One Snowy Night (Heartbreaker Bay #2.5)(11)

So of course she’d taken the only guy Rory had ever wanted.

Max.

Cindy had been one of those sweet on the outside, toxic on the inside -people who were so scary to Rory. It’d been Cindy who in their junior year had lied to their teacher and gotten Rory suspended for cheating when it had been Cindy who’d cheated. Then she’d stolen Rory’s clothes from her locker during PE class and had sneakily taken a pic of Rory in her underwear. Cindy had texted it to everyone in school—-from Rory’s own phone. Just remembering it had her cheeks heating. Her mom and stepdad had been furious at her for all of it, the supposed cheating and the picture. Rory had been devastated and needing sympathy on that in a very bad way, but instead they’d grounded her because they’d actually believed she’d sent that pic herself.

When someone had begun letting themselves into the coach’s office to have sex, Cindy started a rumor that it was Rory, all to deflect blame from herself. After all, it wouldn’t look good for the sweet, wonderful, lovable coach’s daughter to be caught doing it in daddy’s office.

Facing expulsion only a week before finals, Rory had finally resorted to taping Cindy leaving her dad’s office with a guy in hand. The guy had been in shadow, but there’d been no doubt, at least to her, that it’d been Max.

Yeah, her bad, but she’d had to prove herself innocent. And besides, no one else had seemed to know it was him so she had no idea why he was so pissed. She would ask him but the truth was that she was embarrassed. Deeply embarrassed. She wasn’t proud of what she’d done. In her mind, the minute she’d turned the tape into the school proving she hadn’t been the one breaking into the coach’s office, she’d gone from being The Bullied to The Bullier, and she’d hated herself for that.

So much so that she’d left town.

She’d been planning on leaving for a long time anyway. With her mom remarried and having three new kids, it’d been one less mouth to feed, so she’d taken a bus to San Francisco.

Relatively speaking, she’d been one of the lucky runaways. After an admittedly very rough start, she’d taken a part--time job at South Bark, where Willa had tucked her under her wing, teaching her the business and making her take her GED, and in the process had given her back a life that could so easily have gone wrong.

In any case, she was no longer that same Rory she’d once been. When Max had started working in the same building as her last year, she’d been so nervous he’d want to talk about that time in their lives, the time she’d been so very miserable and unhappy.

She had been so relieved when he hadn’t seemed to want to talk at all.

But now she realized they should have. Because he was over there on his side of the truck emitting animosity in waves and insinuating that she’d cost him something big.

Not that he appeared at all interested in enlightening her on what.

Fine. She could read between the lines somewhat and she’d get to the bottom of this in her usual way—-on her own. For now, he’d turned off the engine to preserve gas, and now it was cold and quickly getting colder. She pulled a blanket from her bag.

He snorted but when she looked at him, he was staring out the windshield, jaw tight, eyes hard, one hand draped over the wheel, the other fisted on a thigh. She figured he was made of stone but she lifted up one end of her blanket in offer. “Cold?” she asked.

“No.”

Sensing the thick tension, Carl whined softly.

Rory reached out to test--touch Max’s hand.

Cold.

“Seriously?” she asked him and spread half the blanket over his legs.

He didn’t help her but when she was finished, she found him staring at her like she was a puzzle and he was missing half the pieces.

But she was the one who didn’t understand. And she was done not knowing. “So,” she said tentatively. “You didn’t take your scholarship?”

He closed his eyes for a beat and shook his head. “Why do you keep saying things like that when you know damn well what happened?”

Okay so no, he hadn’t taken the scholarship, and she got a feeling in the pit of her stomach that she’d been the direct cause.

Carl whined again.

“Forget it,” Max told him. “I’m not letting you out again.”

“Max,” she said. “I—-”

“Finally.” He pointed ahead, where the blockades were being removed.

Max cranked over the engine and rolled his window down when a CHP officer came close.

“Don’t know how long we’ll have the roads open,” the guy told them. “It’s looking grim.”

“Thanks,” Max said. “We’ll be careful.”

And he was. So careful it felt like they were going backward. Rory looked at her phone.

No reception, which meant she couldn’t call her stepdad and warn him she’d be late. It was still snowing, it was tense, there was no one else on the road . . . All that, along with the rhythmic slashing of the windshield wipers and the soft blast of the heater left her feeling exhausted. She closed her eyes.

And then jerked upright when the truck slowed and then came to a stop off the side of the road.

She wasn’t sure how much time had passed. The snow had been steadily gathering, over a foot now, she saw with some alarm. They’d pulled up behind a small SUV that was leaning awkwardly due to a blown tire.