Page 45 of Live for Me

“I have no use for a boombox that belonged to the dinosaurs.”

“I don’t mean the boombox, sasshole. Get out here.”

I didn’t bother with shoes. Or a door. My room was on the main floor. Utah laughed while I awkwardly climbed right out through the window.

“You know Indy hacked my phone for whatever this is?” I asked when I got closer to his truck.

“Yeah, I kind of made him do that. Couldn’t have you blowing the surprise.”

He turned the music off and sat the boombox on the tailgate so he could jump down to raise the cover of the truck bed. He dragged a giant tote from the middle of the bed toward us and positioned it on the tailgate in front of me. He stepped back and nodded toward it.

“If this is about to be a jump-scare kind of thing, I’m warning you now that I don’t really like pranks,” I said.

“Warningme?” he asked. “We‘ll have to revisit that later. I’d very much like to find out what it is you believe you could do to me about it if this were a prank.” He stepped around me, so his front was to my back, and he leaned down to my ear. “Open it, sugar.”

I swallowed hard before I raised the lid on the tote.

And then promptly slammed it closed when I saw several very familiar book covers that featured half-naked men.

“Textbooks,” he whispered in my other ear before he chuckled. “I think you might’ve studied some very different subjects than the ones they taught in Utah.”

It dawned on me that slamming it closed wouldn’t have done much good, seeing as he was the one who would’ve packed the books into the tote in the first place. Rather than opening it another time, my eyes shifted further into the truck bed to see four other totes. I spun to face him then and he was close enough that I was staring straight up at him.

“All my books,” I whispered, like a moron. It was obvious that was what he’d done. He didn’t need me to narrate it.

“Every last one,” he said while he sent me straight into cardiac arrest by taking my chin between his thumb and index finger. Rather than risk him kissing me, I turned around and put my palms flat on the tailgate, trying to figure out how to lift myself up into the damn thing. His hands went to my hips, and he lifted me right off the ground until I could raise my feet up to the tailgate instead. I looked in every single tote while he waited quietly.

For as happy as I was to see my books after spending all this time just believing I’d never get them back, the logical part of my brain started to work when I closed the last tote. I made my way back to the tailgate and sat next to where Utah was leaning against it.

“Utah—”

“You’re about to scold me,” he interrupted with a laugh.

“What if they were watching the hou?—”

“Okay,” he said and spun so he faced me to place his body between my legs. I watched his hands land on the tailgate on either side of my thighs and realized instantly that there was no escaping this position.

“You can still scold me,” he said. “But before you do, there’s something else I want you to see too. Indy’s probably making Kyle crazy by now making him set it up and we should probably go rescue him.”

“What if you were followed back he?—”

Utah covered my mouth with his hand and stood there and smiled.

“Nobody knew I was there. Nobody followed me here. Getting in and out with perfect accuracy is just what I do, angel.”

I was lucky his hand was still over my mouth to muffle whatever fucking noise tried to escape me over his last sentence.

But the way he smirked made me think he might’ve known what was happening in my head anyway. He pushed his forehead against mine and I was thankful again that his hand was still there to keep the distance between our mouths.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll get these carried in later. Let’s go save Kyle.”

He backed away from me and held his hand out so I could hold it while I scooted off the edge of the tailgate.

Then he kept his hold on my hand while I died slowly on the walk around the house and toward the detached garage.

“Utah.”

He let go of my hand when I walked around him at the back of the detached garage. Indy was barking orders at Kyle while he tried to run extension chords from the back of the garage to the small cart he was setting up several feet away. Between that cart and the giant back wall of the garage were four separate blankets laid across the grass, each one accompanied by a little cooler.

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