Page 26 of Hero Next Door
Her eyes turned to the grocery store and turned sort of glassy, and for a split second I wondered if we really needed the food at all. Couldn’t we just go up the mountain and look at the view without food?
No, my stomach told me. I was starving, and she had to be at least a little bit hungry, too. She was a strong girl. She’d be okay in the truck by herself for a few minutes.
“Duck down to the floorboard if you want,” I told her, opening the door. “No one can see you down there.”
She was on the floor before I was out of the truck, and I closed the door on her feeling like the biggest cad in the world for leaving her on her own.
* * *
She didn’t start breathing regularly again until we were miles out of town and halfway up the mountain. I knew when she relaxed because I could see her hands unclench in her lap, out of the corner of my eye. I thought about asking whether she was okay, but then I remembered what I’d thought earlier about her knifing me in the guts.
Something told me she wasn’t the kind of girl who would thank me for noticing when she was vulnerable.
Maybe she’d do better if I made myself vulnerable instead.
“Taking you to one of my favorite spots in the world,” I told her quietly. “I never taken anyone up here.”
There was a short silence, filled with tension, and when she spoke, her voice was a little bit hoarse. “And yet you’re taking a girl you’ve only known three days up here. That seems to undermine your whole narrative.”
There was the girl I thought I knew.
“Technically, I’ve known you a lot longer than three days.”
She snorted. “I think that’s stretching it. Why don’t you bring people up here?”
I turned one curve, and then another, and we came to a stop in the turnout my friend Jackson and I had discovered a couple years ago when we were up here exploring. The view was out of this world. The town and the land around it stretched out in front of us, running all the way to what looked like the end of the world, and at this time of year, when everything was fresh and new and bright, it was...
“Oh,” she said softly. She opened the door and slid out of the truck, walking slowly toward the end of the small parking lot.
I slid out and followed her, my steps slow to match hers, and when she turned to me, her eyes had turned from fearful to full of wonder.
“Well this is magical,” she said softly. “I can see why you wouldn’t want to bring people up here. They might get the wrong idea.”
She gave me the last line with a slight smile, and I grinned back.
“Exactly. But I didn’t figure you would.”
She tipped her head back and forth like she wasn’t entirely sure yet whether she was going to take this gesture wrong or not, and just like that she was back. Confident and sassy and poking fun at everything around her, looking for the holes in the plot.
But I couldn’t get the scared girl from the truck out of my mind, and the feeling that I needed to protect her from whatever had been chasing her, that I needed to shelter her with my own body if necessary...
That didn’t go away.
I wasn’t sure it was going to go away anytime soon.
* * *
“Tell me about being on tour,” I said, pouring wine into the paper cup in front of her. “I’ve never been on tour before.”
She sighed and I thought she was going to refuse, but then she started talking. And talking. And talking. About the shows and the audiences and how fast-paced the whole thing was, and about having to constantly go to appearances with Avery and take picture after picture.
“I just want to be behind the scenes, you know?” she finished. “I shouldn’t be the person in front of the lens. I should be the person who coordinated that photographer’s presence. I want to handle the details, not be the entertainment. I don’t have the face for that sort of thing.”
I glanced up at her, thinking that she absolutely had the face for that sort of thing. Long, dark hair, eyes so dark a brown that they were almost black, and a face that should have been in Hollywood in the 50s. She was a mix of Audrey Hepburn and Eva Gardner, and I was willing to bet she was three times as interesting as either of those leading ladies.
But tell her so and she’d give you all the reasons she wasn’t that person.
“What about you?” she asked suddenly. “What have you been doing for the last year, since...”
