ove to see you after one week in the sun. We could go on a holiday, just you and me after you graduate."
"I… sure. That's a wonderful idea," I jabber, finding it very hard to wrap my mind around the fact that Mr. Spontaneity is making plans for something that will be happening three months from now.
Plans with me.
"How long will this ride last?"
"About an hour," he says.
"Wow. Celebrating our reunion on the highway. How original."
"How do you know we're on the highway?" he asks sharply. "Are you peeking?"
"It was just a guess, James. Chill out—"
A buzzing noise interrupts me and I clumsily try to open my tiny bag to reach my phone.
"Leave it, it's my phone."
He snorts after a few seconds. "Dani's checking whether I'm off with you. Well, she only misspelled two words, so I guess she's still sober." The concern behind his mocking tone is not lost on me.
"Don't worry. Parker will take good care of her."
"That's what I'm worried about. He won't. Dani is determined not to be a bookworm anymore when she arrives at Oxford, and apparently she needs six months of clubbing to achieve that. Parker refuses to interfere with her goal."
"Why should he?"
"I don't want her to waste her time at Oxford crawling from party to party," he exclaims.
"That's a bit hypocritical coming from someone who ravaged his entire trust fund in college."
"It actually only took me three years. I was already broke by the fourth year. But she's got no reason to be as reckless as I was. "
The words are past my lips before I fully realize what I'm saying. "Was Lara your reason?"
I whisk the blindfold off, but he doesn't notice. My eyes instantly seek his hands and I breathe. They are not clasping the wheel that weird way they were after the lark brought up boarding school. The speed indicator is far more to the right than it should be, but I know that's just his way of driving.
When he talks, he doesn't sound half as mad as I feared. "How do you know about her?"
"Umm… Parker sort of—"
He grunts.
"Don't get mad at him. It sort of slipped."
"What exactly slipped?" I catch the faintest hint of anger.
"That she… died at your high school graduation," I say in a small voice.
Neither of us speaks for a few seconds. I try to gauge something, anything from his expression, but it's completely unreadable as he looks forward.
"You'd think that would have been the worst day of my life." All signs of anger are gone from his voice. "But the days after it were much worse. The years, really."
I know what he means. At first there's the shock. The beautiful, marvelous, numbing shock that wipes away every thought.
And then the pain comes.
"I went into sort of a nightmare afterward and only woke up from it when the balance on my account hit zero."