14. Shira

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Shira

After we load Lilac up in the hotel parking lot, Felix volunteers to drive. "Are you sure you'll fit?" I ask, then wish I didn't when Felix's cheeks flush. We're not doing that again. We're leaving that behind.

"I'm sure there's a way to make it work." He spends a minute adjusting the driver's seat and the steering column so he can fit comfortably. The same way he fit effortlessly with Blake and me last night. Something I'm resolutely not thinking about in the bright morning light.

Blake hasn't said much, and I can't tell if it's because he's uncomfortable that we did that or, like me, uncomfortable with how much I liked it. Or maybe he's begun to suspect something… I vowed I'd tell him the truth, or at least part of it. This could be our last day together. I don't want to spend it sitting silently in a car. So when Blake slides in the backseat, I slide in with him.

Felix darts a look in the rearview mirror in question.

"To Florida, please," I say like I would to a cab driver.

"What're you gonna do back there?" he asks.

"Help Shira study," Blake says just as I say, "Stay out of trouble."

Felix gives an uh-huh like he doesn't believe either of us. But he accepts Lilac's keys from me and starts her engine.

"You really going to help me study?" I ask Blake as Felix navigates his way out of the lot and toward the highway.

Blake nods. "Do you have flashcards or something?"

I can't resist. I run my hand up his thigh. Whisper, "I bet you were a really good student," mostly to watch his slight gulp. "Straight As, a pleasure to have in class."

He laughs. "They were easy classes."

I move my palm up his leg, just brushing his cock where it's thickening in his pants. He gives the mirror a glance as if he's expecting Felix to catch us in the act. What if he did? Would he object—join in? Blake doesn't give me the time to find out. He removes my hand from his leg and I'm about to pout with disappointment when he curls a palm at my waist, pulls me as close as the boundaries of our seatbelts and Lilac's bench seat will let him.

He drops two fingertips just below my waistband. I've had men grope me all over—some at my encouragement, some despite my warnings to cut that out—but something about that small touch sends a thrill through me.

I overlap my hand with his, pressing his fingers lower.

He tilts his voice, a drip of honey in my ear. "Did you want something?"

I shift meaningfully in my seat. "Maybe you should find out."

"You'll have to be quiet or else Felix'll hear."

"He might not mind," I whisper. If anything he might like it. But no, that's a thought that we left back at the hotel.

Felix, possibly hearing his name, gives another of those glances in the mirror. Does he know what we're doing? There's a fine line between sneaking around and excluding him.

"I can be quiet," I add. It comes out throaty.

I half-expect Blake to shake his head, to tell me he's just joking. To make me get out flashcards . His fingers push lower. "What's the most times you've come in a day?" he asks, matter of fact, and I can't help the slight puff of laughter that escapes me.

"You feeling competitive?"

He hums in agreement. "I like knowing what I'm up against."

I can't help it—I glance toward the front seat. Is this about Blake being territorial or something else? Being a pawn in a game between them wouldn't be so bad—except for the flash of hurt in Blake's eyes that morning.

Blake must feel me tense. He withdraws his hand and shifts to the safety of a few inches away. "You're right, we shouldn't."

"Do you not want to?"

"There hasn't been a second in this last month together where I didn't want you." A month together. As if he started counting the time we were committed to one another from the moment we met.

My heart clenches anxiously. As much as I don't want to, I have to tell him about dancing. I wish everything could be as easy as it was last night, when the world seemed wide open, the three of us floating in a bubble.

Except all bubbles eventually have to burst. I shouldn't be surprised that mine will too.

We're two hours into driving, somewhere on the unending stretch of highway between Fayetteville and Savannah, when Lilac makes a noise.

Felix drove for an hour then finally admitted that he didn't quite understand Lilac's steering. Now he's in the passenger seat. Blake's sprawled in the back. He keeps shifting around like he can't quite get comfortable. His shoulder, possibly. Or an extension of his earlier freakout that he denies is happening.

Another shift. A complaint of springs. Followed by a sound like metal grinding against metal.

"What was that?" Felix asks me.

"Just Lilac settling. It's probably nothing."

Blake stirs in the backseat. "What sound?"

For a minute none of us says anything. Or the three of us don't, but Lilac does, a faint scraping noise that gets gradually louder as we listen.

Instinctually, my hands tighten at the wheel, knuckles pulling white. "Shh." As if Lilac is a spooked animal.

Lilac scrapes back.

"Can one of you Google it?" My voice comes out tense; my stomach knots itself into a hard lump. "It's probably just old lady problems. You know she likes to announce her every move."

In my peripheral vision, Felix reaches like he's going to lay a hand on my thigh. " Don't," I whisper emphatically. Because it was one thing to have his cock in my mouth last night. Another for him to pull the soothing boyfriend act in front of my actual boyfriend—who we're still keeping secrets from.

"She's made it this far," Felix says. "She can probably make it a little farther."

In response, Lilac's scrape transforms into a distinctive whine. Her engine temperature gauge starts to creep up. Traffic whizzes by us. The one place we don't want to break down is in the middle of the highway.

"Let's take the next exit," I suggest. "Just to make sure everything's okay." I don't wait for them to respond before I change lanes. The scraping continues. So does the slow climb of the temperature gauge. It's probably nothing . An unignorable kind of nothing that grows louder and louder.

"Don't cry." I whisper it under my breath—or try to. "Don't fucking cry."

Blake leans forward and squeezes my shoulder reassuringly. "It's gonna be okay, sweetheart."

Fuck. He's so fucking nice. He's nice, I'm lying, and my car is about to catch fire on this highway. I suck in a labored breath and hold back my tears. "Yeah."

"You got this," Blake says. "You're so strong."

"I don't want to be strong. I want the car not to fucking catch fire." It comes out in an angry rush. He's trying to be helpful. I just don't want his help—don't deserve it. Felix said Blake should meet the real me, but this is the real me: always five minutes from setting my own life on fire. "Sorry," I add. "I shouldn't have snapped."

From beneath her hood, Lilac emits a wisp of smoke. So not even five minutes from catching fire. We're almost to an exit. I press her gas pedal—we need a parking lot, a tow truck, for someone else to fix this mess.

And who's gonna fix the mess you've made of everything else? I swipe my hand across my face. Tears aren't useful for anything but blurring my vision.

Off the highway, it's only a short distance to the rest stop. Still, I spend every foot toggling between watching Lilac's hood for more smoke and keeping my eyes on the road.

If she breaks down, I can't afford to fix her. If she breaks down, I can't afford another car. There's no way working retail periodically will cover a car note. So if she breaks down, I'm going to be back dancing—and there goes Blake, out of my life just as quickly as he entered it.

Finally, I pull Lilac into a parking space, cut the engine, and pop her hood. Smoke belches up into the warm February sky, a single puff that dissipates.

"We should see what's the matter, I guess." Even if all I know about car engines is this one is fucked.

Felix glances to the backseat, and he and Blake proceed to have an unspoken conversation involving a lot of eyebrows that I can't track.

"I could use a soda," Felix says, finally. "C'mon, Shira, this can wait a few minutes."

I shake my head. "We probably need to arrange for a rental car."

"I can do that," Blake says. "What do you like?"

Lilac , I want to say, petulantly. I want Lilac back. It's dumb to get attached to a car like this, but she's been with me when no one else has. "Something reliable, I guess. Not too tall—unless…I guess whatever you want to drive is okay." Now that she's probably gone, they can take over.

Blake nods. "Okay, I'll see what's in stock. Can you get me a sweet tea while you're inside?"

"Like a tea with sweetener?" I ask.

Blake leans forward and kisses my cheek. "They'll know what you mean when you ask for one."

So I pull myself out of the car. Felix doesn't immediately follow. Inside, he and Blake are continuing whatever discussion, only this time in a low murmur.

All I can catch is Felix's, "Well, if you think that's a good idea," said in a way that he thinks it's not.

After a minute, Felix hauls himself out. He stretches once he gets out on the pavement, his T-shirt taut across his shoulders. I want to bury myself in his chest—to cling to him and have things be as easy as they were last night when it was just the three of us and the world fell away.

Instead I walk toward the rest stop doors.

The interior of the rest stop smells like sugar syrup. People mill around, most of whom look like they want to be somewhere else. "I'm actually good without a soda," I say.

Felix pauses walking, letting the stream of people flow around us. "Maybe you should take a breather."

"Like I said, I'm fine."

"How long have you had that car?"

"I got Lilac for my sixteenth birthday." She was five years old when I got her, practically new by shitty teenage first car standards.

"Was that…" Felix glances around as if he's nervous to ask whatever he's about to. "You mentioned sleeping in your car when you were nineteen."

Like I merely passed out one night instead of sleeping there for weeks. "Yeah, that was Lilac."

"So she's been with you through thick and thin."

I blow a strand of hair out of my face. "Mostly thin. I spent that month about a minute away from going back to my parents' house. But I didn't. I guess I'm too stubborn."

"What'd you do instead?"

"Begged a friend to let me sleep on her couch—which she did—then tried out for the club. I showed up to an audition like I would for ballet. But I was young and desperate. Turns out that's a moneymaker. I guess I figured things out eventually."

"Huh," Felix says.

"Huh, what?"

"You said stubborn but that sounds a lot more like determined. "

Before I can stop myself, I grip the front of his T-shirt. Pull him down, or attempt to, even if he barely moves.

"What are you doing?" he breathes, but his face inches closer to mine.

For a moment, we breathe each other's air. That same want from the club roars back. That as long as he's here to hold me, everything will be all right. "Kiss me—please."

For a second, he looks like he might. His green eyes study me. His tongue finds its way to his lower lip. But he places a gentling hand on my shoulder until I lower my heels back to the floor. "We shouldn't," he says.

" Shouldn't isn't don't want to ." Even as my face heats. I really have managed to fuck everything up in record time.

"Shira, of course I—" He cuts himself off. "I was a minor-league baseball player whose entire signing bonus went to bailing out the farm. I didn't have any extra money last year."

My forehead scrunches. The farm was broke? He always came to the club with an exact amount of cash. We had ATMs, of course, but I never saw him use one. I assumed he was trying to avoid fees, not that he was on a limited budget. I try to recall the amounts he sent me for my hair and nails: money I was always so grateful to have that I didn't think about what it would have cost him. "If the farm's in financial trouble, why'd you come see me at the club?"

He runs a thumb over my jaw, a careful scrape of his callus. It's funny how certain things can feel like a kiss that aren't one. "You're really asking me that?" he says. "What I asked you that day in June, nothing's changed. Or everything has. But if we're going to do this, we shouldn't be doing it behind Blake's back. Especially when—" He stops and shakes his head. "Especially when he loves you the way he does."

Love. The word hits me. Blake hasn't said it. Or has he? He carried me over that doorway, asked to meet my family, frowned over every squeak of my car. Let his guard down the way he hasn't to other people—and all I've done is erect bigger walls around myself.

A wave of guilt crashes over me. "Blake's too good for me." A truth I've been avoiding for the entire time we've been dating—that at some point he's going to realize it too.

Felix shakes his head. "That's not the problem—it's not that he's too good for you. It's that you are good enough for him and you won't let yourself believe that." He ducks down and kisses me, a brief peck to my forehead, something like a platonic kiss between friends, except for the lump it puts in my throat. "I'm going to get an iced tea that's ninety percent sugar," he says. "If you want to go hit the bathroom."

"Yeah, I'll just be a minute." Because back outside, there's a whole world of things we have to deal with.

Felix dips his head as if he's going to kiss me again, then pulls back like it takes effort not to. "Take as much time as you need. You know I'll be here when you're ready."

Absolutely no one looks good in yellow rest-stop bathroom lighting, but I look worse than most: as if I'm a second away from crying, which I am. I wave my hand under the paper towel dispenser until it issues me a length of scratchy brown paper towel. I dab my eyes with it and examine myself in the mirror. Yep, I still look like shit.

Next to me, a woman in her mid-forties with blond hair is in the process of fluffing it even higher. She must catch me sniffling because she pauses. "Whatever he did, I promise he isn't worth it."

Something about it reminds me of being in the dressing room in the club—how it was more like a party, with girls dancing and drinking and drifting back and forth between their turns on stage. The solidarity that comes from seeing humanity if not at its worst, at least at its sleaziest.

The lump in my throat expands even more. "It isn't him who screwed up," I admit. "It's me."

She pats my arm, gently, then replaces her comb in her purse. "Well, everything's the end of the world when you're young. I'm sure it'll get better."

That's what my mom used to say. That lump expands to where I can barely breathe. I nod, then pull myself into a stall. Something, some hiccupping place inside me, wants to see my mom, to tell her she was right: that I should have gone with the safe option. That taking a leap always comes with the risk of falling. Right now, I'm landing hard.

I take out my phone, compose a text. Even after I got a new number so my family would stop calling me, I put all their info in it. Hi Mom, it's Shira, I'm in a rest stop in South Carolina, Lilac is breaking down and so am I. But I don't hit send. I'm not ready to admit defeat.

Instead, I cry a few tears I blot with one-ply toilet tissue, then take enough deep breaths that I don't feel like I'm gonna completely fall apart. Outside, I'll have to fix Lilac or at least accept that I'm gonna have to deal with life without her. And there's the other thing I need to fix—this mess I've made with Blake.

Okay, that's enough, Shira. Finally, my tears ebb. It'll suck, but I've come through worse on my own.

Calmer, I emerge from the stall, wash my hands, set about fixing my mascara. The thing about dancing is you find the most waterproof stuff. Small favors.

When I get out of the bathroom, Felix is sitting at a table next to three sweating cups of iced tea. "Better?" he asks.

I nod.

"I texted the team that I'm going to be late to spring training."

Right, the thing we got on the road to avoid—that Felix was adamant couldn't happen. "I'm sorry. I should've told you to take the bus. I guess some part of me was sure things would be okay. Look how that turned out."

Felix smiles. "Pretty well, I'd say."

"The team isn't pissed?"

"Don't know yet. It's possible that when we get in tomorrow, I won't have a job."

"Fuck."

"It's possible I didn't have one in the first place. They might send me down or trade me."

"You don't think they're gonna keep you in Boston?"

Felix shrugs, not like he doesn't care but like he knows there's nothing he can really do. "Not sure where I'll end up. Guess we'll see."

"You know," I say, "you're handling all this much better than I am."

Felix laughs—his boom of a laugh that makes a few other eaters turn our way. "I'm not. If I don't have a job playing, who knows what's going to happen with the farm?" He shrugs, a what can you do? shrug like he's been doing the same calculations I did in the bathroom. That things might not be okay, but they'll be okay enough.

That same lump in my throat reappears—or not quite the same. This one feels dangerously like hope. Hope I don't have any right to, until I've come clean about my past. "Any word from Blake?"

"Haven't heard."

"I thought about it. When we get to Florida, I'm going to tell Blake I used to dance. Not about you and me—but you're right, I should stop hiding that." And that'll be the end of things between us.

"Are you sure?" Felix asks.

"Weren't you the one trying to get me to tell him? Blake deserves the truth." No matter what it costs me.

None of the iced teas on the table look like they've been drunk. I motion to one and pick it up at Felix's nod. It's aggressively sugary, but the ice is beginning to melt. Soon it'll be diluted to not much more than water—a reminder of how sweet things never quite last. So I drink it as quickly as I can, then square my shoulders.

"All right. Let's go." And I march myself out of the rest stop to face what's next.