Something in the Way (Something in the Way #1)(45)

“Where?”

“Wherever there’s a place for me.”

My face flushed, my blood suddenly rushing. The idea of him leaving made my heart thump painfully hard. I was stuck in every sense of the word. I had two years left of high school. After that, I’d be in Los Angeles for at least four years for college. What if he didn’t want to go back to L.A.? I couldn’t even get in a car and drive anywhere until I got my license. Manning could leave at any moment without even telling me. No warning, no way for me to follow him.

I gripped the edge of his seat cushion in a fist, as if that’d keep him here. “You’d move?”

He must’ve heard the panic in my voice, because he studied me. His expression smoothed. “Only if I had to. I like Orange County, and I don’t plan to leave. But I have to go where the work is.”

“Will you tell me if you do?” I asked.

He wrinkled his nose. “Of course.”

“Can I have your phone number just in case?”

He laughed a little and rested his head against the back of the seat. “You make me smile, Lake. Nobody else does. How could I walk away from you?” His joy, if you could call it that, eased as he stared up at the ceiling. He kept his voice down. “I’ll promise you something better. Wherever I go, I won’t abandon you.”

“What does that mean? I can come with you?”

“It just means we’ll always be friends. As long as you want that.”

I held onto his seat even more tightly. I believed him, because it was the same for me. If I had to be away from him a few years, if I had to make long distance phone calls or write letters—no cost would be too high to keep him in my life. And maybe down the line, that would pay off. One day, he’d look at me and see a beautiful, sexy woman instead of the awkward, inexperienced teen I was now.

“Where would you go?” I asked.

“I honestly don’t know.”

“Home?”

He shook his head, still looking up. “I don’t have a home.”

I refrained from transferring my death grip from the cushion to his hand. I could give him whatever it was he was missing. I knew I could. “How is that possible?” I asked softly.

“Some people just don’t. It’s not always a bad thing.”

“Tell me about your family.”

“No.”

“What about your sister? Is she with your parents?”

With his head back, his throat was exposed, so I could see and hear him swallow. “No. I don’t talk about my family.”

“Even with me? I won’t tell anyone.”

“It has nothing to do with you. I just don’t.”

I knew I shouldn’t take it personally, but I did. Nobody made him smile like me—wasn’t that worth something? Didn’t he trust me? Feel close to me? I’d trusted him from the moment he’d held my bracelet in his palm and asked me to come get it. All this time, I’d thought he was asking me to read between the lines, to hear the things he couldn’t say.

“We’re friends, aren’t we?” I asked.

“I already told you we were. I just said we’d always be.”

“You don’t know that. Are you embarrassed to have a friend my age?”

“No,” he said flatly. He looked about to add something and thought better of it. He spoke slowly, as if choosing his words carefully. “You’re not that much younger than your sister.”

“But we’re different.”

“I know.” He blinked. “How do you think you two are different?”

“She’s pretty.”

He shut his eyes and inhaled a deep breath. “She is.”

It wasn’t the reassurance I wanted. Maybe he thought I was fishing for a compliment, and I was, so why couldn’t he just tell me I was pretty, too? Was that so bad? I wouldn’t read anything into it. I was ninety-nine percent sure about that.

“Someday,” Manning said, almost to himself, “when you’re older and wiser, looking back on this, you’ll understand.”

“When?”

“I can’t tell you that, because I’m not even sure I understand.”

That wasn’t fair. Maybe he didn’t know exactly what he felt about me, but he had some idea, and he expected me not to wonder about it. I would wonder and think hard about it now—not ‘someday’ when it might be too late. When he was already gone. I wasn’t convinced Manning wanted Tiffany, or even that she wanted him. So what was the link between them? When one didn’t want the other, what had kept them together the past month?

“I said someday,” Manning said, breaking the silence. “Not now.”

“I can’t wait that long.”

He grinned at me. “There’s no hidden prize or anything. Just understanding that comes with time and age.” He looked at my bare legs and quickly away again, as if it were a habit he was trying to break. “You know our conversations—they stay between us. Right? You know that?”

I nodded. Our time together was precious and not to be shared. “I know.”

“All right. Let’s talk about something interesting.” He sat up again and scratched his chin, thinking. “If you won a contest on the radio to go anywhere in the world and you had to leave tomorrow night, where would you go?”