9. Chase
Chase
# Always name your own car, or someone else will do it for you
E ven after we unloaded all of the wedding flowers she’d managed to cram in there, Addison is still a little giddy after the whole ginger-figging revelation when we get into her ridiculous yellow car—which she has given an equally ridiculous name.
And as much as the ginger thing doesn’t sound like something remotely pleasurable for either party to me, I have to admit it brought up all kinds of other thoughts—specifically relating to brats and punishment, and why Addison seemed to speak about it with such…
confidence. Is that what she’s into now?
Being punished? I mean she did book a cabin with a sex dungeon as a second bedroom for her and that douche-fuck, Jasper.
Ginger-figging isn’t for me, but I could definitely get on board with a bratty Addison.
“This is it coming up, right?” She peers through the windscreen, her pathetic wipers moving at snail-like speed to clear the smattering of snow.
“No. That’s a gas station. You said we’re going to Kelly’s Superstore, right?”
She hums to herself, turning down the radio volume as though that will somehow make it easier to see.
“We should have gotten an Uber,” I grumble.
“I did tell you that you were more than welcome to. But I’m not wasting money on an Uber when I have a perfectly good car right here.”
“Perfectly good is debatable,” I mumble, but she hears me.
“If it wasn’t below freezing outside, and Brax would never forgive me if he lost his best man to frostbite three days before his wedding, I would kick you out of my wonderful car, Chase Hunter.”
She gives me my full title when she’s annoyed at me, or trying to make a point, and she always has done. “You and I have very different standards when it comes to wonderful, Addie.”
“Clearly,” she snorts.
I’m sure that was an insult. “What does that mean?”
“I was just agreeing with you.”
“Yeah, but the way you said it, was…I don’t know. Maybe you’re just hardwired to give me a hard time.”
“If I am, it’s because you deserve it,” she says and now there’s a sadness to her tone that I fucking hate.
“Yeah, I do,” I agree, trying to take the sting out of this conversation before it sinks us any further into our fucked-up past.
“Stop being so agreeable,” she huffs.
Fuck, I can’t win here, so I try a change of tactic. “Tell me why your car is named Angelina.”
She takes her eyes off the road for a second and flashes me a grin. “Because she suits it, don’t you think? My little Angelina.” She pats the dash affectionately. “What’s your car called?”
“I don’t name my cars.”
“Well, you should. Maybe then you’d have not wanted to leave it behind in LA and then you’d have driven here in it. Then you wouldn’t be riding shotgun in mine complaining about how un-wonderful she is.”
I don’t point out that driving would have taken me days rather than hours, because she knows that and she’s goading me. Instead, I say, “Un-wonderful isn’t a word.”
“I just discovered it, so it is,” she says, full of defiance and sass.
I’m pretty sure I was right about the bratty side, and it makes my dick twitch very inappropriately in my jeans.
“How do you know if it’s a him or a her?
You haven’t even met it,” I say, hardly even believing that I’m talking about my car like it’s not simply a giant hulk of metal.
It’s gorgeous metal that does zero to sixty in two seconds, but it’s still just metal.
“I can just tell. I’m like a car whisperer. Give me the color, make and model and I’ll tell you its gender.”
“It’s a Bentley Continental GTC, and it’s silver.”
She whistles appreciatively. “Nice. And it’s convertible, right?”
I’m impressed that she knows the car.
“You live in LA, of course it’s a convertible,” she answers her own question. “And he’s definitely a he, and he should have a grand but classy name, like Faraday.”
“Faraday? That’s your idea of grand and classy?”
She nods, a smile spreading across her face as she keeps her eyes fixed on the road.
“Now, I’m never going to be able to look at my beautiful car ever again without calling him Faraday.”
She laughs out loud and the sound makes me smile. “Aw, you called him ‘him.’”
“Probably gonna have to sell him now,” I grumble. “And he was custom made.”
“Well, you should have named him yourself when you had the chance.” She takes her eyes off the road for a second, long enough to flash me a wicked grin that does nothing to ease the situation in my jeans.
Fuck me, she has the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen.
“There it is!” she yells, swerving off the highway way too fast for my comfort, not to mention Angelina’s, whose brakes squeal in protest.
Addie doesn’t seem to notice though and she’s still smiling when we pull into the parking lot of Kelly’s Superstore. “How about I drive us back?” I suggest.
“And let you loose on my precious,” she says the word “precious” in her best Gollum voice, while rubbing the steering wheel and I’m reminded of how she watched all of those movies with me.
When Brax and Eva declared them too long and boring, it was her who sat in her parents’ den with me for an entire Sunday while we watched every one of them back-to-back.
We watched them again shortly after my mom died. Just me and her.
She jumps out of the car and then quickly grabs some tote bags from her trunk. She shoves one into my hands. “I suggest we split up. I’ll grab essentials, and you get the boring stuff like food and coffee.”
“Otherwise known as the things that are going to keep us alive.”
She nudges me in the arm as we walk toward the entrance. “No, I said I’ll be getting the essentials, you know like bourbon. And that , my friend, is the only thing that’s gonna keep us alive.”
I don’t miss that she called me friend, and I don’t think she does either, because her cheeks flush an adorable shade of pink.
If only to ease her growing embarrassment at admitting she doesn’t hate me as much as she pretends to, I ask, “So, the plan is you get too hammered to be able to wield a knife and kill me in my sleep?”
She nods. “Exactly.”
“Sounds as good a plan as any, I guess.”
She claps me on the shoulder, and the contact has my skin warm, even through my sweater and coat. “It’s the only way, Chase.”
She spins in the opposite direction and I watch her dark head disappearing as she turns down one of the aisles.
And then I take a second to breathe and remind myself that I’m only doing this as a favor to Brax.
I’m here for four more days and just because Addie is tolerating me, doesn’t mean we’re miraculously going to rekindle our old friendship, and definitely not anything more.
So, stop looking at her and thinking all of the things you’re thinking about doing, Chase! She’s not yours anymore. You had her and you fucked it up! Asshole.
With that thought in my head, I wander in the direction of the grocery aisle to find some food and coffee.
By the time Addie and I meet up again at the register, I have an entire shopping cart laden with food and other essentials, such as toilet paper.
She casts an eye over my choices and grudgingly gives her approval.
I glance in her basket, filled with cookies, chips, candy, a bottle of Buffalo Trace—her favorite bourbon—and nestled against it is a bottle of Woodford Reserve—mine.
I know her favorite bourbon because I low-key stalk her social media, which is incredibly lacking in any kind of regard for her personal safety or security, but she’s actually remembered mine.
I grind my jaw to stop myself from smiling at that, and she helps me unload my cart. When that’s done, I grab the items from her basket and add them to mine.
“Good idea. We can just split it fifty-fifty.”
I shake my head. “This is on me.”
“Nuh-uh. I pay for my own stuff. I don’t need your?—”
“Addie!” I don’t mean to say her name like that, like a command, but I don’t miss the way her hazel eyes darken at my tone, nor the way she immediately gives me her undivided attention.
“You paid for the entire cabin, and I know I wasn’t your intended roommate, but I want to pay my way. Please just let me do this, okay?”
She stares at me, her chin tilted and her jaw working.
“No way. You might be invading my cabin this week, but let’s get one thing straight, you are less guest and more unwelcome intruder.
And you do not get to assuage your guilty conscience for ruining my wonderful, idyllic getaway by bribing me with pasta and toilet paper. Capisce?”
I want to argue. Fuck, I want to toss her over my shoulder, march her outside and kiss that sassy mouth until she stops yelling at me. But I absolutely cannot do any of that.
So, I relent. “Fine.”
“Fine,” she parrots.
Brat!
Still being as stubborn as a mule, Addie refuses to let me drive her precious Angelina back to the cabin.
And infuriatingly, she insists on listening to her own carefully curated playlist on the way back, a playlist which consists of annoying, cheesy Christmas songs.
It’s not that I’m some kind of monster who hates Christmas; it’s just that it’s historically not been the happiest time of my life.
At least as an adult. My mom always did what she could to make the holidays special.
She was a waitress in a diner and our Christmases usually involved me sitting with some coloring books and waiting for her to finish her shift.
It was still fun though. We’d take leftovers home and watch Christmas movies while stuffing our faces with turkey, and then cheesecakes for dessert.
Then, she died a few weeks before Christmas while I was in my last year of college.
So that holiday sucked ass. And then the following one…
well, that was the year Addie and I hooked up.
“I love this song!” She turns up the volume super loud and begins singing along. Addison Kinsella is a woman of many talents, but singing is not one of them. I suppress a smile at her off-key vocals. But then the lyrics hit me, and now I’m overwhelmed with memories of that night.
I doubt she even realizes the significance of this song, but I watched her dancing to “Santa Tell Me” at Hugo Pierson’s Christmas party.
I still recall what she was wearing in technicolor detail even now: blue skinny jeans, a tight, red sweater with the words “I’m on Santa’s Naughty List” written across the front and pair of sky-high red Louboutins that her parents had bought her for her eighteenth birthday—her pride and joy.
And fuck but the way she danced, like she didn’t care who was watching her, even though I know for sure I wasn’t the only guy staring at her and drooling over the way her hips moved so perfectly to the music.
Her confidence was sexy as fuck, and all the times I’d told myself I shouldn’t look at her that way because she was my best friend’s sister seemed to melt into nothing.
And then she smiled at me, right as she was singing the part about “getting on top of him by that fireplace” and I was done for.
I took her home and even though we kissed in the park, and then again on her porch, I still tried to convince myself that nothing more would happen. Except it did. We shared something incredible.
And then I fucked it all to hell.