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, and it was the first really obvious difference I noticed between him and his brother. 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.
That was how I’d forever remember Of Mice and Men—as amateur pencil porn.
The guy behind the counter was wearing a checkered shirt and black, horn-rimmed glasses, and was hunched forward on his elbow as he worked on a crossword puzzle from the newspaper. He lifted his eyes disinterestedly as we approached—a halfhearted attempt at customer service—but when he caught sight of Tyler, he dropped his pencil and hopped up from his stool.
“Hey! I was waitin’ for ya.” His grin spread wide and made his scruffy, unshaved face look more welcoming than his what-the-hell-do-you-want glance had. It was clear that when he chose to, like now, he had an infectious quality about him, as his eyes crinkled with enthusiasm.
“Okay . . .” The guy went behind the desk excitedly and reached beneath the counter. “This came in, and I immediately thought of you.”
Tyler took a step closer, and I tried to see around him. Whatever it was—and from where I stood it looked like a magazine, a really old magazine—it had Tyler’s full attention now.
Tyler leaned forward, pursing his lips. “Can you take it out?” Tyler asked, his voice low and filled with what was unmistakably awe.
“Dude, of course I can take it out. But trust me, I’ve already checked it from cover to cover. It’s practically mint. It’s exactly what you’ve been looking for.” The clerk slipped it from the plastic sleeve that protected it, and Tyler’s eyes went wide as his fingers cautiously, gingerly, reached down.
When he brushed the cover, I saw him suck in his breath and hold it.
This thing was seriously important to him.
All I could see was faded print and creased pages, and a chunk missing from the bottom-right edge of the cover.
There was clearly a discrepancy in our interpretations of “practically mint.”
But after inspecting it, neither of them even haggled over the price; Tyler just laid down several bills, way more than I thought anyone should ever pay for a relic like that.
Tyler put his prize back in its plastic covering, and the guy behind the counter double-bagged it for him, making it more than obvious that you should never be too careful when it comes to protecting your secondhand junk.
I cleared my throat, and Tyler glanced my way self-consciously, as if he’d only just remembered I’d been standing there the whole time. “Oh yeah. Hey. This is Kyra,” he told the clerk, who had also suddenly noticed me now that their transaction was coming to a close. At first he gave me a quick once-over, like he wasn’t all that interested. And then he did a double take, and his gray eyes scoured me with laser intensity. I squirmed beneath his examination.
The guy frowned then. “I know you,” he told me as if it were irrefutable. “From somewhere . . .” I could see the cogs in his head turning as he tried to nail it down. “Did you go to Emerson?”
Did? he’d asked, and I shook my head, studying him right back and wondering if I’d ever seen him at the rival high school. “No. I went to Burlington.”
He nodded as if that made sense, but he was still scowling, still trying to decipher where he knew me from. I was sure he didn’t look familiar to me, so I couldn’t help him out. I was almost positive we’d never crossed paths before.