Page 62 of Live for Me

Utah let go of my face, put both his hands under my arms, and lifted me right up into the truck after that. He was apparently already completely aware that I wouldn’t have any control at all over my own body in that moment.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

utah

Memphis was quiet for almost the entire drive back to New Jersey’s farmhouse.

Part of me wondered if she wanted me to ask why she was pissed directly at me, and the other part of me was still pissed at her for being entirely unable to follow simple instructions. She even put up a fight when I made her sit still long enough to check the back of her head to make sure she wasn’t bleeding.

I couldn’t tell if she was mad that I’d barked orders at her like she was mine to boss around, or if she was mad because I’d turned her on and called her out on it before proceeding to do nothing at all about it.

She waited until I had the truck parked in front of the house before she decided to speak.

“If you still want to cross something else off that list with me, let’s go to a bar.”

I couldn’t have come up with a response to that if she’d even gone the extra step to tell me exactly what I was supposed to say to her. She was squirming again after I spent an entire minute just staring at her.

“I could use a break from all this,” she said quietly and looked down into her lap.

I felt like I’d missed an entire conversation somewhere in the last three hours that we’d spent in this truck.

“Sure,” was all I could get to come out of my mouth. “Tonight?”

She managed to turn a whole shade lighter somehow when all the blood drained from her face.

“Tomorrow?”

“Anything you want, angel.”

She was out of that truck as quickly as she could move and left me sitting there staring at her empty seat for a solid ten minutes longer in my state of confusion.

When I did finally make it inside, she hadn’t stopped to set up camp at the kitchen island. She wasn’t sitting in her spot on the couch next to Indy.

“You guys good?” he asked when I’d apparently stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room for too long.

“Where’d she go?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I assumed her room. She walked right on through. Didn’t say anything.”

“She asked me to take her to a bar,” I said and laughed when I dropped down on my end of the couch.

He put the TV remote down and turned to face me completely with his legs criss-crossed. He laced his fingers together and sat his chin down on top of them.

“Please tell meeverything,” he said with the most pleasant smile he possessed.

“Tomorrow,” I said, laying my head all the way back to stare at the ceiling. “She asked me to take her to a bartomorrow, Indy. There’s nothing to tell yet.”

“So, she just asked you out of the blue? Andsheasked for a bar?”

“Almost three hours of total silence and she ended that by asking to go to a bar. She’s never been to one.”

He was quiet for a second. Understandably so. Memphis really didn’t seem like the bar-going kind now that I’d spent time around her.

“What was Nevada like?” Indy asked.

“No fun at all. You heard how it went.”

He tried again. “I meant what’d she look like?”

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