The Taking

“You wanna come?” Our words overlapped, and I stopped talking so I could process what he’d said, to make sure I’d heard him correctly. He stood there rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly and waiting for me to answer.

I lifted my shoulders. “I mean, sure. I guess. It’s not like I have a whole lot goin’ on around here.” I glanced behind me at a room that was sterile and practically begging me to make a break for it. When I turned back, I wrinkled my nose. “Do I have to change?”

He stood on his toes so he could check me out. I was wearing the jeans and one of the T-shirts my mom had gone ahead and paid for during our shopping trip from hell. “Nah. You look good in clothes that fit,” he told me, his eyes sparkling.

“What?” I gasped, feigning surprise. “Are you sure? Because I’m pretty sure I nailed it with my mom’s high-water yoga pants. Are you saying they’re not in style, because they totally were five years ago?”

His expression became a little too serious, making me catch my breath. “I’m pretty sure you could pull off just about any look you wanted to.”

“Good.” I laughed, hoping he couldn’t hear the shakiness in my voice. “’Cause I seriously don’t have anything else, and I really don’t want to put my softball uniform back on again, like ever.”

I checked the time again, and it was still just before six o’clock, same as it had been a couple of minutes ago. I lifted my foot to the window ledge and held out my hand to him. I thought about leaving a note or something for my mom to let her know where I’d be, but then I figured she had my number—because she was the only one, aside from Tyler, who did—and she could call if she was worried.

Tyler’s fingers closed around mine. Austin’s hands had always been dry, sometimes cracked even. He’d spent years applying special creams and moisturizers to protect against all the chlorine and sun damage, but they always had this rough quality about them, like fine-grit sandpaper. He’d spent half his life in the pool, the other half in every available lake, river, and stream. He was one of those people who probably wouldn’t have minded if he’d been born with webbed toes.

Tyler’s hands were soft. Not like a girl’s or anything, but not calloused like mine—which still made absolutely no sense since, according to everyone, I hadn’t picked up a bat in five years.

But now that I stopped to think about it, there were so many things about Tyler that were different from his brother, it was hard to imagine I’d ever mistaken the two of them in the first place. His hands, and his eyes, which were green but were mossier colored than Austin’s. And the dimple that appeared once more when I bumped against him as I hopped down, making him look somewhere between gorgeous and stunning.

I blinked hard, trying to snap some sense into myself. Where the holy hell did that come from? I balked at the idea of Tyler as anything but Austin’s younger brother, because no matter what, that’s what he was—Austin’s brother—and I struck a silent deal with myself to never, ever think about him as anything other than a friend, because that is all he could ever be.

CHAPTER FIVE

“OKAAAY, I GIVE UP. WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE?” I asked, surveying the less-than-savory alley where Tyler had parked. “Shouldn’t we be someplace a little less . . .” I raised my eyebrows. “Stabby?”

Tyler shoved open his car door in a way that made it clear his car door was the kind that needed a good shove in order to open. “Relax,” he assured me. “It’s perfectly safe.”

He smiled, and that made me feel a little happier, if not at all safer, as he got out and came around to my side, opening my door and waiting for me. No one had ever opened my car door like that, not even Austin.

I blushed and ducked my head as I eased past him, trying not to notice how tall he was or the way he smelled, which wasn’t at all like back-alley garbage. He locked the car and went to a door that was dented and painted black. He didn’t knock or anything but let himself inside. He held the door long enough for me to realize I was supposed to follow, so I trailed after him and found myself in a storage room of some sort crowded with metal shelves and stacks of cardboard boxes and plastic crates that filled every possible space. There seemed to be no order to the chaos. Mostly, it looked like books and catalogs, but there were also stacks of rolled posters and piles of photographs, and magazines and comic books.

Tyler didn’t stop, though. He slipped right past the hoarder’s haven not giving it a second glance, leading me without a single word into an even more cluttered bookstore beyond.

This wasn’t one of those chain bookstores, though, the ones where everything is perfectly aligned and tidy, and where there were tables strategically positioned to highlight this week’s hottest sellers. There was no soft jazz playing in the background or a café with easy chairs so patrons could kick back with a pastry and hang out to browse their selections. This was more like a thrift store for books, which made sense, I supposed, when I spied the bold neon sign on the other side of the plate glass window that read used books.

It had that smell too. That musty, old-book smell. The smell you notice when you got your assigned reading in English class. The smell that wafted up from the pages of a book that’s been passed down year after year, the one with the dog-eared pages and highlighted passages, and rips and a tattered cover. And if you were really, really lucky, some kid with nothing better to do, because he for sure wasn’t going to read the book, drew pictures of ladies’ boobs at the front of each chapter.