Leaving Annalise (Katie & Annalise Book 2) Read Free Page B

breath. As soon as the air came into my lungs, I sobbed it back out again. Over and over.
    I flapped my hand at Nick, who was still talking. “Go away. Go back to Texas. I don’t want anything to do with you. I don’t want to be friends or pretend to be nice. Just go away.”
    Nick’s hand grabbed mine as I shooed him with it, and his calloused grip was strong but gentle. A real man’s hands, my father would have said. Nick leaned his head into the truck.
    “Katie, listen to me. I’m sorry,” he said, but I cut him off.
    “For what? Because you wasted your money coming here?”
    “God, no. But I only have forty-eight hours until I have to leave. Are you going to make me stand out here that whole time, or could you let me in where you can yell at me from close range?”
    Forty-eight hours?
    Shit.
    I did want to talk to him. I wanted to rip his head off first, but afterwards, I wanted to hear what he had to say. My sobs turned to sniffles. A car drove slowly past us in the parking lot. Great. I probably looked like a drunk prom queen fighting with her date.
    “Can I please get in the car with you?” he pressed as a black Pathfinder jerked to a stop beside me, skidding the last few feet.
    Oh, yes, I knew that car. And it was driven by someone who was about to be very mad at me. A door slammed. Feet crunched on gravel. But it wasn’t Bart who appeared at my window.
    Ava came up beside Nick, looking incredibly Ava-like in a stretchy red dress with off-the-shoulder sleeves and voluminous black hair billowing behind her in the night wind. Ava, whom I had supposedly called from my truck. Oops.
    “Girl, got an angry man over there who come and get me.” She stabbed an index finger toward Nick. “That the one you not s’posed to pine for?”
    I instantly regretted that I had vomited up the whole story about Nick to my new friend. Not exactly what I wanted him to hear, but oh well. “Correct,” I said.
    “Thought so,” she said. “I think the one in my car expect you to choose between the two of them real quick.” Thought sounded like taught and think like tink. Them like dem.
    “He sent you over here to tell me that instead of coming himself?” The heat rose in my face and settled over my cheekbones.
    Ava shrugged and she had the grace to look apologetic. But it wasn’t Ava I was upset with. I remembered Bart’s liquored-up breath from earlier and I added that sin to this new one. I pulled my gearshift forward and slammed it down into drive, but kept my foot on the brake.
    “Tell him he just made it pretty easy,” I told her. I unlocked the doors. “Get in,” I said to Nick. Letting him in didn’t mean I had to be through letting him have it.
    Ava got back in Bart’s Pathfinder. Nick went around and climbed into the passenger seat. I punched the accelerator and enjoyed the sensation of my big tires throwing rocks ten feet into the air behind me. I hoped a few of them made contact with something shiny and black with four wheels.
    “Don’t get the wrong idea,” I said to Nick. “I’m just mad at him.”
    He didn’t answer, but he pulled his seatbelt across his body and snapped it into place. I turned the wheel hard to the left, barely slowing down for the turn out of the parking lot. I mashed the pedal to the floor and an enormous pressure I hadn’t known I’d borne lifted from me, floated in the air above my head, and then was gone.
    Wow. What was that?
    “Where are we going?” Nick asked. His body was angled toward me and his dark eyes bore into me.
    “Scared?” I asked him.
    “No, curious.”
    I put both hands on the wheel, ten and two, and drummed the fingers of my right hand. A tingling sensation had started somewhere deep inside me. Excitement. Something I hadn’t felt since the last time I’d been in Nick’s personal space. I knew I’d better hurry if I had a prayer of continuing this ass-chewing. I kept driving.
    We crested Mabry Hill, the highest point at the center of the island,