity. His midnight blue eyes study me with care, and he waits impatiently for me to give him a response. Sliding a strand of my hair behind my ear, I flick my gaze to the front of the vehicle, where my brother is deep in conversation with Sinjin. When I face Wyatt directly, I’m as honest as I can be.

“Because I’m not good enough. Because my parents have Lucas, and I can barely manage to—”

“You’re everything. Don’t believe for one second he’s any better than you or that you don’t deserve just as much love.”

I start to speak, but he cuts me off. “Kylie, the cutting?” His voice is soft and dangerous, possessive and sexy, and I lean closer to him. “Don’t ever fucking do it again.”

I swallow hard. Fall hard. And I never look back.

“I promise. I won’t.”

I kept that promise, only wavering once since then.

Now, I open my eyes and make myself a new vow—to stay away from all these memories and make it back to L.A., without dredging up more of our history.

He rests his palm on my thigh, and I lower my brown eyes to it, relieved that I had the good sense to wear sunglasses. Dragging in a harsh breath of air, I cover his hand with mine.



Heidi absolutely refuses to stay with Cal another night, and because I’m virtually broke and without an ID until I return to L.A., I agree to share a room with her when we reach the Onyx Hotel in Houston five hours later. With an atrium lobby and floor-to-ceiling windows, the place is far more luxurious than the hotel we stayed at in New Orleans. The Onyx also comes at an extravagant price, and Heidi has no problem letting us know during check-in.