Rush (20 page)

“It is to me.”

“That’s because you’re so sweet. But it
won’t hurt me to sleep on the floor once and I don’t want you staying alone if
you’re going to be scared.”

The achy butterflies were back. I wasn’t
sure how he could call me sweet when he was the one making all the sacrifices.
And sleeping in his bed...it sounded so intimate, even if he wouldn’t be there
at the time.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Come on. Do it for me. Otherwise, I’ll
be up all night worrying about you.”

I gave him a skeptical glance. “You
will?”

“All night long.”

I closed my eyes with a sigh. This was
going to change things between us, not to mention between me and Trent. There
was more at stake here than the way my relationship with Max would develop.

But I didn’t have to let it change
anything, right? We could hold on to our friendship, and Trent would never have
to know I’d spent a night at Max’s place. We’d go on the way we’d been before.
It was just this one time, after all.

“Okay,” I said. “But just this once.”

“Right. Just this once.”

I gathered a few things and threw them
in my backpack. We left by the back door and I didn’t see anyone on the stairs
or in the quad when we got outside.

***

It took Max and me about twenty minutes
to walk to his place. He lived close to downtown, in an old house that had one
of those high, curved roofs like the ones you see on traditional American
barns. The house was painted yellow, not red, though, so it didn’t actually
look like a barn. It was cute, but there was something spooky about it too.

“Your house gives me a weird feeling,” I
said as we walked up the concrete walkway to the front door.

“It’s in the same style as the
Amityville Horror house,” he said, opening the door.

“Oh. Yeah, you’re right.”

“It isn’t haunted, though. Except by
Fred, but he’s only here because of me.”

I swallowed. “Am I going to meet Fred?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t usually show
himself to visitors, but with you he might make an exception.”

The foyer of the house seemed incredibly
small, considering the size of the building. But I guess it had been carved up
into apartments, so whoever had adapted it had probably carved up the original
foyer too.

We climbed a narrow staircase to a small
landing on the second floor. Max opened the flat, apartment-style door and let
me into his living room.

It was a long, mostly empty space with
bare wooden floorboards, a metal filing cabinet, old wooden desk, and one
chair. On the desk was the biggest computer monitor I’d ever seen.

“That’s a huge monitor,” I said.

“It helps me when I’m designing. I like
to be able to see what I’m doing.”

Oh, right. That made sense.

Max slipped off his jacket and hung it
on a nail in the wall next to the door. “You can put your coat on the back of
the chair.”

I followed directions. It was an office
desk chair. Did he have any normal, home-type furniture at all? The place wasn’t
very cozy.

“Want a beer?” he said.

“Sure.”

I trailed after him as he went into the
kitchen. It was a pretty good size for an apartment, and it looked like it had
been built in the fifties and never updated. There was a red laminate counter
with a metal edging, like the kind you see on mid-century diner-style tables.
There was a wooden drop-leaf table shoved under a window on the near side of
the room.

Max opened the fridge and pulled out a
couple of beer bottles, handing one to me.

“Do you have a bottle opener?”

He reached into a drawer. “Here you go.”

“I shouldn’t be here,” I said as he
handed me the bottle opener.

He gave me a wary look. “Why not?”

“Because of Trent. I feel like I’m
cheating on him.”

“We’re not doing anything like that. We’re
just talking. Hanging out.”

“Yeah. I guess.” I opened my beer and
gave the opener back to him. “Why does he hate you so much, anyway?”

Max opened his own beer and took a swig.
Was he trying to avoid my question? He kept the bottle in his hand, staring
down at the brown glass, his brows crimped together.

“He always hated me, from the day we
met. I think he resented my dad, too. He didn’t like the fact his mom was
remarrying.”

“That’s too bad. Are his folks divorced?”

“Yeah. And his dad almost never sees
him. My dad is more of a father to him.”

“And he still hates you even though he’s
so close to your dad?”

“Obviously.”

I tasted my beer. It was good. Not what
I was used to, because I usually drank the cheap, mass-produced stuff. This was
better.

“I think that’s incredibly unfair.”

He shrugged. “People can’t help how they
feel, I guess.”

“He doesn’t have to be so mean to you.”

His lips curled up. “Taking my side,
Caroline?”

Someone had to. Although I was still a
little skeevy about the whole murder thing...but it had happened when Max was
only ten and nothing he’d done since I’d met him had given me the impression he’d
ever enjoy hurting another person.

“I hate it when people are cruel to
others, especially to my friends,” I said.

“Am I your friend?”

“I hope so.”

His smile turned a bit bashful. “I’ll be
as much of a friend to you as you’ll let me.”

Wow. I wasn’t sure how to take that.

“I still don’t get why Trent hates you
and not your dad,” I said. “Your dad is the one who married your mom. Not you.”

“I was an easy target. Small for my age.
Trent got a kick out of picking on me.” He said it matter-of-factly, like it
wasn’t a big deal.

“Right now I don’t like him very much.”

Max leaned back against his kitchen
counter. “I don’t want to get between the two of you.”

“You’re not.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” I lifted my shoulders. “You
know, sometimes lately I’ve been wondering where I belong, though. The people I
usually spend time with...they don’t understand about the ghost thing. They
either laugh at me or tell me I’m being stupid. And those are the ones I’ve
been dumb enough to talk to. Most of my friends I wouldn’t even try to say
anything about it because I know how they’d react.”

He listened with sympathetic eyes. “Yeah,
I know what you mean.”

“But you have friends who understand.
You have your circle. Isn’t that a group of people who do magic together?”

“Yes. Where did you hear that?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe I read it
somewhere.”

“I do have my circle,” he said. “But
most people don’t understand and I’m careful how I talk about it in public. I
made the mistake of telling some people about Fred when I was young, and the
fallout was ugly.”

I nodded. A feeling of weight and
tension in my shoulders that I hadn’t even been aware of fell away, and I
seemed to breathe more easily. It felt good simply to share this stuff, to talk
about it to someone who didn’t think I was either crazy or an idiot.

“Does Trent know about Fred?” I said
with a glance at Max.

“No. At least, I’ve never told him.” He
grimaced. “I don’t know what might have been said behind my back, but I think
if he knew, he would have thrown it in my face.”

“Probably.” I was beginning to realize
my boyfriend was not only
not
the great guy I’d first thought but was
actually kind of an asshole. “I’m starting to wonder what I ever saw in him.”

“I really don’t want to talk about
Trent,” Max said.

Well. That was understandable, I guess.
But what else could we talk about besides Trent or ghosts?

“Why don’t you show me some of your
designs,” I said.

We went back into the living room and
Max pulled up some of his work so I could see it on his monitor. I didn’t know
much about design, but his stuff looked really professional to me.

“I’m not much of a judge,” I said, “but
I think your work is really good.”

“Thanks.”

Was he blushing? That was awfully cute.

“I’m starting to fall behind because of
school, though,” he said. “My work load was really picking up before I enrolled
and I can’t keep up with it.”

The beer was making me all warm and
floaty and a lot less shy. The ghosts didn’t seem quite so scary at the moment.
I tilted my head, looking at him, wondering.

“What?” he said, smiling.

“Can we try talking to Retro-girl here?”

“We could, but it would probably be
easier if we try making contact where she likes to appear.” His fingers plucked
at the fabric of his jeans. “Of course, if I got through to Carter then maybe
she wouldn’t need to bother you anymore.”

“So are you going to do that? Talk to
Carter, I mean.”

His gaze dropped. He had the most
beautiful eyelashes, so thick and long that I wanted to pet them.

“I don’t know what I’d say to him.” His
voice sounded raspy all of a sudden. “I killed him. What can I say now?”

“I don’t know.” If I hadn’t had a beer,
I would have kept my hands to myself, but I was buzzed and my good judgment was
shot. I reached out and laid my hand on his arm. “I’ll be with you, if you’d
like.”

He shot me a glance and then looked down
again. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to be there for you, after what
you did for me.”

“I didn’t do anything anyone else wouldn’t
have done.”

“Max, that’s not true and you know it.
Some guys would have just joined in the fun and a lot of people would have
pretended they didn’t see anything.”

He just kept looking at the floor.

I squeezed his arm. “You’re a good
person.”

Max snorted. “No, I’m really not,
Caroline.”

“Why would you say that?”

He finally lifted his gaze to mine. “You
really have to ask?”

“It was an accident. Wasn’t it? If it
wasn’t, if you did it on purpose, then tell me. Tell me you meant to shoot him.”

He pinched his eyes closed. His nostrils
flared and his jaw clenched, released, clenched again as his mouth briefly
contorted. He opened his eyes and looked straight at me. “It was an accident.”

The expression in those dark-blue eyes
was so empty that it hurt me to look at them. But I couldn’t look away. I had a
hunch that he needed me to look at him, to hold his gaze.

“You were just a kid yourself,” I said.

He passed his hand over his eyes. “I don’t
want to talk about this right now.”

I was pressing him too hard. We barely
knew each other, and here I was trying to get him to open up. Lecturing him on
how it wasn’t his fault. It just hurt me to see his pain.

When I’d been with Trent, it had been
easy to judge Max, to think of him as someone who could kill for fun. I hadn’t
known him at all then. Now, everything was different.

It must be because he’d stood up for me
against those guys. I’d been terrified and he’d protected me. That had changed
the way I saw him. But it was too soon to expect him to bare his soul to me.

I smiled. “Okay. No Trent, no Carter.
Got it.”

So else what could we talk about? The
weather? Maybe our respective majors. That was usually a safe subject. Boring,
though.

“So,” Max said. “What do you like to do
in your spare time?”

“Read,” I answered with a sense of
relief. He’d found what ought to be a safe subject.

“You’re a bookworm, huh?”

I frowned at the surprise in his voice. “Did
you think I couldn’t?”

He grinned. “No, I didn’t think you were
illiterate. It’s just most of the sorority girls I’ve met didn’t seem
especially—um—intellectual.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m not sure my
reading material counts as intellectual. I mostly read genre fiction.”

“Which genres?”

“Fantasy, romance, sometimes mysteries.”

He sank to the wooden floor. “I read a
lot, too.”

“Where are your books?” I followed him
down to the floor and arranged myself cross-legged. It was a bit drafty down
there, but I wanted to be near him.

“I don’t have many,” he said. “Mostly I
go to libraries. I haven’t had a place to keep books for the last few years.”

“But I thought you lived with Brad and
Marie.”

He shrugged. “I did. But I didn’t want
to clutter up their place with a lot of my shit.”

That was sad. His real family hadn’t
wanted him, and when he did find a place, he was afraid to impose on them by
actually collecting any physical possessions. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t
like it if I vocalized that thought, however.