Paper Hearts

43

|| Victoria ||

He called when the sun had already gone down, and the sky was a deep, inky black. I picked up the phone with a furrowed brow, opening my mouth to say something sarcastic when his voice rang in my ear.

"Victoria," Luke said, sounding breathless.

"Yes?"

"I'm outside. Get out here, grab a blanket, and let's go."

"Luke?" I asked, through a laugh. "Are you crazy?"

"No, Hemmings, but I am freezing my ass off. The truck's heating is completely broken. So hurry up, if you will."

The truck? Luke still had his truck?

Without a second thought, I said goodbye, rushing down the hallway and writing a note to my father, who was having a late night at the office. I snatched a blanket off of the couch and headed out of the door, where I saw the driveway was illuminated with the warm, familiar headlights.

It was true. Luke's truck was restored to it's former glory, and he grinned at me from the driver's seat.

Laughing, I slung myself into the passenger's side, and he took the blanket from me, throwing it in the backseat.

"What's going on?" I asked him, and he smiled the same coy smile.

"Can't tell you that. It would ruin it."

"You're so frustrating."

"And you're so controlling."

"You're going to have to find a better insult soon, Luke, that one's wearing off."

"Dammit," he said, in a mock-disappointed voice as he pulled out, "What ever will I do?"

I shook my head.

"Shut up, Callaway."

"Only when you do, Hemmings."

It was funny, how easily we were able to slip back into our old ways, and it felt as though no time had passed at all. As if the four memorable weeks we'd spent together were being lived all over again, right there, in that moment.

I didn't ask any questions; I simply let my fingers run up and down the weathered leather of the seats, the familiar smell and static-filled radio flooding my senses and I watched him out of the corner of my eye, observing his taut features and steel-blue eyes that were set directly in front of him, unwavering, intense.

They were the eyes that looked like the depths of the sea, the eyes that I had grown to love and hate and trust and a million other things. They were the eyes that made me feel at home and in the middle of nowhere at the same time, the eyes that looked welcoming yet closed-off, open yet full of a thousand untold secrets.

His gaze was contradictory, opposing forces, a battle between two extremes.

But it was the gaze that I so often found myself lost in, and the gaze that I so often thought about, even after all those months apart.

And I fell into silence with that thought in mind, and somewhere in the midst of my rambling mind, his hand found my own and he lifted it to his lips, just like he had on the night of my mother's wedding, when he'd stayed by my side throughout the night-and then carried me to the clinic in the morning.

Dragged back into reality as the warmth of his lips pulled from my skin, and cold spread across the place where they had just lingered.

I tried to ignore the jittering in my veins as he continued to drive, and I continued to watch him, wondering how it was that-even after all of this time-I was still somehow able to fall for him with the same intensity that I had the first time around.