Meg Cabot - Missing You

“I have to,” he said, laughingly prying my arms off him. “What if your parents wake up? Is that really how you want them finding out about us?”

Flopping disgruntledly back against the pillows, I said, “I guess not. Still. What are you doing later?”

“Seeing you,” Rob said as he sat down on my window seat to tug on his motorcycle boots. It was extremely odd to see Rob Wilkins in my bedroom at all.

But it was especially weird to see him sitting on the lace-covered pillows with which my mom had decorated the built-in window seat beneath my bay windows. It was sort of like seeing Batman shopping for shampoo at the drugstore, or something. Just completely out of place.

“I have to go to the garage for a while,” Rob said after he’d gotten both shoes on, and stood up. “Want to come over and grab some lunch around noon?”

“I could bring you lunch,” I said. “I could make some sandwiches and cupcakes or something.”

Rob looked at me. “Did you just say you’d make cupcakes?”

“Yeah,” I said apologetically. “I don’t know what came over me. Since that would so never happen.”

“I’m sure if you did make cupcakes someday,” Rob said chivalrously, “they’d be delicious.”

“No, they wouldn’t.”

“Well, no, you’re probably right. Still. It was a nice thought.”

“I’ll just see you at noon,” I said. And rolled out of bed. “Here, let me walk you out.”

Rob tried to argue with me, that he could find his own way downstairs. But I didn’t want to run the risk of him running into one of my parents alone. I didn’t want him calling off the engagement after only six hours.

But I managed to get him out of the house safely. The only person in the house besides us who was up was Chigger, and he just checked us for food. Not finding any, he went back to the couch.

I stood on the porch in the cool morning air. Even though it was so early, I wasn’t a bit tired. That’s because I’d slept like a log for a change.

“Where’s your truck?” I asked when I’d looked around and seen only a nondescript sedan and—hilariously—a Trans Am parked on the street.

“I parked around the corner,” Rob admitted with a sheepish smile, before kissing me good-bye. “I didn’t want to arouse the suspicions of your neighbors.”

“You’re such a gentleman,” I said. He’d started down the porch steps, but I held on to one of his hands. “Hey, Rob?”

“What?”

“Did my dad buy my bike from you? Blue Beauty, I mean?”

Rob’s grin was crooked. “Yeah. He asked me what kind of bike I thought you’d like, and…well, I had that one picked out for you a long time before he asked. Let’s put it that way.”

“I knew it,” I said, my heart feeling as if it were about to bubble over with joy. “Bye.”

“Bye.”

He seemed to be having trouble containing the bubbling over of his own heart—at least if the way he smiled at me was any indication. I had never seen him look so happy.

Then he left, hurrying down the street to get his truck. I stood and watched him disappear around the corner. In fact, that’s why I didn’t notice the driver’s door to the Trans Am parked across the street had opened. Because I was too busy watching Rob disappear around the corner.

Which is why I didn’t realize Randy Whitehead Junior was coming towards me until he was halfway across the yard.

“Randy,” I said when I finally noticed him. “When’d you make bail?”

Seriously it didn’t even occur to me to be scared. That’s how giddy I still was from everything that had happened during the night.

Even when Randy didn’t say anything—just kept coming towards me with a very intent expression on that weaselly looking face, hovering beneath his hundred-dollar haircut—it didn’t seem weird. I just assumed he hadn’t heard me.

“What are you doing here, Randy?” I asked him. “You come to apologize?”

But when he climbed the steps up to where I was standing in two long strides, then seized me by the throat with one hand, throwing me back against the screen door, I realized he hadn’t actually come over to apologize.

“You,” he pressed his cheek against mine to whisper into my ear, “have ruined my life.”

I tried to scream. I really did. But his hand was crushing my larynx. I couldn’t even breathe, let alone utter a sound.

I would like to add that Randy? He smelled extremely ripe, a combination of body odor, Calvin For Men, and what I was pretty sure was tequila. My eyes started to water, and not just from lack of oxygen, either.

“I wasn’t hurting anybody,” he hissed raggedly in my ear. “Those girls wanted it. Theywanted it. And now my mom says I’m a disgrace, and my dad says—you know what my dad says?”

I was clawing at his hands, trying to get them off my neck. I’d tried kicking him, but being barefoot, I didn’t seem to be doing much damage. I tried kneeing him in the groin, but he kept moving out of the way. It was hard to get much leverage, anyway, considering the fact that he was holding me a couple of inches off the ground.

“My dad says if I kill you, to keep you from telling my mom about Eric, he might even forgive me for being such a screwup someday.” Randy’s breath was as ripe as the rest of him. It had been a while since he’d hit the mints. “So that’s why I’m here. I was hoping you’d come out of the house and get on that bike of yours, and I could just wait till no one else was around, and knock you off it and into a ditch or something. But you know what? I like this better. Because take a look. No one else is around. Just you. And me.”

It was hard to tell, over the roaring in my ears. But I thought I could hear Chigger barking. Yes. Chigger was definitely barking. And hurling himself angrily against the screen door, right behind. I could feel his claws. That ought to wake Mom and Dad up.Good boy, Chigger. Good boy.

“I’ll tell you what, though,” Randy said. “I’ll let you go if you tellme who Eric is. Because I really, really want to know.”

And he loosened his hold on my throat—just a little—so that I could tell him. I choked down a lungful of air. And croaked, “Bite me.”

Wham!The hands went right back around my neck.

“That’s not very polite,” Randy commented. “Jesus, why won’t that dog shut the hellup ?”

On the wordup , something happened to Randy’s head. It disappeared.

Or at least, that’s how it seemed from my angle. It wasn’t until his hands suddenly left my throat again—and I was falling to the porch floor, gasping for breath—that I realized Randy’s head was still very much attached to Randy’s body. It had just seemed to disappear, due to the force of the blow Rob had delivered to his jaw.

Collapsed against the screen door, I was in the perfect position to watch Rob pummel the life out of Randy Whitehead Junior. I got to see some bloody bits of capped tooth fly by—very gratifying—and was able to explain to my startled parents, who’d finally been roused from bed, that the reason Rob was killing Randy Whitehead was that Randy had been trying to kill me.

Still, it wasn’t my dad who broke up the fight—though, to his credit, he tried, which was an almost comical sight, this middle-aged man in boxers and an undershirt, trying to pull Rob off the drunk pornographer who’d taken advantage of his sister, and then tried to kill his fiancée.

No, it was the man who strode into my yard right after that, gun drawn, and shouted, “All of you! Freeze, or I’ll shoot! FBI!”

“Oh,” my mother said from where she’d been helping me up from the porch floor. “Good morning, Dr. Krantz.”

Keeping his pistol trained on Randy—who really didn’t look as if he was too eager to go anywhere, anyway—Cyrus Krantz said, “Good morning, Toni. I was hoping I wasn’t too early to stop by for coffee. I can see now that I came just in time. Up to your old tricks again, eh, Jessica?”