Page 17 of All Roads Lead to You

“Okay.”

Dad held out his arm, and I slid into his hug while hugging my baby sis, too.

“Thanks, Dad.”

“You’re welcome, son.”

I wasn’t sure I should be thanking him. Traveling with Nick was going to be a nightmare. Nothing good would come of this.

“Oh, and Logan?” Dad called as I walked out.

I turned to face him. “Yeah?”

“I have some other records of your mother’s if you’d like them.”

There went my eyes again, burning with tears. I took a shuddered breath to shove the pain deep inside. “I’d like that.”

Chapter 5

Nick

It was mid-July, and I needed to start packing for a three-week road trip with Logan. The goal was to leave by the last week of July and arrive in California by August fifteenth, giving us a couple of weeks to meet up with our parents and move into our dorms before classes started on the twenty-eighth. I also needed to be there early for tennis practice.

Most of our rooms had already been packed up and shipped off to California, where our stuff would stay in storage until Logan and I arrived. Then, our parents would arrive to bring our cars and the rest of our clothes by the twenty-fifth.

It would’ve been easier and less expensive had Logan not insisted on taking this trip, but I understood why he needed to. He’d been planning and saving for it forever. It was especially sentimental now that Hunter couldn’t go. I totally got it. That didn’t mean I wanted to go, not with Logan, anyway. He’d probably kill me in my sleep. I still felt his fists on my face from last month. This trip was going to end in disaster. I felt it in my bones. But Mom insisted I go to fix things between Logan and me.

Why should I? He was the asshole. Logan was the one who should try to improve things.

I could’ve put my foot down and said no, but a part of me wanted to help him fulfill his dream. He didn’t deserve it, but this was for his mom. I would’ve felt like an asshole had I insisted on not going.

We hadn’t fought again since that day I ruined his record, but we also stayed out of each other’s way. At least things had been calm for now.

Caleb sat on my carpeted floor, tossing a tennis ball in the air, hitting the ceiling, and catching it. The ‘thunk, thunk, thunk’ grated on my damn nerves. With his last throw, I caught the ball mid-air and tossed it into a storage box.

“Moody today,” Caleb groused.

His blond hair was perfectly parted down the middle, falling down in feathered waves. A small mole sat right underneath his left eye, and he had one of those upturned noses that the girls liked so much.

“Well, you would be, too, if you had to go on a trip for three weeks with someone who hated you.”

“Please, you don’t like him either.”

“True, but that doesn’t make this any better.”

“Yeah, your stepbrother’s kind of a dick.”

I smirked at him as I grabbed my backpack that I used for camping out of my walk-in closet. “So are you.”

“Fair, but I’ve got the looks to compensate.”

I rolled my eyes. “Or it’s your looks that make you an arrogant dick.”

“You adore this arrogant dick.”

We barbed each other all the time, and while Caleb came across as arrogant, he’d always been there for me. He was someone I could go to when I needed to talk about shit. And he’d supported me after Lauren and I broke up.

We high-fived each other. “I’m going to miss you, man. I wish you were going to Stanford with me.”

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