Page 19 of The Promise Of You

He shakes his head. “Long story.”

I look around. It’s still dark, there’s no voices or sound of anyone trying to fix anything yet. “We have all night.”

He huffs an exhale. “I’m not sure where to start.”

“Let’s start with the girl. Who was she?”

He tilts his head back against the faux wood panel. “Her name was Audrey. She was very pretty, and she was very much into my brother.” His voice is low and almost remote.

“Younger or older? Your brother.”

“Older brother.”

“How old was Audrey?”

“His age.”

“So older than you.”

“Right.”

“How old was everyone? I need context.”

He shuts his eyes and shakes his head with a chuckle. “You’re worse than Skye,” he says.

“Your friend’s six-year-old?”

“Right.”

“’Kay, back to Audrey. How old was she?”

“She was twenty-one, my brother was twenty-one, I was eighteen.”

A very pretty twenty-one-year-old who was into his brother. How does hot-as-sin fit into that? “Keep going.”

“We were at this party… and… I saw her crying in the corner… and I offered her a ride home.” His voice breaks a little. “That’s it.”

That’s it? “What happened?”

His gaze flutters around the elevator before settling on mine. “We got into a car accident.”

Oh crap. “She didn’t make it,” I whisper, hoping he’ll have another answer.

He shakes his head.

I want to ask him about the accident, what happened exactly, but I’m afraid of what I’ll hear. Maybe he was intoxicated? Maybe he was just too inexperienced and made a fatal mistake? “And you were driving,” is all I volunteer, just to make sure I got the basic facts right. The root cause of his guilt.

“Yup. Got hit. Couldn’t get her out of the car soon enough. Car caught up in flames. I tried.” His jaw clenches, the muscles rolling as he grinds his teeth.

I nudge my head against his chest and rock us back and forth. He leans over me to hold me tighter, and his arms crush me. His whole body is trembling, just like mine was before.

Two messed up people clinging to each other in a dark box suspended in midair.

We could be having sex right now.

I’ll take this instead, any day. With him, I’ll take this. This connection, this understanding. It’s more than I ever had with Tucker.

It could be because we’ll never see each other again.

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