Wild Like Us (Like Us 8)

Akara eyes the road as a paparazzi vehicle hugs too close to us.

I buckle my seatbelt and pick up my tablet again.

“Take the next right and circle around,” Akara tells Banks. “We’ll lose the last one and then you can jump onto the freeway.”

“Right on.” Banks swerves to catch the next turn.

I tune out their security talk.

“Shit, it’s blowing heat again,” Akara says after a minute or two, but he doesn’t fiddle with the vents. We’re all just sitting in an uncomfortable swelter, which is not all my Booger Baby’s fault.

I break the quiet. “We’re still headed to REI?”

“Yep,” Banks says.

“Alright, good.” I try to focus on the checklist, but I can feel their eyes ping to me every so often. My neck is burning. My face is burning.

My whole fucking body is burning.

Concentrate, Sulli.

Right, we have to pick up more supplies before hitting the official road to Montana. I have most of the climbing gear—stuff I picked up from my parents’ house last week—but I didn’t want to grab the camping equipment. My mom would ask questions, and I’d spill every last detail. Hell, I still want to spill even without her asking.

“Fuck this heat,” Akara complains as he pushes his hair back with two hands and then reaches for the vents again. I think he’s being kind by not saying Fuck this Jeep.

I barely glance up. “I can take her into a shop once we’re in Montana.”

“I’ll just take a look at her,” Banks says to me, and he catches my eyes in the rearview. “My ma’s a mechanic. Spent my teens working in the shop with her.”

I knew he had the skills, but didn’t know how he got them.

“That’s cool that you did that with your mom.”

The corner of his mouth lifts. “Yeah, I didn’t see it like that until I got older. Back then, I didn’t have a choice, really. Needed the money, and I didn’t want to work as a busboy like my brother.”

His brother is going to marry my cousin.

The fact rolls up to me now and again. Sometimes I wonder if it’d complicate anything between me and Banks. So far it hasn’t, but I guess we’re not much of anything anyway.

“Weren’t you a lifeguard?” Banks asks me.

“When I was fourteen,” I say. “It was at a local community pool, but kids kept fake-drowning so I’d save them.”

“Can’t blame them,” Banks says.

“Why? You’d want to be saved by the famous Sullivan Minnie Meadows too?”

“Not ‘cause you’re famous, mermaid.”

Is he…is he flirting? My pulse skips. No way. My brows pinch, and Akara shifts uncomfortably in his seat. He switches a knob on the air conditioning.

No luck.

Akara glances back. “Maybe those kids were trying to see if you’d grow fins and a tail.” He tosses the dirty sock that I threw at him right back at me.

“Jokes on them because I quit after a week.” I chuck it back again. “And I thought you didn’t believe in mermaids.”

“I don’t.” He has trouble facing forward, away from me.

I’m about to speak when a text pings my phone.

Morning, my peanut butter cupcake. Hope you have a wonderful day! Guess what? That new donut shop you’d been talking about is opening up down the street from Superheroes & Scones tomorrow. We should go next time you’re free. Love you to the moon and back xoxo – Mom

My stomach sinks into the fucking Earth.

“Sul?” Akara’s concern leaks from his voice.

“It’s just my mom.”

“Everything alright?” Banks asks.

I swallow hard and toss my cell between my hands. “Yeah, it’s all normal. Which, I guess is the problem. I just…” I exhale into a deeper frown. “I don’t like keeping this from my parents. It feels wrong.” I hug my legs to my chest.

Banks wipes sweat off his brow. “If it’s eating at you, just call them.”

“Exactly,” Akara chimes in, wafting his shirt which looks damp.

“What if my dad shows up and demands you return me?”

Banks nearly smiles.

Akara shakes his head. “We didn’t kidnap you, Sulli. We’re not going to listen to him.”

My brows raise. “You wouldn’t listen to Ryke Meadows?”

Akara rotates more fully to face me. Confidence eking from every small movement. His eyes lock onto mine. “I won’t listen to Ryke Meadows.”

More heat bathes me. As does skepticism. “You remember Red Rocks when I wanted to go off on the long trail by myself. Without you, even. And my dad said, not that day because I’d already done a hard morning swim. You agreed with him.”

He barely blinks. “You were seventeen.”

“So?”

“You’re twenty-one now.” He tilts his head, hair falling over his forehead. “An adult.”

I’ve always wanted to hear him say those words.

You’re an adult now.

My parents had an epic, soul-mate kind of love that started out as a beautiful friendship, and my mom met my dad when she was fifteen. He was twenty-one. And he never even let himself love her in that way until months after her eighteenth birthday.