Page 17 of My First Mistake
Fuck, I can’t win here, so I try a change of tactic. “Tell me why your car is named Angelina.”
She takes her eyes off the road for a second and flashes me a grin. “Because she suits it, don’t you think? My little Angelina.” She pats the dash affectionately. “What’s your car called?”
“I don’t name my cars.”
“Well, you should. Maybe then you’d have not wanted to leave it behind in LA and then you’d have driven here in it. Then you wouldn’t be riding shotgun in mine complaining about how un-wonderful she is.”
I don’t point out that driving would have taken me days rather than hours, because she knows that and she’s goading me. Instead, I say, “Un-wonderful isn’t a word.”
“I just discovered it, so it is,” she says, full of defiance and sass.
I’m pretty sure I was right about the bratty side, and it makes my dick twitch very inappropriately in my jeans. “How do you know if it’s a him or a her? You haven’t even met it,” I say, hardly even believing that I’m talking about my car like it’s not simply a giant hulk of metal. It’s gorgeous metal that does zero to sixty in two seconds, but it’s still just metal.
“I can just tell. I’m like a car whisperer. Give me the color, make and model and I’ll tell you its gender.”
“It’s a Bentley Continental GTC, and it’s silver.”
She whistles appreciatively. “Nice. And it’s convertible, right?”
I’m impressed that she knows the car.
“You live in LA, of course it’s a convertible,” she answers her own question. “And he’s definitely a he, and he should have a grand but classy name, like Faraday.”
“Faraday? That’s your idea of grand and classy?”
She nods, a smile spreading across her face as she keeps her eyes fixed on the road.
“Now, I’m never going to be able to look at my beautiful car ever again without calling him Faraday.”
She laughs out loud and the sound makes me smile. “Aw, you called him ‘him.’”
“Probably gonna have to sell him now,” I grumble. “And he was custom made.”
“Well, you should have named him yourself when you had the chance.” She takes her eyes off the road for a second, long enough to flash me a wicked grin that does nothing to ease the situation in my jeans.
Fuck me, she has the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen.
“There it is!” she yells, swerving off the highway way too fast for my comfort, not to mention Angelina’s, whose brakes squeal in protest.
Addie doesn’t seem to notice though and she’s still smiling when we pull into the parking lot of Kelly’s Superstore. “How about I drive us back?” I suggest.
“And let you loose on my precious,” she says the word “precious” in her best Gollum voice, while rubbing the steering wheel and I’m reminded of how she watched all of those movies with me. When Brax and Eva declared them too long and boring, it was her who sat in her parents’ den with me for an entire Sunday while we watched every one of them back-to-back. We watched them again shortly after my mom died. Just me and her.
She jumps out of the car and then quickly grabs some tote bags from her trunk. She shoves one into my hands. “I suggest we split up. I’ll grab essentials, and you get the boring stuff like food and coffee.”
“Otherwise known as the things that are going to keep us alive.”
She nudges me in the arm as we walk toward the entrance. “No, I said I’ll be getting the essentials, you know like bourbon. Andthat, my friend, is the only thing that’s gonna keep us alive.”
I don’t miss that she called me friend, and I don’t think she does either, because her cheeks flush an adorable shade of pink.
If only to ease her growing embarrassment at admitting she doesn’t hate me as much as she pretends to, I ask, “So, the plan is you get too hammered to be able to wield a knife and kill me in my sleep?”
She nods. “Exactly.”
“Sounds as good a plan as any, I guess.”
She claps me on the shoulder, and the contact has my skin warm, even through my sweater and coat. “It’s the only way, Chase.”
