Page 23 of Tattoos and Heartbreak
I didn’t need further encouragement. I jammed my foot down on the accelerator and went tearing forward up the street, my heart pounding with either excitement or terror—or both—and one thought in my mind: I’d just stolen a truck.
So I could continue on tour with Olivia Johns and Connor Wheating.
And it was all Rivers Shine’s doing.
RIVERS
Istared up at the clouds scooting along above us, my hands behind my head and my eyes half closed.
“I can’t believe we just stole a truck,” Lila said again.
“Relax,” I said. “I’ll have one of roadies take it back. That means it’s not stealing. It’s borrowing.”
I could feel her looking at me, her eyebrows probably furrowed and her eyes inevitably narrowed. “We took it without asking, Rivers. That’s stealing.”
“Oh my sweet summer child,” I murmured, trying very, very hard not to smile at how naive she was. I mean sure, we’d taken the truck without permission. But I was definitely planning to return it, and that meant it wasn’t actually stealing, in my book.
Just borrowing without permission.
Lila must have realized that I wasn’t going to agree with her on that point though because she shuffled around a bit and got quiet for several moments. We were laying in the bed of the truck, which we’d parked in a meadow we found halfway to our next stop. We hadn’t needed a rest, not really—the drive was only about two hours—but we’d both thought it was a good idea to get off the road for a little in case anyone was chasing us.
And I hadn’t asked her, but I suspected we’d both also wanted to prolong the drive at least a little bit. This was the first time we’d been together outside of a hotel full of people who either knew us or wanted something from us, and it felt... I don’t know, like we’d escaped together or something.
Like it was just the two of us out here on the road, with no one else watching or taking pictures or wondering whether we were going to be able to keep appearances up. No judgement, no pressure, no other people.
Okay so I didn’t know if she felt any of that. But I certainly did.
“What are you thinking?” I asked quietly.
She let out a chuckle. “I was thinking that the cloud right above us looks like a dragon.”
It wasn’t anything like what I’d been expecting, and I looked over at her, surprised. “You were thinking what?”
She turned and met my eyes, her eyebrows lifted. “You never played that game when you were a kid? Like, making up stories for what the clouds looked like?”
No, I thought. When I was a kid I’d been too busy getting through the chores my foster parents—all three sets of them—had given me. Or I’d been hiding from the older kids in the group home. The ones that thought it was funny to play pranks on kids littler than them. Or I’d been reading any book I could find on the music business and teaching myself to play guitar, positive that the music industry was going to be my way out of my situation.
I hadn’t had time to stare at the clouds.
And I hadn’t had anyone to stare up at them with me.
Now, though, I turned back to the sky and tried to see what she was seeing.
“A dragon?”
“Sure.” Her hand shot into the air over us and she pointed. “See, there’s its head. And right there is its wing. And its tail is that part that comes down around the bottom.”
And just like that, I could see it. A dragon, twisting back on itself with its wings spread and its tail coiled around it. It was like... magic. I hadn’t been able to see anything, and then with a wave of her hand, Lila had changed that.
She was a witch. It was the only possible answer.
When I looked to the next cloud, though, I saw something there, too.
“That one’s a dog,” I said, pointing at the smaller cloud to the left.
“A dog?”
“Yes! See it? The part on top is its head and there’s its body and its leg...” I put my hand up and gestured, trying to figure out how to explain that a cloud was actually a dog, and wondering why the fuck it was so important to me that she be able to see it.
