Page 12 of Live for Me

“You just do whatever you want whenever you feel like doing it. And you don’t care at all what it means to anyone else. It’s like you don’t even think about it beforehand. You just decide it’s going to go one way, and then you make it go that way while you’re guessing your way through it.”

In my mind, those were all good things.

The way that she’d said it somehow made every bit of it sound negative, though.

“Why’d you stop?” she asked, a solid minute after I’d stopped moving us in tiny circles.

“The music stopped, angel.”

She shifted her head away from my chest to look toward the speaker on the tailgate of the truck like she needed some kind of confirmation.

“I didn’t even—” she started to say, but paused to shake her head. “What was the name of that song?” She made a point to look right up at me then. And I got so fucking lost in the shimmer of her green eyes from the parking lot lights that no part of me registered what she’d asked.

The level of dumbass that she managed to render me was fucking insane.

Instead of attempting to respond, I took that opportunity to shift one hand to the side of her face to move her hair behind her shoulder so the wind would stop trying to use it to block her face from my view. I could cut eyeballs out to keep them from seeing her, but picking a fight with the wind for interfering with my view of her seemed like a stretch.

“Utah?” she asked, and then she giggled. It was something she seemed to do involuntarily when she felt her uncomfortable.

“Hm?”

“What song was that?” she asked and slowly nodded toward the speaker, treating me like a confused child because I was acting like a confused child.

But that question only made my throat try to close up while I swallowed hard.

I couldn’t begin to guess what she would do with that information. I had a plethora of thoughts about what a normal woman might do with a song title, but if I’d just committed some crime against her in her mind by making her dance with me in a parking lot, I had some serious concerns about what she might do to Jackson Dean’s music career. And I fucking liked his music.

“Fearless,” I answered. “It’s calledFearless.”

Memphis nodded her head before she looked down between our bodies. She seemed to realize, for the first time in the last few minutes, that we were still standing here pressed against one another with no real reason for doing so since we were no longer dancing.

She cleared her throat and took a slight step backward to put a hint of space between our bodies.

“We should probably go,” she said quietly.

I forced my arms to let go of her the rest of the way. I tried to breathe in as much air as I could handle at once while I put the speaker away and closed up the truck bed. While I thought she’d be buckled into the passenger seat by the time I made it back to my side, she was actually climbing around in the backseat to dig through her backpack.

“You alright?”

“Just looking for my headphones.”

“You can connect your phone to the truck,” I suggested instead. “New Jersey didn’t like myhillbillymusic either.”

“No,” she said quickly. “It’s not that. It’syourtruck. I don’t care what you listen to in it. I just — I wanted to —. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Memphis,” I said and smiled, while I simultaneously had to genuinely try to keep my voice level once I’d figured it out. “I can just play the song for you again, angel.”

She stopped to glare at me, like she was preparing to have to defend herself in case I was going to make fun of her.

I wasn’t about to do such a thing.

I wanted desperately to know if she hadn’t understood the lyrics, or if she’d been too focused on something else to pay attention to them. And everything in me was trying to explode at the same time with curiosity about why she cared so much to hide it from me. I seemed to make her uncomfortable enough just by existing, though, so I wasn’t going to push it.

“Come on,” I said and motioned for her to make her way back to the front. She looked like she was very much considering making herself comfortable and staying in the backseat to hide.

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