Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 77018 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77018 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
I needed brakes. “If you had to choose between kale and chocolate, which would you choose?” I blurted.
Most guys would have stopped and stared down at me, brow raised at the randomness of that question. But Vance didn’t. His steps didn’t even falter. “For dinner or—”
“Don’t think too hard. Just at any point, some random person comes up to you and says, ‘Kale or chocolate.’ Which one would you choose?”
“Chocolate.”
Shit. Swallowing, I reminded myself the kale or chocolate question wasn’t the end all be all. I had at least one hundred other questions he could royally screw up on and reveal he was a rotten person at his core. “Okay. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? In your life?” I’d added that last bit to get down to the nitty, gritty bad stuff.
“Are we playing twenty questions or something?”
“Something…” Like, find a reason to stop myself from launching over lover’s cliff with him. “Come on. Worst thing.”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Don’t tell me.” I dropped his hand. “I’ll just assume you murder elderly women and dump their bodies in the Hudson River.”
He snatched my hand back up. “The fact that that is where you went is really fucked up; you realize that?”
“This is not about me, Vance. It’s about you.”
A string of small cars and Vespas sputtered by in the dark. “Fine. The worst thing I’ve ever done was run over Mr. Snuffleupagus.”
“The Sesame Street puppet?”
He stared down at me with judgmental eyes. “He was not a puppet.”
“He was.”
“He was half puppet, half costume. Two men had to get in that suit.”
I stared at him, confused and a little amused.
“Look, you enjoy random words,” he said. “I enjoy random information.”
That would be a point in favor of compatibility. Just what I did not need. “If you didn’t mow down the puppet-costume thing, then which Mr. Snuffleupagus did you run over?”
“My neighbor’s cat.”
It wasn’t great, I’d give him that, but unfortunately, sometimes very unlucky people run over animals. It didn’t make him a criminal.
“My dad hit a deer once. Accidents happen, Vance.”
“Accidentally running over him isn’t what makes it the worst thing I’ve ever done. I reversed out of the drive, felt the… bump. Freaked out, put the car back into drive, and went forward again.”
I covered my mouth with my hand, imagining that second bump. “Why would you do that?”
“I panicked. Then I got out and saw him.” Vance shook his head as we rounded the corner of a fromagerie, the stout stench of aged cheese drifting from the shuttered windows. “It was awful. I knew he was dead, which made me panic more. I got a shovel from my granddad’s shed, scooped him up, and put him in the trunk.”
“You put a dead cat in the trunk?”
“Out of everyone I know, you, of all people, should understand the terrible decisions a person can make when they panic.”
“Fair enough. Go on.”
“I put him in the trunk and then waited until my grandma got home.”
“Because Granny was going to resuscitate him?”
The streetlamp cast a warm glow over his face as he shot an unpleased glare in my direction. “No, because I was sixteen and didn’t know what to do.”
“Bury it?” That would have been the sensible, yet still morally wrong, thing to do.
“My grandma told me to take it to the neighbor’s house.”
I could just imagine a sixteen-year-old Vance carting a limp and mangled Mr. Snuffleupagus to the neighbor’s front door. “Did you just leave it on the porch?”
“I rang the doorbell. But I told them I’d found the cat on the road on my way home from school.” Traffic zoomed past as we headed over a bridge crossing the Seine River. “The lie made it worse somehow.”
Although nothing about Mr. Snuffleupagus’s death was good, it wasn’t like Vance had run him over on purpose. He had a conscience.
“What about you?” he said. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
Biting my lip, I glanced at him. Mine was worse. Mainly because it hadn’t been an accident. But I’d made him tell me… “When I was in sixth grade, I gave one of my best friends a horrible haircut.”
“That’s not bad.”
“I did it on purpose because Rosco Stevens, the love of my twelve-year-old life, liked her.”
“Okay. That’s cruel.”
“I know. I felt horrible about it, so to make it better, I gave myself the same horrendous haircut, so she wasn’t the only person being made fun of.”
“At least you tried to make it better…”
By the time we’d reached the hotel lobby, still hand in hand, I was no closer to not liking him than I had been fifteen minutes before. He’d never clotheslined a bicyclist. He rolled the toothpaste from the bottom of the tube, not the middle like a monster. I couldn’t find one thing I didn’t like about him—even his alarms now had a soft spot in my heart.