Page 38 of No Judgements

Mrs. Hartwell looked stricken. “But you can’t leave! I’m making your favorite—ropa vieja.”

Drew looked heavenward before taking me by the arm and physically steering me from the kitchen. “Let’s go.”

“But you’ll be back?” I heard his aunt cry, as he hustled me down the hall. “You’re not going to drive back out to the beach, are you, Drew? Except to get those dogs of yours?”

He called back to her in Spanish—a language I never learned properly because I took French in school, though I’d picked up a few phrases around my dad’s clients and the café—and the next thing I knew, we’d brushed past Nevaeh and her friend Katie, doing their nails on the living room couch, and burst out the front door.

“Good God,” he said, as soon as we were headed toward his red pickup, parked in his aunt and uncle’s driveway. “Thanks for that.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. “For what?”

“For giving me an excuse to get out of there. You saved me. Again.”

“How did I do that?”

“With that excuse about having to go get your scooter.”

“It wasn’t an excuse.” I eyed him as he unlocked the driver’s-side door to the pickup. “I paid good money for that scooter.” Used, but it had still taken a sizable chunk out of my savings. “I don’t want it to get ruined.”

“Well, good timing, anyway.” He’d climbed behind thewheel, and now he leaned over to unlock the passenger-side door. “You saved my ass.”

“I assure you,” I said, climbing into the truck, which smelled as pungently as ever of wet dog, “that your ass is the last thing I was thinking of.” This was a lie. I was finding myself thinking about his ass—and other parts of him—more and more often, and it was disconcerting. “Why are you so mean to your aunt, anyway?”

“Mean to her?” He looked startled. “How am I mean to her?”

“All she wants is to have her friends and family safe around her during the storm, and you can’t even do her that simple favor?” I pulled at my seat belt. It had given me trouble my first time in the truck and was doing so again.

He lifted both hands in a so-sue-me gesture. “Since when can’t a guy stay in his own house—that he built himself, by the way—during a storm?”

“The storm of the century. That’s what they’re calling it.”

“They say that for every storm. It’s what the media is paid to do, hype things up. It’s how they get ratings. I would have thought you of all people would know that, with your mother.”

“Yes, but in the case of a hurricane they’re probably right.” I glared at him. “Wow, it must be so great to be Drew Hartwell, king of Little Bridge Island, who can do whatever he wants without regard to anyone or anything else.”

“Whoa.” He’d turned on the engine, but now he turned it off, and we sat in the driveway with thunder rumbling overhead, and the rain probably—most likely—coming atany moment, which meant I’d get soaked on my ride back on my scooter. “Hold on a minute. Just what the hell are you talking about?”

“Well, your aunt and uncle raised you, didn’t they? And yet you don’t seem to feel that you owe them even the slightest—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,whoa. My aunt and uncle did not raise me. They’re very nice people, and they are raising my niece, for which I am very grateful, since my sister is a bit of a mess at the moment, and Nevaeh’s dad took off basically the second she was born. But I had a pair of very kind, supportive parents until a few years ago, when a semi going the wrong way down Highway One took them both out.”

I blinked at him, surprised. I’d never heard this.

“And yes, Lucy and Ed have been great ever since,” he went on. “But I was twenty-five at the time. I did not need surrogate parents then, or now.”

I sat for a moment in silence, staring straight ahead as a single fat drop of rain plunked down on the hood of the pickup. Then I said, “Well. I’m sorry about your parents. And your sister. That’s awful. In different ways, of course, but still... awful.”

“Thanks. But who are you, anyway,” he demanded suddenly, “to talk about how I treat my relatives? Aren’t you the one whose own family offered to send a private plane to get you out of here before the storm, then turned the invitation down?”

I whipped my head around to glare at him. “So you were listening to my private phone call after all?”

“How could I not? You were practically yelling. It was kind of hard not to hear.”

“You know what.” I grabbed for the door handle. “I don’t need a ride to my place. I’ll walk.”

“Oh, no.” He flipped a switch, and the door lock snapped into place. I was trapped. “You’re not getting out of this that easily. You can’t judge me for doing the exact same thing you’re doing.”

“Actually I can, because you’re not doing the exact same thing I’m doing. I’m riding out a hurricane safely, at your aunt’s house on the highest point on the island. You’re doing it recklessly, in a house that’s not even finished, on a beach.”