~*~*~*~ "I will speak daggers to her, but use none." ~*~*~*~
"Miss Grey." Adrian stood beside a black Lexus, a tall, well-dressed man beside him that I assumed was to him what Taylor was to us. "How were your last two classes?"
"Fine, thank you," I answered him politely. Around him, it seemed, I never knew how to act. Polite one minute, joking the next, quoting Shakespeare… He had me all across the map. "How did your lecturing go?"
He gave a small smile and turned to open the door to the backseat for me. "Let's just say that I'm glad it's over. Shall we depart?"
Instead of answering, I folded myself as gracefully as possible into the back of his Lexus. It smelled like leather and laundry detergent and mint. And when Adrian folded himself in after me, it also smelled like that delicious cologne that almost made my mouth water.
"La Blanc, Arthur," he called to his companion once he was behind the driver's seat. The one apparently named Arthur gave him a nod and then we were off, pulling away from the safety of the school and into the unknown. The thought made me shiver with nerves and anticipation.
"You seem nervous," he noted, observing me closely.
I blushed and looked out the window on my side, hoping that he wouldn't notice. It was clouding up, after all, so there wasn't a ton of natural light… "I'm not nervous."
He chuckled, almost darkly. "How you lie, Miss Grey."
Of course he could see right through me. I'd never been the most spectacular of liars. And as if that wasn't bad enough, my conscience began to harp on me. Are you absolutely insane? You just got into a car and are driving off into the unknown with a man that you hardly know! Sure, he says you're going to La Blanc, but he could take you anywhere that you want and you would be helpless. Not only is he surely stronger than you, but he has a companion with him that looks young and strong. What are you going to do? Sarah knows that you're with him and what the plan is, but she also promised not to tell on you. If you didn't come back to school, she would assume that you decided to sleep with him or something. No one would know what had happened to you…
"Are your thoughts running away with you, Miss Grey?"
Holy crap… How did he know that? I cleared my throat. "Just wondering what I'm going to have at La Blanc; I haven't eaten there in quite a while. You managed to get reservations?"
He snorted, as if the very insinuation that he couldn't get reservations was an insult. "Of course I did, Phoebe."
Phoebe… Is that the first time he's called me by my first name? He always called me 'Miss Grey', and that had been fine with me because I had always hated the name Phoebe. But he made it sound… okay. I still would have preferred a more normal name like Anna or Kristen or Casey, but Phoebe was all right, too.
"Good," I said softly and looked back out the window, trying to guess how long it would be until it rained. I was going to miss the super frequent rain showers when I moved away from Seattle. I thought that rain was one of the most natural beauties of the earth. It refreshed plant life, created fun splash puddles, and played a beautiful rhythm on car roofs and windows and trees. I would never get enough of rain.
"Please tell me what you're thinking," he said softly after several long moments of silence. "I can't tell."
Raising an eyebrow, I looked over at him. "Should you be able to tell?"
"Usually, I can," he answered honestly and then frowned slightly. "But with you… I don't know. You can be hard to read sometimes."
"I'll take that as a compliment," I told him and turned once more to look out the window. "I don't want to be an open book; that's what Shakespeare is for."
He hummed and I thought it was in amusement, but I couldn't be entirely sure. He was harder to read than I was. "Have you decided what you'll be ordering?"
"Not yet." La Blanc's menu had actually been the farthest thing from my mind. "What about you?"
"I've not yet decided, either." As he finished his sentence, the rain began to fall not in the gentle smattering of sprinkles, but all at once, a rushing wave of rain blown by a fierce wind.
I smiled and pressed myself a little closer to the window, looking out at the beauty of the storm. And just as I raised my hand to press it against the glass, I felt him move next to me, until his body was all but pressed into mine.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" he breathed into my ear. "The unrestrained power."
He likes the rain, too? "Yes," I breathed back at him, my breath slightly fogging the window. "Beautiful."
We stayed like that for several long minutes and just when I could take it no longer and was about to turn and ask him to kiss me, he moved away, back to his seat on the other side of the car. It wasn't much distance, but it felt like a chasm in that moment and I had a feeling that he knew it.
When we arrived at La Blanc, Arthur opened my door and held an umbrella over me so that I could get into the restaurant without getting wet. Adrian must have had an umbrella, too, because he wasn't wet when he gave the name to the hostess, who took us to our seats immediately. Adrian ordered wine for himself and I ordered a water with lime. We looked over our menus in silence, received our drinks, and gave our orders to the waiter.
Finally, Adrian looked up at me with this dark, depthless look in his eyes. It sent shivers down my spine.
"It's rude to stare, you know," I told him, attempting to be brave, before I unfolded my napkin and set it in my lap.
"Then I'll be rude," he declared matter-of-factly.
"I'm sure you were raised better than that," I told him and reached for my water glass. Why is my mouth so dry?
"My mother can roll in her grave," he said, shocking me into looking up at him. He was calmly swirling the wine in his glass, looking at it almost with fascination. "Miss Grey," he said and looked up into my eyes, a smirk curving his lips. "It's rude to stare."
Face flaming, I looked down at my water glass. "I wasn't."
"So you claim." Before I could rebut, the waiter came back with our food – they had really double-timed it – and then we were alone once more with our food. To distract myself from my swirling thoughts, I set to work pouring the dressing on my salad before digging in. I wasn't going to let him make me uncomfortable.
"I tried to stay away from you, you know," he said halfway through our silent meal.
I looked up at him in confusion and found him looking at me with something like a bittersweet sadness. "Tried to stay away from me? What do you mean? Why?"
"Isn't it obvious?" he asked me, and I could tell that he truly thought it was. "You're an angel, Phoebe Grey, and I'm the devil. I shouldn't ask you to fall with me."
I almost protested with outrage until I realized that he hadn't said 'fall for me'. He had said 'fall with me', whatever that meant. Collecting myself, I asked him, "You're saying you're no good for me?"
He nodded and took another sip of his wine. "So I told myself to stay away from you, because you didn't need that in your life." He paused. "But sin always seems to find its way to me anyway, so it was really no use. I was a goner from the moment you stumbled – literally – upon me at that party."
The sincerity in his voice and his eyes made my heart begin to pound… but in a good way. "I don't think that sin finds people, Adrian. People are attracted to sin; it's the human condition."
He smiled at me. "Perhaps you're right, Miss Grey."
"Is that a scary concept for you?" I asked him boldly. "You being wrong about something?"
"No," he responded seriously. "I know that I am frequently wrong, Miss Grey. In fact, I operate better in the black and grey areas of life than I do in the white."
"Why do you suppose that is?" Why are you still sitting here?! You need to get away from this guy! He's bad news! Run! Run!
He considered this for a moment, finishing off the last of his wine before he finally answered. "I suppose it is, in part, a choice that I made when I turned sixteen. But I also think that it's a part of me that I was born with. Like how some people just naturally prefer blue to red. It's inexplicable."
"So what are your blues and reds?" I asked him, even though my conscience was still screaming at me to get away from him and never look back.
He was no longer looking at me, but appeared to be lost in his own thoughts. "Do you really want to know?" he asked me softly.
"Yes."
Nodding absentmindedly, he signaled for the check and then looked into my eyes. "Then you won't be going back to school today, Miss Grey. I suggest that you go and make the necessary arrangements."