Praying for Rain (Praying for Rain Trilogy, #1)(22)

I chuckle and shake my head.

“What?”

“You just sounded so country.”

Rain scoffs. “If you think I sound country, then you haven’t heard—”

“No, it’s not your accent,” I cut her off. “It’s just the way everybody down here tells you the distance in minutes instead of miles and uses landmarks instead of street names.”

“Oh my God.” Rain’s mouth falls open. “We do do that!”

I smile even though my bullet wound is starting to scream from pushing my bike up this never-ending hill.

She tilts her head to one side, watching me. “You said everybody down here. Where were you before you came back? Somewhere up north?”

“You could say that.” I smirk, giving her a half-second of eye contact before resuming my death glare at the littered pavement. “I lived in South Carolina for a while, but before that, I was in Rome.”

“Oh, I think I’ve been to Rome. That’s close to Alabama, right?”

I snort. “Not Rome, Georgia. Rome, Italy.”

“No way!”

Rain reaches over and smacks me on the arm, narrowly missing my bullet wound. I wince and suck in a breath, but she doesn’t even notice.

“Oh my God, that’s amazing, Wes! What were you doing in Italy?”

“Being a colossal piece of Eurotrash mostly.”

Rain leans forward, devouring my words one by one like kernels of popcorn. So, I just keep spewing them.

“After I left Franklin Springs, I never stayed anywhere longer than a year—a few months usually—and then I’d get bounced to the next piece-of-shit house in the next piece-of-shit town. As soon as I aged out of the system, I knew I wanted to get as far away from here as fucking possible. I was sick of small towns. Sick of school. Sick of having no fucking control over where I went or how long I stayed. So, on my eighteenth birthday, I checked all the airline sales, found a last-minute deal to Rome, and the next morning, I woke up in Europe.”

“The system?” Rain’s dark eyebrows bunch together. “Like foster care?”

“Uh, yeah. Anyway”—I kick myself for letting that slip. It’s not that I’m embarrassed about it. I just don’t particularly want to talk about the worst nine years of my life right now. Or ever—“Rome is fucking incredible. It’s ancient and modern, busy and lazy, beautiful and tragic, all at the same time. I had no idea what I was gonna do once I got there, but as soon as I stepped off the plane, I knew I was gonna be all right.”

“How?” Rain is so engrossed in my story that she steps on a muffler lying in the street and almost busts her ass.

I try not to laugh. “Almost everybody was speaking English. There were signs in English, menus in English, the street musicians were even playing pop songs in English. So … I cashed in my dollars for euros, bought a spare guitar off one of the street performers, and spent the next few years strumming classic rock songs in front of the Pantheon for tips.”

I glance over, and Rain is staring at me like I’m the fucking Pantheon. Eyes huge, lips parted. I have to reach out and pull her toward the bike so that she doesn’t hit her head on the tire of the flipped Honda minivan we’re walking next to.

“Did you have to sleep on the street?” she asks, unblinking.

“Nah, I always found somebody to crash with.”

That makes her blink. “Somebody, huh? You mean, some girl.” When I don’t correct her, she rolls her eyes so hard, I half-expect them to fall out of their sockets. “Did you point guns at their heads and make them pay for your groceries, too?”

I raise an eyebrow at her and smirk. “Only the ones who talked back.”

Rain scrunches up her nose like she wants to stick her tongue out at me. “So, why’d you leave if you had it so good with your classic rock and your Italian women?” she sasses.

My smile fades. “It was after the nightmares started. Hey, watch out.”

I point to a shard of glass sticking up at a weird angle in Rain’s path. She glances at it just long enough to avoid it and then returns her rapt attention to me.

“Tourism totally dried up. I couldn’t make shit playing on the street anymore, and I couldn’t get a real job without a visa. I didn’t really have a choice, as usual. My roommate was an American whose parents offered to pay for our plane tickets back to the States, so … that’s how I ended up in South Carolina.”

“Did you love her?”

Rain’s question catches me completely by surprise.

“Who?”

“Your ‘roommate.’” Her big eyes narrow to slits as she makes sarcastic finger quotes around the word roommate.

I hate how much I like it.

“No,” I say honestly. “Did you love him?”

“Who?”

I drop my eyes to the yellow letters emblazoned across her perky tits. “The guy you stole that hoodie from.”

Rain’s eyes drop to her sweatshirt, and she stops dead in her tracks.

I guess that’s a yes.

Crossing her arms over the band logo, Rain lifts her head and stares at something off in the distance behind me. It reminds me of the way she looked when she was watching that family at the park yesterday.

Right before she flipped the fuck out.