“Let me connect my phone.” She leaps between the seats and taps on the touch screen center console until she is allconnected. With a thud, she sits back and rests her head on the seat.
I copy her, closing my eyes as I let myself soak in the music and tried to calm my nerves, which are on fire. I squirm in my seat.
When I flick my eyes open, Samuel is staring at me from the rearview mirror. I watch him watch me, waiting for him to say something. When he doesn’t speak a word, I mouth to him,What?
He doesn’t reply or give me a response but just keeps staring from me to the road and back to me again. I stick my tongue out at him and laugh as Lianne bellows the lyrics to the song she chose.
He chuckles and shakes his head.
* * *
The music is louder than I expected it to be. I mean, I don’t know what to really expect from a club. I don’t even know they let eighteen-year-olds in. But we walked right up. They took one look at Samuel and opened the door for us.
Is it like this at every club?
We walked through the crowd of people. The noise is too much to even know where all the voices are coming from.
“Hey!” Someone plants a hand on my stomach and stops me in my tracks. “How are you tonight?” A sweaty man is standing, with his shirt buttoned only halfway, his chest hairplastered to his skin. I try to hold back my disgust. The man leans closer to my ear. “I said how are you tonight?”
“Yeah, I heard you. Fine. Thanks.” I push at the hand he still has on my stomach, but it doesn’t budge. “Excuse me,” I say louder.
“‘Yeah, I heard you,’” he mimics.
“Is there a problem?” Samuel comes beside me, swinging his arm around my shoulder.
The guy looks up at Samuel, and his face goes stark. “No. No problem. My bad.” He peers at me and back at Samuel. “I didn’t know she was with you.” He backs away with his hands up like Samuel is holding a loaded gun, crashing into a waitress.
Her drink goes flying off the tray. He slips in the puddle and lands on his ass. He looks so much less intimidating than he did moments ago.
“Don’t fall behind, okay?” He pulls me along.
“I didn’t mean to. He stopped me.”
“Well, keep up,” Joshua adds as Samuel keeps his arm around me.
Walking beside me, Lianne eyes Samuel. “Can’t take you anywhere, huh?”
I shake my head in embarrassment.
Samuel gestures to a booth with a velvet rope around it, and a man opens it for us to slide in. “What can I get you, Mr. Donovan?”
“A bottle of top-shelf vodka and a pitcher of...” He looks at Lianne and me. “They look like a cranberry-lemonade type, don’t you think, Joshua?”
“Definitely.” Joshua chuckles.
The man nods and leaves.
“A whole bottle for just you two, huh?” I lean in to make sure Samuel can hear me over the blaring music.
Lianne is bouncing in the booth in awe, gazing at everyone moving on the dance floor in front of us.
Joshua takes a seat next to her, looking bored. “A bottle for the four of us?” He points to Lianne and me.
Confusion takes over. What is he doing? Never in my whole life—well, eight years of being Samuel’s sister—has he ever been okay with me breaking the rules. Why now? Because I am eighteen?
“I can’t drink, Samuel. I’m underage.” I laugh, trying to ease my confusion.
“It’s one night. And you have me.”
