Chapter Twenty

It should be the start of an excellent night, but Candice's new alter-ego might have other plans.

My black boots stomp as we descend the steps of my front porch. The man who has made it so easy to let my guard down is holding my hand as my head turns left and right. I fail to see his jeep amidst all of the parallel-parked cars. “Adam, where’s your car?”

His deep voice expels a chuckle softer than I imaged he was capable of. “I thought we should try something different. I didn’t think it’d be practical to show up on a horse, but this is supposed to be the wild west so I thought I’d arrive with something unexpected,” he says before guiding me down the sidewalk towards a black motorcycle that’s not normally parked in my neighborhood.

My jaw drops open and my head shakes before any words can form in my mind or my mouth. “Uh-uh. No way. That’s too-”

“Wild?” he asks, cutting me off with his tied-to-the-theme joke.

“Are you kidding me?” My eyes are big but my cheeks are sore from trying to prevent the smile that threatens to creep onto my lips.

“Come on, babe. Smile,” the tall boy says as he leans in, his chin very close to my neck as his arms wrap around my waist.

I’m suddenly silent. Speechless. Dumbstruck. Babe? I know we’ve been seeing each other, talking and I’m his homecoming date but… babe? Are we official? Are we almost official? Sabrina should’ve prepared me for this.

“Are you smiling yet?” when his breath hits my ear, I suddenly have chills I didn’t have before. He must sense this in my shiver as he pulls his leather jacket off and throws it over my shoulders. Okay, yeah. Now I’m smiling as he pulls back to look at me, his hands firmly on my biceps to hold the jacket onto my body. “There it is,” he says with pride while shooting me a smile of his own.

What perfect teeth he has. It quickly makes me self-conscious of my lack of professional dental work. I’ve always brushed my teeth first thing in the morning and right before bed, but we’ve never had the money for braces. So instead of continuing to smile like I want to, I slam my lips together and bite down on them.

It’s an action that he notices right away as the hands on my biceps start to rub up and down. “Hey, where’d that pretty little smile go?”

I scoff and look away. It’s not like I’m trying to be rude to him, I just don’t know how to accept compliments that I know are a lie.  “Don’t have one,” I reply with my mouth directed down the street.

“Candice,” Adam says softly as his hand moves from my bicep to my cheek. His thumb strokes the corner of my lip. It forces my lip to twitch and create the brief illusion of a smile. “What just happened? Where’d you go?”

The sigh that escapes my lips is more telling than I want it to be in the sense that it reveals just how much I don’t want to talk about it. Where did I go? Into the darkness of my mind. Can I tell my homecoming date that? My homecoming date that I happen to be falling for? Absolutely not. “Look,” I say as I move closer to the motorcycle and force his hold on me to break. “Can we just go to the dance, please?”

Adam’s taller frame turns and moves in front of me, effectively trapping me between his body and the bike. “Please?” I say again, my eyes looking up at him and practically begging him not to push the subject.

He looks confused, even worse defeated as he bows his head and circles around the bike once before hopping on. Once on the bike, he places a helmet onto his head before reaching over to hand me the one that was hanging on the other handlebar.

“No thanks, it’ll mess up my hair,” I say as I pat the curls that took me all night to make look semi decent.

“But we have to keep the head underneath safe too,” he counters sounding a little too much like my brother.

“Okay, stop!” My voice raises, quite possibly for the first time ever directed at Adam. My palm swings downward, swatting the helmet out of his hand. As the helmet smacks the corner of the sidewalk, a thick strip of the black paint is chipped away. “Stop! Stop trying to protect me. I don’t need anyone to save me! Look at me!” My arms extend out to show off my full wingspan in the flowy red dress. “I’m not your princess. I’m the Saloon Girl. You know what we do in the old west? We break up fights started by drunk cowboys. We kick out the one’s that get too rough.” I lean down and, with a serious look on my face, whisper directly into his ear. “I don’t need to be saved, Adam Shepherd. I may not have a lot of control over what happens at home but here, with you, I get a say. And I’m not wearing that f*****g helmet.”

He smirks at me with what I assume to be admiration. “Okay,” he says without the smirk dissipating. “Now get on the damn bike, ya’ badass.” It’s not condescending, and I know it’s not because he doesn’t mention the helmet that I just ruined or ask me to put it on.

I approach the bike again and lift my leg to swing it over the seat, a chill breeze suddenly making me aware of what I’m wearing " and more specifically what I’m not wearing. He chuckles at me, as he lifts the wind-mask on his helmet so he can speak to me again. “You don’t know how to get on, do you?”

“Hush, you,” I say to quiet him as I swing my legs in different directions, trying to see which way will allow me to get onto the bike without my dress catching the wheel. There’s one option I can think of, but it will leave me pretty vulnerable.

“I won’t look if you don’t want me to. I promise.” Adam must be thinking the same thing, because his promise addresses my concern perfectly.

I offer a shy smile at him before grabbing the material at the bottom of my dress in two handfuls. “Eyes closed, cowboy.” He does as I tell him to do, and with his eyes no longer a concern I hike up the material until it’s all in front of me and above my hips before swinging my left leg over the back of the bike. My pelvis slams down onto the back of the bike, nothing but a thin pair of panties separating the most intimate part of my body from the seat that Adam is also sitting on. The bunched up dress separates my chest from his back, though, so that helps calm my nerves a little.

Just a little. Shannon may joke about Candy Corn being this badass alter-ego, but inside the nerve-racked Candice Cornell still lives.

And having my bare a*s on the seat of a motorcycle is definitely a big nerve-trigger.