“Why?” he asked.
“Because wrecking balls exist,” I said.
At first, I wanted to make the best of this weird and crummy situation. I wanted to see if I could open him up and get him to talk with me a little bit. I wanted to see if maybe I could make a new friend before I was dropped off in my hometown, forced to find my own way again after experiencing betrayal after betrayal.
But he was an immovable object.
What he didn’t realize was that I was also an unstoppable force.
I could tell I had shocked him, but to what extent, I wasn’t sure. He turned his eyes back to the road, and we continued along, but the tension in the car grew thick. I actually rolled the window down in order to get some fresh air, despite the fact that it was so frigid. And when I’d had my fill of it, I rolled the window back up.
“So you have family,” I said.
“That I won’t talk about,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a free country, and that’s my choice,” he said.
Why didn’t he want to talk about his family? How bad could it be, right? Even though he was closed off, he was also well put together. His family couldn’t be absolute shitheads, right? He was stern and closed off, but he was also intelligent and very successful. That said something about his mother, at the very least.
Maybe he was adopted, and that was why he didn’t want to talk about it. Maybe his adopted parents were monsters. Maybe he was going on this wild excursion to find his birth parents and was just covering it up with work. Maybe his family was long-lost royalty, and they were reaching out to him after years of oppression and ruling some far-off country with their conservative laws and backward ways.
He looked like he could be royalty. He was handsome enough to be.
Despite his crappy demeanor, his jawline was strong. His chin was prominent, and his bright blue eyes looked like they were singing. His lips were full, but not overblown, with just the perfect amount of rosy pink color to them. His skin was pale, but not unhealthy, and even underneath his coat, I could tell he boasted a muscular figure. His legs were long, and his arms were lanky, but the way his dark hair swept off to the side seemed to offset his rigid body with the slightest boyish demeanor.
If he wasn’t such a stick in the mud, I’d probably try to hit on him.
Suddenly, the car jolted. It thumped and hobbled, and Colin immediately pulled over onto the side of the road. The car came to a stop while the foreign sound continued to thump, and I felt a rush a fear course through my veins.
Were we stranded? Did we need help? Was he going to kill me and leave me on the side of the road?
“Do we have a flat tire?” I asked.
“Maybe. I won’t know until I check.”
He got out of the car and disappeared from view, and for a split second, I thought about running. Maybe he wasn’t adopted royalty at all. Maybe he was the child of a serial killer that was taken from his parents by CPS. Maybe his father was an axe murderer, and his mother was an accomplice, and this would be the trigger that flipped his psychotic switch.
“It’s flat,” I heard him say.
“Do you know how to change a flat?” I asked.
“Of course, I do.”
I slid out of the car and made my way to where he was. The tire was flat, but not blown out. We’d been driving on it long enough to dent and bend the rim of the wheel. Colin opened the trunk of the car and started pushing things off to the side, placing them in their perfect little imaginary chalk outlines before he started looking for the spare tire.
Then, as if the situation couldn’t get any worse, the clouds opened up and began dumping snow on us.
It was snowing so hard, I could hardly see the road off in the distance while Colin changed the tire. He struggled with the lug nuts to get them off. They had probably tightened from the cold weather we were driving in. He grunted and groaned. I offered to help, but all he did was shrug me off when I bent down to try and take the tire iron from him.
“I’ve. Got. It,” he said pointedly.
I shook my head and climbed back into the car. If he didn’t want help, then there was no reason for me to freeze my ass off, too. I felt the car jolt and bob before the car settled to the ground, and thirty minutes later, this rigid, angry man climbed back into the driver’s seat.
I didn’t think the frown on his face could sink any lower until that very moment.
“Everything good?” I asked.
He said nothing and pulled back out onto the road.
Now, I knew what it felt like to be him. I’d tried everything I could think of to get to know him, but all he wanted to do was shove me away. This was literally a car ride for him and nothing else, so I finally conceded defeat and propped my legs back up onto the dashboard.
If he wanted this car ride to be silent and miserable, then it could be silent and miserable.
Chapter 5
Colin
The weather was getting worse. As I continued to drive down the highway after changing that damn tire, I could see the snow finally piling up on the highway. I was having to slow my
