20. Duck, duck, go – Aurora
20
DUCK, DUCK, GO
AURORA
I stoop to pet Ellie, whispering to her to behave for Atticus while Seven brings the car around.
“You sure Atticus will be okay with her while we’re out?”
I’m still not sure I’m comfortable with it.
Elijah smirks down at me and Ellie. “Yeah, he’ll be fine. Don’t tell him I said so, but I think he secretly loves dogs. Animals in general, actually. Not the messes they make, but…” He shrugs. “I’m willing to bet he’ll have her doing some kind of new trick by the time we’re back and I can guarantee she’ll be the best fed dog in the state. He takes any kind of responsibility obscenely serious.”
“I can see that,” I agree, thinking about Atticus’s general demeanor and the way he seems to need to be in control of the situation at all times, even if it’s just cooking breakfast.
Elijah gives me a strange, questioning look and a lump forms in my throat.
Please don’t ask about last night.
Please don’t ask about last night.
Please. Please. Please.
He parts his lips to speak, but is interrupted when a gunmetal gray Jeep crunches over the cobblestone, speeding around from the garage to the front drive.
“Oh! I forgot to ask about your other car,” I say, quick to try to bring up something else to talk about. Literally anything else. “I hope the repairs on it weren’t too bad. I could use some of my first salary to?—”
“It’s fine,” Elijah interrupts me. “It was—uh—a rental, actually. We returned it and paid for the damages already. It wasn’t that bad.”
“Oh.”
The driver’s side window rolls down and Seven rests his arm on the frame, leaning out with a mischievous look on his face that makes my belly flip and my cheeks heat until I’m sure I can’t hold his gaze for another second without bursting into flames.
“We going or what?”
I swallow, pressing one last kiss to Ellie’s head. “You be good,” I tell her again. “Stay.”
Seven slaps the side of the Jeep and I hurry to catch up to Elijah as he holds the passenger door open and looks at me expectantly.
“Oh, that’s okay. You can have the front,” I offer, but he only shakes his head and sweeps his arm dramatically.
“Today is about you. I insist.”
I chew on the inside of my cheek, finding Seven waiting with his lower lip between his teeth as he revs the engine and pats the seat next to him.
“Don’t worry, Ro. I’ll take it slow.”
The way he says it drips with innuendo, and my core tightens as I slip into the seat and buckle in before I can make this any more awkward than I already have.
If Elijah still doesn’t know what happened last night, a couple more comments like that and he’ll be able to guess on the first try.
I don’t notice the ducks until the seat belt clicks audibly into place and Elijah slips into the back seat behind me.
The entire dash is filled with little rubber ducks squatting in a neat line from one end to the other. Ducks that look like pandas. Ducks with aviator sunglasses and crowns and visors and cowboy hats.
“Um?”
I reach out to pick up the one directly in front of me, but it’s fused to the dash with some kind of sticky silicone. When I slide my questioning gaze to Seven, he’s grinning at me broadly. “Sick, right? I’ve been trading ducks for years and these are the cream of the crop.”
Now that he says it, I think I have heard something to do with Jeep people and ducks before but I’ve never actually seen it with my own eyes.
“They’re…cute.”
Elijah lets out a soft chuckle from the back seat and Seven shakes his head, giving him a glare without any real bite to it through the rearview.
“It could be worse,” he says as he pulls away from the house and jams the button on the stereo to connect with the Bluetooth on his phone. “I could collect teeth. Or bones.”
“You have done that.”
“Well, I don’t anymore. Now it’s ducks.”
“A vast improvement.”
A strange smile worms its way onto my lips as my brow wrinkles. They can’t be serious, can they?
“This one’s my favorite,” Seven says, indicating a duck with a bandana covering most of its face, a black cowboy hat, and an old-fashioned pistol.
I look over the rest and smirk. “Mine, too.”
The first notes of one of my favorite songs filters into the cabin and my lips part. “You listen to Sleep Token?”
“So do you,” he says in answer, and snorts when I look at him in confusion. “It was playing in your car when you hit me.”
I flinch and he reaches over to pat my thigh. “All is forgiven, Ro.”
“Do you mind if I turn it up?”
He presses a button on the steering wheel to turn it up before I can, filling the Jeep with “Jaws” as we pull out onto the main road. I let the music bring me a sense of calm, feeling the tension in my shoulders ease and my restless legs release into the cushioned seat as one song shifts into another I like, and then another I’ve never heard but immediately love by someone called Livingston.
Taking in the remote mountainous scenery, I sigh and it quickly turns into a yawn.
“We’re almost there. Don’t fall asleep yet,” Elijah says from the back seat.
I turn to face him. “I thought you said it was pretty far.”
We’ve barely been driving for twenty minutes.
His eyes crinkle when he smiles. “It is.”
He looks past me out the windshield and when I twist back around in the seat, we’re turning onto a narrow road with a tall chain-link fence running along it. On the other side is an open space with long paved roads and a large building at one end.
Hangar , my mind supplies.
It’s a hangar.
There’s sunlight glinting off a small plane just outside of it.
“Surprise,” Seven says, lifting his brows playfully.
My heart slams in my chest. “You can’t be serious?”
“ Dead serious.”
“Especially about good fashion and even better hairstyling,” Elijah agrees. “Did you think we’d take you to the nearest Great Clips and have a quick shop at TJ Maxx?”
I blink and Elijah makes a show of looking hurt. I get the feeling he’s trying really hard to make this easy for me. To make it normal. Unlike Seven and Atticus, Elijah seems genuinely worried—not about my going to the cops or anything like that—but about me.
I can see it in his eyes, how he’s waiting for me to snap. To break down and start screaming and begging for them to let me go. And I remember that he doesn’t know about my past. Where I came from. What I’ve been through. Not like Seven does. And even he has only scratched the surface. I’m no stranger to fucked-up shit.
“Please don’t tell me you’re afraid to fly,” Seven says, and for a fleeting second I find real concern in his eyes and I think if I said yes, he would turn the car around right here and now, and it makes my throat burn just thinking it would be that simple.
“No,” I answer finally. “I’m not, but this is insanely excessive for a hair appointment.”
“If it makes you feel any better, Sev left his jacket in Amsterdam this one time and made us all turn around mid-flight to go back and get it.”
“And Céline is the only person any of us trust enough to let near our throat with a straight razor.”
“You did say you’re not mafia, right?”
Elijah laughs, but I’m serious. “If not that, then what is it that you do, exactly?”
“If we told you that,” Seven says, his voice low and husky as we pull through the main gates and drive toward the plane. “We’d have to kill you.”
“Seven,” Elijah hisses, and I wait for the jolt of panic that should come, but it doesn’t.
“He didn’t mean that,” Elijah rushes to say as Seven puts the car into park.
Seven doesn’t agree with him, but the way he tosses me a wink before stepping out of the Jeep makes it almost impossible to stop the surprised smile from tugging at my lips.
“Let’s go!” Seven calls, whistling in greeting to the guy carrying a briefcase onto the private plane who has to be the pilot.
Elijah opens my door for me and extends a hand to help me out. This time, I take it.
“Where are we going?”
“Do you want to ruin the surprise?”
I’m not sure I can take any more surprises and Elijah seems to see that written on my face.
“It’s okay, I can tell you. We’re going?—”
“No,” I rush to say, sensing his disappointment. “It’s okay. I do like surprises. Or, at least, I’d like to like them.”
He gives me a sad smile and his grip on my hand tightens just a little as if to say he understands before he lets it go. “If you change your mind, let me know. I’ll even show you the flight path.”
I console myself with the fact that we can’t be going too far since I don’t have my passport with me, and last I checked you need that to enter another country.
I let him lead me to the short set of stairs where Seven is already waiting at the top.
“This is crazy.”
I don’t realize I’ve said it out loud until Seven chuckles, and says, “If you think this is crazy, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”