haunting melody as for the profound lyrics. The chords seemed to vibrate through her, warming her from the inside out, and as they drove down the desolate stretch of highway, she couldn’t remember the last time she felt so contented.
She lazily turned her head to the side, looking at Chase; his head was back against the seat and his eyes were closed. The T-shirt he had changed into clung to his still-damp skin. There was the faintest hint of a five o’clock shadow defining his jawline, and his hair flipped away from his forehead and ears in wet curls, looking much darker than it was. Just before she turned her eyes back to the road, she noticed his hand on his thigh, his fingers moving to the notes as if he were playing some unseen piano.
“Do you play?” she asked.
“Mm-hm,” he hummed softly, his eyes still closed.
“Can you play this?”
He nodded. “It’s pretty simple,” he said. “The chords, I mean. Not the song. The song itself, the lyrics are just…” He trailed off, his voice lazy.
“Yeah, I know,” Andie said gently. They fell into silence again, listening to the song, until Andie sighed softly. “I’ve always wanted to play.”
Chase lifted his head to look at her. “You don’t play? You have a piano.”
“I know,” she said, shrugging guiltily, “I just thought it looked nice in the room.”
He smiled at that before resting his head back on the seat. “I’ll teach you to play this.”
“You will?” Andie asked, unable to keep the surprise out of her voice.
“Mm-hm. If you want,” he said softly, closing his eyes again.
She turned her eyes back to the road as the oddest feeling washed over her. For a second, she almost felt disoriented. How could only twenty-four hours have passed since they started this trip? To her, it felt like so much longer than that. And not in the way that a task seems to take forever when it’s tedious or mundane, but more in the way that she felt like the person sitting next to her was someone completely different from the one who climbed into her passenger seat yesterday morning. This person wasn’t callous, he wasn’t crude, he wasn’t antagonistic; he was smart, and funny, and sweet.
At that moment the disorientation gave way to a different, but much stronger feeling.
Shame.
Because she realized then that Chase had always been those things. She had just chosen not to see it. She had made the decision to pigeonhole him according to her own first impression of him, knowing all too well how incredibly deceiving first impressions could be.
Andie glanced over at him again. She had no idea if Chase knew what she had thought of him a day ago, but it didn’t matter. She felt terrible about it, whether he was aware or not.
But she knew how she could make it up to him.
Andie smiled to herself as the plan began taking shape in her mind. She had looked up some information on her phone when Chase was changing into dry clothes; she’d been looking at the map and saw the name of the place, remembering that Chase had mentioned it to her the day before, and her curiosity had gotten the better of her.
A little while later, Andie put on her blinker and took the exit off the highway, and Chase looked over at her.
“Again? You seriously have the bladder of an incontinent grandmother.”
“I don’t have to go to the bathroom,” she laughed.
“Then why are we getting off the highway?”
“We’re making a stop.”
His brow lifted. “A stop? Is this in the itinerary?”
“It is now.”
She glanced over at him just in time to see his slow grin. “Well, holy shit,” he said, unbuckling his seat belt and turning quickly to reach into the backseat.
“What are you doing?”
A second later Chase came back up with his camera. “For posterity. We need hard evidence of the day you threw caution to the wind,” he said, aiming it at her.
Andie laughed just as the soft click sounded, the flash briefly illuminating the space between them like a spark, and she found herself wishing that a camera could immortalize a feeling as well as an image.
Because she knew she would never want to forget how wonderfully unbound she felt at that exact moment.
Tybee Island was a small island about twenty minutes east of Savannah, Georgia. It was only about twenty-two square miles, but within that small area, it seemed to be everything or anything a person needed it to be. As