Velvet by Temple West

back looking like this.”
    Adrian smiled with the corner of his mouth, and it was adorable. “No,” he said. “I suppose you can’t.”
    “Trish won’t want to go. She’s having a good time. I don’t want to make her leave because of me.”
    “Do you want to stay?”
    I looked back up at him, miserable and dizzy. “No.”
    “Come on.” He handed me my shoes and led me out the door and back into the party. Despite my paranoia, nobody paid any attention to us since truth or dare was still going on and apparently some of the girls had agreed to interesting dares.
    I stopped abruptly in the middle of the crowd. “What about Trish?” In my inebriated state, it sounded more like “Trissssssh.”
    He glanced through the horde, but neither of us could spot her. “Text her that I’ll bring you over before her parents are awake.”
    I thought about it a second. I didn’t want to stay. I couldn’t go to the ranch. I couldn’t go to Trish’s. “Where are we going?”
    He smiled with the corner of his mouth again. “My home.”
    Little warning bells dinged loudly in my head. Or maybe that was the headache. “Won’t your parents wonder about you bringing me home so late? Dressed like this?” I clutched my cloak around my shoulders and shivered like a crazy old cat lady.
    “First of all, I live with my aunt and uncle,” he explained. “Second, we don’t even have to see them; there’s a balcony connected to my room and we can get in through there. But they wouldn’t mind either way.”
    “Are you sure?” I asked.
    “Caitlin,” he said, crouching down to make eye contact. “I won’t take you anywhere you don’t want to go.”
    I searched his face. He wasn’t lying. At least he didn’t seem like he was lying. I honestly don’t think there was a way I would have known at that point, but his face looked like one of those sincere, non-lying faces.
    I nodded. “Okay.”
    We slipped out the barn doors. I grabbed his arm so I didn’t fall into the man-size potholes littering the dirt-and-gravel parking lot. He didn’t seem to mind. Once we got to his bike, it occurred to both of us that I was wearing a dress.
    “Hmm,” I said, contemplating the logistics. “This will work. Just don’t be staring at my business.”
    Holding on to him, I hiked my dress up and swung my leg over, the fabric bunched up to my thighs, the leather of the seat freezing against my skin. Adrian grabbed his coat from one of the saddlebags and put it over my shoulders.
    “Won’t you be cold?” I asked, already shivering.
    “I’ll be fine. I’m just worried about you. I forgot to factor in the whole”—he looked at my legs—“dress issue.”
    “I’m fine if you’re fine.”
    He stared at my legs again. “I’m fine.”
    I shivered, waiting for him to get on the bike.
    He cleared his throat. “Right.”
    I shoved my helmet on (did he always carry around a spare helmet?) and slid my arms around his waist.
    It felt a lot different when he wasn’t wearing a jacket.
    Adrian had very nice abs.
    I poked them just to make sure they were real, and he turned around to look at me strangely. I decided to stop poking him.
    The headlight cut through the night as the Harley revved away from the barn, the beat of the music fading quickly behind us. We picked up speed until I was sure we were breaking the limit by a good twenty or thirty miles, or maybe it just felt like that because my eyes couldn’t focus on anything.
    God, it was cold.
    My arms were fine because of the cloak and Adrian’s jacket, and my face was fine because it was completely covered by the helmet, but my legs felt like they were being whipped with lashes made of ice. Overhead, the moon shone brightly through a few clouds and cast the road ahead into odd shadows, making the whole strange night even more bizarre. The woods on either side of the road were like zippers pulling closed behind us. If we didn’t go fast enough we’d get eaten up in their teeth,