Page 18 of Resonance

Instinctively, I hopped from the cab of the truck to help him, then shook my head at myself, wondering what the hell I was doing; he could manage fine.

Owen beamed me a bright grin, slinging his duffle around to the front and letting it dangle from his palm by the straps as he stopped in front of me. “Want me to put this in the wayback or inside?”

“Inside’s fine. There’s enough room in the back seat.” I glanced up at his apartment again, the ribbons of blue paint peeling off in thick strips, the crack in one of the windowpanes like somebody’d gotten after it with a BB gun.

“This is where you live?”

Owen looked over his shoulder, squinting at the apartment, then swiveled back to me, serene smile still in place. “This? Nah, this is my helipad. My mansion’s a little farther back.” He leaned in close, dropping his voice to an ominous near whisper, as he breezed past me toward the passenger side. “It’s invisible. Only the Chosen can see it. Too bad for you.”

Yeah, it was gonna be a long trip.

I slid into the cab as he opened the back door and shoved some boxes aside.

“I brought some snacks and stuff, but I was hoping once we get going we could stop somewhere and I could get a Grapico. That’s my road treat.”

I angled a look over my shoulder. “Funny, I was hoping once we got going, we could just… keep going.”

“Ohhhhh, you’re one of those,” he said with something like sympathy. He tossed his duffle into the back seat and slammed the door.

“One of what?” I asked when he climbed into the passenger seat.

“Road trip nazi. Should I have brought an empty bottle to pee into so we don’t have to stop?”

“Didn’t even think of that. Wish I had. Ididremember my duct tape, though.” I gave him a sharp grin as I put my seatbelt on.

“That was a joke about how much I talk, right?”

“It was,” I confirmed and shifted the car into gear to back out of the drive as Owen pulled out his phone and started fiddling with it.

“Did you even make a playlist?”

I tapped the brake, halting our progress momentarily. “Nope. No playlist, no snacks, no spot all the red cars or out-of-state plates. We’re gonna do this old-school style where you actually just get in the car and drive from point A to B.”

Owen met my stare with a crooked grin. “You’re doing road trips all wrong.”

“I’m doing ’em fast, which I think is the point. Plus I wanna try and get ahead of this storm that’s dropping heaps of snow about an hour behind us.” It was an eight-hour drive, and since we were leaving in the late afternoon and it made no sense to drive overnight, I’d planned on stopping at the two-thirds mark to grab some sleep. I had no desire to get stuck in a snowstorm on the side of the highway somewhere.

Owen fiddled with his phone some more, then unbuckled his seat belt and leaned into the back seat, putting his ass disturbingly close to my face as he scrounged around in his bag. Though the heat in my groin seemed to disagree about the disturbing part. I clenched the steering wheel. “What’re you looking for back there?”

“This.” He dropped back into his seat and brandished a cable triumphantly. “BecauseIdid make a playlist, rightfully anticipating that you would suck at road trips.”

Owen plugged the auxiliary cable into the console, then attached it to his phone. And just when I was about to protest that I wasn’t about to listen to four hours of K-pop or whatever he was into at the moment, the Eagles’ “Desperado” came through the speakers and he stared at me with smug satisfaction. “I dare you to complain about the Eagles.”

And since I couldn’t, I just ignored him.

“Yeeeep.” I could hear the grin in his voice, and goddamn if I didn’t have to work hard to keep it from leaping the gap between us and becoming one of my own.

3:30p.m.:

“Dan?”

“Yeah?” I blinked a couple of times, having gotten a little lost in the passing of lines on the road and Mick Jagger’s seductive growl on “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

“Just making sure you hadn’t fallen asleep.”

“My eyes are open, aren’t they?”

“Well, that’s not always a good indication. I knew this guy once when I lived in… well, actually no, that’s not right. It was when I was in Gatlinburg. But before I met you. Anyway, he swore he slept with his eyes open, and I didn’t believe him until I actually saw it. It was creepy as hell. And they weren’t wide open, sure, but like halfway. Still.” Owen shuddered in my periphery, and I made a snoring sound. “Very funny.”