Page 204 of Ride With Me

“Want one that’s cold?” Taz offered as he reached between the seats to where the cooler rested on the back seat.

“Please,” Keely replied. “Unless you’ve got something stronger.”

He was shivering now that the defogger was off, so Taz reached for him and watched as Keely fumbled to get his seatbelt undone.

“I wish,” Taz said as Keely scooted over beside him.

He hadn’t been able to tell when Keely was on top of him and scrunched up so Taz would still be able to see to drive, but theyfit together perfectly. As he draped his arm around Keely, now plastered to his side, it was impossible to miss how right it felt to have him tucked against him that way.

“So, worse place you were ever stranded,” Keely asked, curling towards him instead of way.

Not only that, but he caught Taz’s sleeve and tugged his arm around him like a blanket, pressed his ear to Taz’s chest, and damn near went dead weight on him.

You couldn’t get more perfect.

“Bug Tussle, Texas,” Taz admitted.

“What, the place with the antique car trek?” Keely replied. “That place is awesome.”

“Oh bullshit, come on!” Taz said, scooting back so he could stare down at Keely. “No one has ever recognized the name of the town before. Hell, most think I made it up.”

“Like I said, my folks go wherever the wind blows them,” Keely explained, “and since cars happen to be a passion all three share, Bug Tussle was one of the many assorted places we wound up in.”

“Dayum. At least you were there by choice.”

“I take it you weren’t?”

As pissed as he’d been when it happened, Taz was proud of the fact that he could look back on the moment now with a smile and not a scowl on his face.

“I was shanghaied,” Taz prefaced. “Key information that would have led to me sayinghell no, was withheld from me at the start of the trip.”

“Anytime anything is phrased that way, it was either a menace for a family member, or the kind of friend you kick yourself for having, who was responsible for the whole mess.”

“In this case it was a family member.”

Keely giggled at that, but the silence that followed let Taz know that he was genuinely interested in hearing the rest of the story.

“That car trek you mentioned, that’s how we ended up there too,” Taz explained. “Someone who obviously didn’t know my brother well enough to know it was a bad idea, hired him to deliver a car to the guy who’d purchased it from him.”

“Was it a caddie?”

“Yeah, how’d you know?” Taz asked as he studied Keely intently, searching his memory for any recollection of having met the man before.

“It’s the most popular car up there,” Keely explained. “Folks looking for parts or looking to buy or sell a vehicle, tend to flock to that event. Between the trek and the show, it’s great advertising, and one of the biggest gatherings for antique caddies in all of Texas.”

Taz took a moment to let that sink in fully. “You call them antiques instead of classics. Why?”

“Because everything older than twenty years is considered a classic,” Keely explained, “But those aren’t the kinds of Caddies that feature prominently there. Vintage is a specific range of cars between two years I can’t remember, but antique is anything over forty-five years, so it’s more accurate for what people take on that trek. Which is exceedingly long, and extremely boring when you’re a kid who has very little interest in old vehicles and just wants to divide their time between the theater and the giant slide and splashpad behind the candy store.

“I’d have said you didn’t have an interest in vehicles at all, considering the way we met.”

“And you’d be wrong,” Keely said, giving him a little poke in the ribs, right along a ticklish spot that he had discovered earlier. “I drive extremely well, thanks to my mom and my oldman sticking me behind anything and everything from the time I could crawl. I just never learned to fix them like my mama.”

It took a moment for what he said to sink in, then Taz chuckled, because he was really coming to love hearing about Keely’s family. Was it wrong that a little thread of hope had started wiggling into his brain that one day he’d get to meet them.

Then something dawned on him, and he cocked his head as he stared down at the top of Keely’s head. “You didn’t leave home hitching, did you?”

“Nope.”

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