Total pages in book: 83
Estimated words: 75898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
“So what did Jake tell you?” I blurted out. No, no, no. My cheeks blazed up once again.
Cal turned the key and the truck roared to life. He didn’t answer me, but instead did something with one of the control lever things coming out of the steering wheel. It made the truck shudder—I had never driven, myself, so I had no actual idea what he’d done. The size of his hand, though, as it moved the lever thing, made me frown as a thrill of anxiety, mingled with unwelcome need, went through my system.
He reached his right arm over toward me. I opened my mouth, about to cry out in alarm, and I shrank back toward the door with my hands in front of me balled into fists. I felt absolutely sure Cal meant to grab me and teach me a lesson about asking such questions. Instead, he put his hand behind the bench seat so he could twist his shoulders in my direction and look back behind him, through the cab’s rear window.
I understood: he had put the truck in reverse. He needed to back up, to turn around and head down the driveway. As if my violent overreaction had startled him, Cal turned back from the rear window to look at me. His face wore a slight frown, as if he felt the need to study me more closely, in order to understand what he had just seen.
“Well,” he said, “one thing Jake told me is that you’re a handful.”
CHAPTER 18
Grace
I knew that here in the confined cab of Cal’s truck, even with the red light of sunset bathing us through the windshield, my latest massive blush must be totally visible.
“I…” I said, suddenly losing myself inside his blue eyes, seeing myself through them and finding I had nothing at all to say. “I…”
His frown deepened a little, but not in anything like a mean or even a judgmental way. I felt my own brow crease hard.
“I don’t…” I managed, and then, in a small, almost helpless-sounding voice, “I don’t know what that means.”
Cal’s face changed from an expression of puzzlement to one of happy, slightly mischievous appreciation in a moment. The way his mouth had quirked up at the side made it impossible for me not to answer the smile with one of my own.
He turned back toward the rear window and started to back up.
“Well,” he said, as he turned back toward the windshield and used the lever thing on the steering wheel to change the truck from going backward to going forward. Putting it in gear, I suddenly remembered—that had to be what he’d just done.
He started driving down the driveway toward the highway into town before he continued. I studied his face, the red of the sunset making him look, frankly, like a god. When we got to the end of the driveway, and I’d started to think he would leave it at well, he suddenly turned to me and winked, just like he had done in the kitchen.
“I guess,” he said, “a handful means a girl who’s got a bit too much going on for her own good.”
My mouth opened as if to reply, but Cal had already turned back toward the road and started to pull out of the driveway—and I had nothing to say, either. I couldn’t argue. I had a lot going on, at least inside. I guessed one way of looking at my unbelievably stupid decision to steal the earrings might involve wanting to do something dramatic on the outside to demonstrate to myself—and the world—that the way things worked in modern life didn’t work for me.
Up to that moment I probably would have told anyone, including myself, that I had shoplifted because I didn’t have enough going on in that utterly boring life in the subsidized dorm with the subsidized unemployment allowance. Without apparently meaning to, though, Cal Perkins had just offered me what felt like an insight into my own mind.
I didn’t like it. Or maybe I told myself I didn’t like it, because how dare he be right about me? Worse, if Cal were right, it would mean Jake and Shelly were right, too: I was a handful.
That absolutely couldn’t be true, because if I were a handful, it would mean…
It would mean I belong in Grasskiln, where men like Jake and Cal can make sure I get the discipline I need.
I looked down at my hands in my lap, as the truck picked up speed along the highway. A few moments before, I had almost felt happy. I had returned Cal’s smile.
Like an idiot.
I stole a glance at him.
Sure, he’s fucking gorgeous. But he just tried to tell you about yourself—he tried to tell you that you belong in this fucking crazy town.
“Where are we going?” I asked him, trying to break myself out of the thought circle that I could see would only make me unhappy.