True (True Believers #1)(19)
Author: Erin McCarthy

Shocked, breathless, I felt my cheeks heat up as I stared at him, sucking in air. He had stopped moving, and lifted his head up to give me a cocky smile of satisfaction. “That didn’t take long.”

I shook my head, feeling mildly embarrassed. “I didn’t mean to . . .”

He laughed and sat up so he could brush a kiss across my lips. “You’re a nut. Why else would you be doing any of this if you didn’t mean to?”

“I don’t know.” I just wanted to be a little more sophisticated.

Tyler readjusted my dress so my chest was covered again and he withdrew from under my skirt. “You have goose bumps. Let me turn the car on.”

I didn’t really think the shivers were from cold, but I didn’t argue with him. Tugging my dress down closer to my knees where it belonged, I watched him light up another cigarette. There didn’t seem to be a pattern to his smoking. I’d seen him go hours without having one, but then times like tonight, he seemed to light another almost as soon as he put one out. The addiction seemed behavioral, not physical.

Maybe I stressed him out.

He did start the car, but he made no move to pull out of the parallel parking spot and go to Nathan’s. “What kind of doctor do you want to be?” he asked out of nowhere.

I blinked at the unexpected topic change. “I want to be a coroner.”

“What?” he asked, glancing over at me in surprise. “Like autopsies and shit?”

I nodded.

“Damn. And you look so sweet all the time.”

“It’s very logical,” I told him, like that was supposed to explain everything. But I didn’t really feel like having a conversation about my career choice when I was still pulsing with desire and was wondering what he intended to do and what I intended to let him do.

“I suppose it is. But gruesome.” He looked behind him and put the car in drive and pulled out onto the street. “Come on, let’s take you back to your dorm.”

“What?” I reached back for the seat belt to click it in before I remembered there wasn’t one. For some reason that upset me, and I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was a need for protection, literal and otherwise. “I thought we were going to Nathan’s.” I thought you wanted to have sex. And I thought maybe I just would have said yes, given how he’d made me feel in under three minutes over a gearshift.

“If we’re going to stick to just making out I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

We had actually surpassed making out already, in my opinion. I didn’t know what to say. Did he just not want to have sex with me? Because what other explanation could there be? Maybe my future career had turned him off. I knew that not everyone understood why I would want to slice open corpses.

“Did I do something wrong?” I said, then hated myself for saying it. God, that was such a lame, pathetic girl thing to ask. But it was out, and I couldn’t take it back.

“No, of course not.” He sounded surprised. “I just promised you I would only go as far as you wanted to go, and honestly, Rory, I have a boner the size of the Empire State Building right now. I think maybe we just need to take it easy. I don’t want you to regret anything.”

“Oh.” I wasn’t sure what else to say. I wanted to trust that his actions were out of respect for me. But then why did I feel so rejected?

Was it that he didn’t want me to regret it, or that he didn’t want to regret it?

We drove in silence and I studied him without shame, wanting to remember this moment, this car ride, feeling like it might be the last time I saw him. My finger came out and traced the tattoo on his bicep, following the lines of the tribal letters spelling out TRUE Family. He glanced at me in surprise but he didn’t say anything.

“What does this mean?” I asked. “Something besides the obvious?”

“It’s mine and my brothers’ initials. Tyler, Riley, U, and Easton. The four of us make a family and my parents can go f**k themselves. We don’t need them.”

“That’s beautiful,” I said, and I meant it, though it was sad that his parents didn’t factor into the equation. If I were to get a tattoo to represent my family, I wasn’t sure what it would be. A little book with two names on it? Or an angel on my shoulder watching me, for my mother?

“That’s one way to put it.”

I realized he had stopped at the circle by the front door to my dorm, which meant he was not planning to park the car. Not planning to walk me to my room or even to the door. Not that I expected him to. But that didn’t mean I didn’t want him to.

Nor did he bother to put out his cigarette. It was a noxious smoking cloud between us as he leaned over and gave me a quick kiss. “Get some sleep. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

It felt like a dismissal. For a second, I just stared at him, longing, wanting, and my expression must have been more obvious than I realized, because he swore.

“Jesus, don’t look at me like that.” His finger came out and wrapped one of my curls around itself. “You’re so f**king beautiful, you’re killing me.”

He did look agonized, though I didn’t understand why, and when he tugged on the curl, it was hard, not teasing, shocking me into action. I started to peel off his jacket. But he shook his head. “It’s cold out, don’t worry about it. Good night.”

He might as well have taken his foot to my back and shoved me, he sounded so ready to be rid of me. I suddenly felt sick and I threw open the door, repeating my actions of the previous Saturday night, but with a whole different set of confused emotions. This time when I bent over and removed my room key from my pageant sock, I glanced back to see he was rubbing his face with both hands, like he wanted to erase away whatever he was thinking.

Ironically, I didn’t want to erase anything. I wanted to hold on to it, to savor it, to remember it late at night alone in my dark room.

Ripping his jacket off, I ran up all four flights of stairs to my room, unwilling to wait for the elevator.

***

The door, thrown open too hard, slammed into the wall and woke me up. I was about to pry my eyes open and yell at Kylie and Jessica to quiet down when I realized they were talking about me.

“I can’t believe she actually did it, that she went home with Tyler,” Kylie said, her words slurred, a loud thump indicating she had dropped her purse on her desk. The desk lamp came on, casting a weak glow through the room, making it likely they would notice that I was, in fact, in the room.