Seven Weeks to Forever (Love / Romance)

Chapter Fifteen

Countdown to The Life-After: five weeks.

"Where are you going?" my aunt yells from the kitchen. So much for trying to sneak out.

"To see a friend. Please feel free to go back to Boston while I'm out." I don't know if she can hear me, and I don't care either way.

The house has been a war zone for the last few days, and these are the first words we've spoken to one another in over twenty-four hours. The silence started after an airport limo showed up in the driveway yesterday morning, the driver claiming to have instructions to take me to LAX. Even the pleading phone call I made to my uncle to talk some sense into Aunt Sarah fell on deaf ears, but I guess I shouldn't have expected anything different. We're a Harvard family, after all—that's where my uncle and aunt met. No one in our family tree dares to put college off for a year, and the only one to defy the Harvard tradition was my mother. She went to Stanford, which made her the black sheep of the family. Ivory towers can be a little strange.

My aunt appears in the foyer just as I'm turning the handle of the front door.

"Who is this friend?" she demands. "Not some boy you haven't introduced me to, I hope." Here we go.

"A vagrant who lives out on Skid Row," I answer.

"It is a boy, isn't it?" she narrows her eyes. "That's what's behind this dropping-out-of-Harvard nonsense."

I ignore her, pulling open the door. She presses her hand against it, trying to push it shut. I yank harder, forcing her to move her hand away. I win.

"Have a good day," I mumble, stepping out onto the front porch.

"A little respect would be nice, you know," she calls after me. Yeah, ditto.

I pretend I don't hear her and keep walking to my car. She's still standing there when I back down the driveway, and I can tell she's furious. I give her a wave before zooming away down the street.

It takes about half an hour to drive to Santa Monica. I follow the instructions of my GPS turn-for-turn, but I'm sure it must be wrong when I pull up outside of the address Riley gave me for his apartment. Either that, or he gave me the address for his parents' recording studio by mistake. It sure looks like a studio, complete with two skinny guys with black spiky hair standing outside. Both of them are wearing black T-shirts and jeans. They could definitely be musicians working on a record. This can't be Riley's place.

I park my car anyway, then pull out my phone to call him. Before I can open my contacts list, though, a knock on my car window makes me jump. I look up to see Riley standing outside.

"You live in a recording studio?" I ask, opening the door and getting out of the car.

He laughs. "Kind of. I live above it. My parents own the whole building. They let me move in when I started college last fall."

"Doesn't it get loud?"

"Only when there's a metal band recording." He leads me to a set of stairs around the side of the building. I follow him up the steps to a door at the top.

"It must take you forever to get to work," I tease him.

"The stairs take at least five seconds."

He opens the door, letting me walk ahead of him. The inside of his apartment is bright, with the sunlight from the windows reflecting off white walls. There's wall-to-wall carpet in the living room, probably to deaden some of the sound from the studio below. If there's anyone recording right now, I can't hear them up here.

"Soundproofing," he comments, as if reading my mind. "See? It's really not so bad. Want something to drink?"

I follow him over to the kitchen. "I could do with a glass of Dom Perignon."