Chapter Twenty-Four
It took me several weeks to find my footing again, almost a month since the crash had claimed Devin’s life. Jordan had stopped trying to call me, had stopped trying to contact me altogether. I supposed I owed the lack of Jordan’s presence to Aiden. Whatever had happened between them outside the shop, their conversation after the confrontation, they’d both moved on from it.
The continuation of their friendship came with strings, Aiden told me at one point. I figured those strings were all about me, so I let it lie. I didn’t want to know about much of anything, it hurt too much to think about Jordan.
Life was moving on. I was finding that while painful, I had the ability to move on from Jordan. I was still in love with him, I always would be, but I could find peace without him. I still thought often about Devin. I’d already visited his grave. He wasn’t there, but spending time with the polished stone helped me feel closer to him.
I no longer blamed him for being angry with me.
I had learned to stop blaming myself too, somewhere along the way. In doing so, I began to like myself again. I’d liked who I was before Caleb and before Jordan. I found that girl again, I embraced her.
Late one Saturday night, I found myself sitting on the tailgate of my sister’s truck, eating fries, and watching the first street races since The Street King Showdown, since Devin died. I cheered for those I considered friends. Inside, I cheered a little bit for all of us.
Bree didn’t hide her enthusiasm, shouting and cheering as she always had, like nothing else had happened. I didn’t begrudge her that. It wouldn’t be fair to any of us. My sister deserved to find happiness again.
I swung my legs and watched the festivities happily, laughing as Breanna jumped on Rascal’s back celebrating a win for Vic.
When it was Jordan’s turn to race, I found it didn’t hurt to smile. As long as I didn’t do too much thinking about what had happened between us, I didn’t feel all the pain of the past.
I was surprised that the ʼ65 sat at the start line in place of the Malibu. The old red truck led from the start, never backing down, winning with a gap between cars.
“Whoo!” Breanna shouted before giving me a sheepish look.
I shook my head. “It’s okay, Bree, really.”
She smiled as she did a wiggling boogie all the way back to me. “I love you, Raelynn.” She placed a kiss to the top of my head. Breanna and I had been closer than ever in the weeks since the crash.
“What’s he doing?” This from Rascal, as the car Jordan had run against made its way back to the start line. I followed his gaze to the opposite end of the street where Jordan’s truck sat idling, barely visible save for the red glow of the taillights.
I was walking before I had time to question it, moving before I could stop myself. I’d moved on, at least that’s what I tried to convince myself. Yet, I’d read his messages repeatedly. I never had the heart to delete them.
I’d replayed the heartbreaking words he’d said to me, during the fight with Hunter, thousands of times.
Inside, I was at war with myself.
“Raelynn?” Breanna called after me.
I gestured for my sister to stay where she was and broke into a jog. My chest was tight. Something was very wrong, the atmosphere crackled with a tension I couldn’t place.
I was scared for the first time in a long time.
When I got to the driver’s window, Jordan was staring out into the night. He was breathing, his eyes were open and focused ahead of him. Which eased my fear. I hadn’t spoken to him in weeks, but that didn’t mean I wished any harm to him.
If something happened to Jordan…I didn’t know what I would do.
“Jordan?” I reached for him through the window but pulled my hand back as if I might get burned.
“Years ago,” he started, “I took Devin to one of these for his first time. We rode our bikes out to the canning factory. Took forever to get there, peddling the whole way. Our lungs and legs burned, but man, it was worth it.”
I could see them clearly, young and gangly, riding their bikes in the middle of the night without a second’s consideration to how much danger they could get themselves into.
“I keep thinking that if I wanted to go out, I’d want to go out like that…like he did…” The pain in his voice was gut wrenching.
“I don’t like the way you are talking.” My voice was barely audible over the rumble of the big block engine.
He took the hat off and rubbed the stubble on his head before putting it back. Then he continued as if I hadn’t said a word. “I get a thrill when I drive, it’s like being in another world, on another plane of existence. For those four or five seconds? Nothing else exists. I thought I could find that tonight.”
“Did you?” My voice cracked.
“No.” He leaned back against the seat and closed his eyes. “I owe you an apology, Raelynn. I owe you a lot of them.”
Over my shoulder, behind us, several backlit forms were moving up the street. No doubt thinking the truck broke.
Jordan’s voice brought my face around again. This time he was looking right at me. “When you left with him after the funeral, I died a little.”
“Jordan.” I dropped my forehead to the cool metal of the truck door. The pain I’d fought so hard to free myself of was creeping back in. “You wouldn’t even look at me. I couldn’t stand to be there anymore. Hunter was an easy way out.”
“You don’t owe me an explanation, Raelynn.” He cut me off, his voice sad and weary.
“I know I don’t. But it’s the truth.” When I looked up I found that his face was as tired as his voice.
“Get in.” He hitched a shoulder toward the passenger side. The silhouettes that approached were close enough for me to make out Vic and Aiden.
My chest tightened for a different reason now. It would be far too easy to climb in, to forgive him, to forget everything that happened between us. I couldn’t look away from those dark eyes that had always called to me.
He wouldn’t beg, but he wouldn’t break either. The decision was mine and mine alone.
My body was piloted by someone else as I pushed off the truck and jogged around the front to climb in.
As soon as I was seated he took off like rocket, I looked back once to see a crowd of people standing not far from where the truck had been. My brother and sister were there, both of them looking as confused as everyone else.
Nobody would come after us though. My phone wouldn’t blow up with worried messages. I was with Jordan, I was safe. He’d always take care of me.
We drove for a long time in the dark, in the quiet, for so long I wasn’t even sure where we were. Not that it mattered. A sense of calm had settled over me, as if being with him made everything okay again. I’d only thought my world had righted itself without Jordan.
“Are you cold?” he asked me as we pulled up to the gas pumps at a brightly lit truck stop. I was vaguely aware of where we were, right about thirty miles out of town on the highway.
“Yeah,” I trembled with chill. “I didn’t even notice until you said something.”
He handed me the hooded sweatshirt from the seat between us as he climbed out of the truck. “You were shivering. I need a soda. You?”
“Yeah.” I rolled up the passenger window and pulled on the hoody as he crossed the parking lot and disappeared into the glass doors, covered with beer ads.
The hooded sweatshirt was warm and smelled like him. I’d be lying if I said the latter didn’t make me shiver in a different way.
“It swallows you whole.” He grinned for a second when he returned and handed me a soda from inside the store.
What was he thinking? As he pumped gas, his body was coiled like a snake ready to strike, all tight muscle and clenched jaw. Did he not find the peace I had found? Or had I become one of the demons that haunted him, another scar for him to bear?
“What are we running from?” I asked him when he slid into the driver’s seat.
“Everything.” He wrapped and then unwrapped his fingers around the steering wheel before starting the engine.
“Then let me drive.” I turned sideways in the seat as he fired up the engine and we hit the highway. I couldn’t handle the melancholy, couldn’t battle his demons for him. In the silence, that became all too apparent. “Let me chase the sunrise.”
In the east, the sky had already started to brighten. I waited, allowing myself the caress of eager anticipation, for his answer.
“Do you want to drive or make a pass?” The look on his face was the closest thing to my Jordan, the man he’d been before the crash, that I’d seen in weeks.
My smile widened, tendrils of excited energy whipping through my body and showing on my face. “Both.”
He shook his head but the corners of his mouth turned up a little bit.
“There it is,” I sighed.
“What’s that?”
“I lost you there for a while, but you’re back now.” I turned his words on him. Jordan had been gone, lost in in a bottomless pit of self-loathing and guilt.
He was quiet in apparent contemplation as he slowed the truck on a stretch of blacktop in the middle of nowhere. “Haven’t had much to smile about, to feel good about, lately.”
There was so much unsaid, so many hurt feelings, that I didn’t know how to respond or if I even should.
He must have seen the indecision on my face. “I don’t want anything from you, Raelynn. I’m not asking you for anything. It’s that—I’m tired of being alone with myself. It’s not fair for me to make you be here, to make you stay with me tonight.
“There’s another apology I owe you.”
“You didn’t make me do anything.” I slid from the passenger seat and jogged around to the driver’s side. Jordan had already popped the door open when I got there.
He slid out and caught my face in his hands. I had to close my eyes to keep away the emotions the warm touch of his fingers wrought in me. I swayed a little on my feet when he pressed his forehead against mine, his breath kissing my skin.
“I never deserved you. I never will.” His coarse whisper was barely audible over the rumbling of the truck’s engine.
I had every intention to pull his hands from my face. His touch left me reeling, and I no longer knew which end was up. The walls I’d built, all the lies I’d told myself, all came tumbling down. Instead of pulling away, I clung to his wrists. I was drowning. “I’m not okay, Jordan.”
“I know, baby.” He pulled me into his arms, all my mental warning bells sounded at once. I should pull away. I couldn’t find what I needed like this, not with what had happened between us.
“Don’t.” I shook my head against the warmth of his chest, “Don’t call me that.”
The need to stay there in his arms was too great for me to try to break free. I’d wanted this for so long, needed his embrace for weeks. He’d denied me that, of all the things he’d done that was the worst.
I loathed myself for needing his touch, for needing him.
“Jordan…” I pushed against his chest, putting some space between us. “I can’t do this.” I looked at the dry grass at my feet, unable to look at his face. I feared what would happen if I really looked at him. “I can’t…because I want it too much.”
He sighed and moved around me, leaving me standing there at the door. I stayed frozen to that spot, stuck in that moment torn between desire and survival, until he called at me from the passenger side. “We gonna do this?”
“Yeah.” I tried to smile but it didn’t happen. I couldn’t find that calm place I’d had before I’d climbed from the truck. Jordan had left me stripped bare, feeling every emotion at once. I put a white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel to keep from shaking.
“You taught me how to drive in this.” My smile was grim, though the memory was a bright happy one. “God, I was so scared.”
“Are you scared now?” The low rumble of his voice was as sexy as the growl of the engine.
“Not of the truck.” Sparing him a glance in that moment cost me a lot. So much that I had to force my eyes forward to focus toward the pink glow over the horizon. I wasn’t over Jordan Slater, I never would be.
“Didn’t take much teaching.” Sensing my need to move on, Jordan quickly continued. “You caught on quicker than Aiden.”
“No way!” I was genuinely surprised. That I’d done anything with cars better than Aiden or Breanna was unheard of. Like always, he’d read me perfectly. I thought of my brother and sister, instead of Jordan and me.
“Fact. You took off on your first try, every time. He stalled out first try, at least twenty times. He about jerked my neck off my shoulders.”
All the Casey kids learned to drive on Old Man Slater’s old Chevy. It was beat up and rusted out then, a cast off hand-me-down farm truck. At one point, I’m pretty sure we sat on upturned buckets instead of seats and bounced through the fields behind the house. There were memories in this old truck, good memories, the sort that made the bad ones hurt less.
The way he was watching me stole my breath. I closed my eyes on an inhale in a desperate battle to cling to the happy memories and forget everything that hung between us.
With nothing left to do, holding on to the happy times, I opened my eyes and put the truck in gear. When my foot hit the gas, it responded like a dream, sliding from one gear to the next in a smooth rush well past sixty miles an hour.
I didn’t turn my head, I didn’t need to. I could sense his nearness, breathe in the intoxicating scent of him from the hoody. In that moment, I was cocooned in all things Jordan, pushing the truck faster and faster into oblivion.
I found a flat stretch and stopped the truck, looking at him only long enough for a nod of approval.
I couldn’t ignore the tingling sensation in my legs when his arm brushed my skin as he turned on the nitrous bottle. He turned completely in his seat and reached over me, pulling the seatbelt across my lap and fastening it. Jordan was so close, one turn of my head would have put my lips against his.
I didn’t turn. If I did, I would have lost more of myself than I could afford.
There was no burnout, I didn’t lay rubber for grip. I’d probably never go fast enough for that to matter. I wasn’t a racer like he was. But, I could still appreciate the power of the truck, find the excitement of putting my foot to the floor and letting her eat, as they said.
“Remember how to do this?” he asked as he pulled the belt across himself.
“Oh yeah.” I gave an excited smile and stomped it. I left off the clutch smoothly, without any barking of the tires. I grabbed second before I’d had a chance to think about it.
Then, I hit the button.
The speed the nitrous produced from the engine, the pure adrenaline garnered from it, was as good as sex. Better even, in some ways. I got gooseflesh, chills ran right down my spine and took my breath away.
I held it like that, my body tossed back against the seat until the unadulterated rush of adrenaline spiked to fear and my control started to slip. Only then did I lift off the gas, dried corn stalks passing so fast they were nothing more than whipping blurs in my side view.
“Oh my God!” I shouted as I slowed the truck to a manageable speed. The pure rush he’d spoke of earlier soothed my soul. For those few seconds, I was somewhere else. “Now I know why you do it.”
“Yeah.” He blinked at me, his face drained of most of its color. “But, I like it better from over there.”
I laughed, I couldn’t help it. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you scared.”
“I’ve never ridden shotgun when someone else was making a hit. Much less someone who doesn’t race.”
“I learned from the best.” I winked at him.
“Yeah, your dad was something else.”
“I wasn’t talking about Dad.” I laughed.
“God, you’re beautiful, Raelynn.” He said the words so quietly, I thought for a moment I imagined them. When I turned to him, he ducked his head away. I couldn’t recall a time when he’d done that, hidden his face from me. This was a side of Jordan I didn’t know, I wasn’t sure what to do with it.
I parked the truck on the shoulder and put it in neutral. There were years where I’d have given anything to hear him say things like that to me. Even now, there was a familiar tightness in my stomach at the knowledge he thought I was beautiful.
There was something else too, a sickening dark feeling that I couldn’t place. I could still see the way he’d looked at me when he fought Hunter, hear the derision in his voice. It had been so much worse than his rejection years ago.
“Take me home, Jordan.” I slid from the driver’s seat and made the trek around the truck for the last time. He wasn’t waiting for me at the door, he’d walked around the back of the truck. I let out a breath of relief I’d held. The space he’d given me, allowed me a moment to bolster myself.
“I wish I could take it all back.” He told me point blank when I shut the door behind me. “I can say I’m sorry a dozen times, but it won’t change anything. I was in a dark place, a broken place, I still am. I don’t think I can find my way out of it without you.”
I didn’t respond for a very long time, I held my peace the entire way home.
My voice broke through the tension coated silence when he slowed on the small road between our houses. “I don’t know what to tell you, Jordan, or what you want from me. I tried to give you everything you could need, I really tried. Up until the fight with Hunter, I would have forgiven you anything. Because I knew you were hurting.” I took a shaky breath as he parked the truck. “After what you said to me, I can’t.”
He grabbed my hand before I could escape. “When I saw you with him, something snapped. I was so damned angry, I couldn’t see, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to hurt him because I couldn’t hurt you. I couldn’t make you feel like I felt in that moment.”
“But you did hurt me.”
“I know, and I’m so damn sorry.” He pressed his forehead against the steering wheel, knocking the hat back off his head. “I’ve fucked up a lot of shit in my life, but that’s the one thing I wish I could take back. I thought that nothing could be worse than Devin dying until I lost you.”
I opened the door to the truck and took a deep breath. “I feel like all my insides have been ripped outside of my body and then you ran them right over. I can’t make sense of that, I don’t know where we go now. I need time to think about it, to work it all out. I can’t do that when you’re so close.” Shakily, I let my breath out in a rush. “I can’t do that if you don’t let me breathe. When you talk to me, when you touch me, when you’re close to me? Nothing makes sense anymore.”
I slid from the truck but stopped short of closing the door when I saw the quiet anxiety on his handsome face.
“Is this it?” he asked with a voice laced with trepidation and sorrow.
“I don’t know.” It was the only answer I had…and no answer at all.