The Color of Heaven (The Color of Heaven Series Book 1) by Julianne MacLean

Author:Julianne MacLean [MacLean, Julianne]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2014-01-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-four

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Just drive.”

Without a word, we continued west along Central Street. Every so often, Matt angled a glance at me. I met his eyes in the dark car and felt as if we were fugitives fleeing a crime, with no clue where we were going.

I tapped my heel repeatedly on the floor of the car—tap, tap, tap—and clutched my handbag on my lap. I twisted it, wrung it, squeezed it.

“What are we doing, Cora?” he demanded at last, when we seemed only to be following the white headlight beams into the darkness.

“I don’t know.” We had no particular destination, and it felt wrong. “Maybe you should just pull over.”

He turned onto the shoulder of the road, where the tires crunched over the gravel, then he switched off the engine and lights.

The world—and all the raging thoughts crashing around inside my brain—suddenly grew quiet. Matt rolled down his window and rested his arm on the door. The cool night air drifted in, and I took a deep, cleansing breath. Crickets and frogs chirped in the wet ditch. Moonlight streamed in through the front window. We were surrounded by trees.

“Why did you stop talking to Peter and me back in high school?” I asked, feeling angry as I pushed my hair away from my face. “What was so special about Doug Jones and his old pickup truck? Was he more interesting than we were? Were you bored with us?”

The question had nagged at me for too long. I had bottled up that rejection years ago and stuck a cork in it, hidden it away. Now it was bubbling over.

He took his hand off the wheel and turned toward me. “I wasn’t bored. I just knew I was different from the two of you. I was fed up and headed for trouble. You were better off without me.”

“We didn’t believe that. At least I never did,” I insisted. “We were friends, no matter what, and maybe if you had stayed with us, you wouldn’t have gotten into trouble in the first place, and you wouldn’t have…” I stopped.

“Wouldn’t have what? Left town?” He gazed out at the night. “I needed to be on my own,” he explained. “That’s all it was. I had to get away from my father, who took some kind of perverse pleasure in beating the crap out of me.” He paused. “I just couldn’t be part of that group we’d become.”

“But you joined another group—Doug and his idiotic friend. I don’t even remember his name.”

Matt shook his head. His eyes held no expression. “They were both assholes. I never thought otherwise.”

“Then why were you friends with them? Why not us?”

God, I sounded like a pathetic, spurned lover, as if he had cheated on me and abandoned me. But I was not his lover. It had never been that way between us.

But what was it, exactly? There had never been a word for it. There still wasn’t.

I covered my forehead with a hand and shut my eyes.

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