No Judgments

by Meg Cabot

  A part of me didn’t want to respond. A part of me warned, Just get on your bike and ride away, Bree.

  But another, stronger part of me just kept talking. This is another problem I have. Sometimes, I’m Sabrina, painfully shy. Other times, I’m Bree, who can’t seem to shut up.

  “The likelihood of my being attacked on my way home is so small that it’s statistically insignificant,” I informed him. “You’re aware that in the majority of sexual assaults against women, the victim knows her attacker?”

  Drew stared at me, dumbfounded. “Are you saying that you think I—?”

  “No,” I said, instantly mortified. Why couldn’t I listen to the part of me that was painfully shy, get on my bike, and ride away? But I couldn’t. I was as welded to the spot as the streetlamp beside me. “Of course not. I’m just saying that it’s highly unlikely I’m going to be assaulted by a stranger on my way home tonight, despite what your aunt may think. It’s not really her fault. She, like so many others, has fallen victim to Mean World Syndrome, something I know a lot about because my mother makes her living off it.”

  His dark eyebrows furrowed. “Mean world syndrome? What—” He stopped and, as if only just registering what I’d said. “Your mother?”

  “Yes, my mother. She’s a judge. Judge Justine.”

  “Your mother is Judge Justine . . . Justice with Judge Justine from the radio?” His hands went to his dark hair, causing it to stand more riotously on end than usual. “But she’s . . . famous.”

  “Yes.” I stuck out my chin. I’d dug my grave. Now I had to lie in it. “Yes, she is. And not only from the radio. She also did that stint on—”

  He said it along with me. “Dancing with the Stars.”

  He stared at me, as if completely reevaluating who I was—and what to think of me.

  I didn’t blame him. I’d have been reevaluating me, too. All this time he’d thought me one person—Bree, the plucky, long-working, pink-haired waitress, living entirely on her own.

  And now suddenly I’d morphed before his eyes into this other person, Sabrina Beckham, with a famous radio personality millionaire mother, one who was no doubt always there to help out financially . . . except of course he didn’t know I was barely speaking to her, or that I’d come to this island in the first place to get away from her, because she, like my ex, had broken my heart.

  I probably shouldn’t have told him.

  But I couldn’t help feeling as if Drew Hartwell, of all people, deserved to know the truth. At least this way he’d stop thinking I was some dumb Fresh Water.

  “So what is Judge Justine’s daughter doing here, of all places?” Drew asked, finally, spreading his hands wide to indicate the whole of Little Bridge. “Working as a waitress in my aunt’s diner?”

  “It’s a café,” I reminded him, stiffly.

  “Whatever.”

  “I’m . . . I’m taking a break to work through some things.”

  I saw his gaze narrow. “Drugs,” he said, finally.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’d be thinking drugs if I hadn’t seen you every morning at eight A.M. for the past few months, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

  “See,” I said, slamming the wedge heel of my sandal into my kickstand, then hopping onto my bike. The thought of him thinking about my tail—metaphorical or not—was unsettling. In a good or bad way, I couldn’t tell. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. That kind of negativity—my mother’s perfected it, all in order to engage her listeners. She uses fear—fear that the world is a much more dangerous place than it actually is, that if a girl takes a break for a while to work through some things, she must be on drugs, or that if she walks home at night by herself that she’s going to get sexually assaulted—to convince others that the world is this dangerous and unforgiving place. But it isn’t. Or at least, for the most part, it isn’t. I mean, yes, bad things do happen. My dad died last year—but of cancer, not from being murdered, or anything. And—and, well, bad things have happened to me, too, but it was because of someone I knew, and thought I could trust. Bad things happen to everyone sometimes. That’s just life. I don’t believe the only safe thing to do now is stay home and put bars on my windows and invest my money in gold coins from the U.S. Treasury—”

  “Hey,” he said, gently. He’d taken a step forward and wrapped his fingers around my handlebars to keep me from riding off. “Bree. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that crack about you taking drugs. Obviously, you’re the last person who would ever do drugs. You’re way too uptight.”

  I rolled my eyes at him. “Thanks a lot.”

  “And a real addict would have gone to Miami. Or Key West. There are no drugs here in Little Bridge. At least, no hard stuff.”

  Frowning, I stared down at his fingers. In the misty light from the streetlamp, I could see that the knuckles were still raw from where they’d come in contact with Rick Chance’s jaw.

  The back of his hand was also lightly furred in dark hair, the same finely textured hair I’d seen when he’d lifted his shirt that morning, making a vee down his taut stomach before disappearing beneath the waistband of his shorts.

  Just the reminder caused a tingle in a place I’d sworn to keep away from men for the foreseeable future.

  And yet all I could think about was how those hands might feel on my bare skin.

  “Let go of my bike,” I said in a strangled voice, lifting my gaze to his.

  “No. Look. I’m sorry about your father. I didn’t know. I just . . . Bree—” His voice sounded as choked as my own.

  Suddenly, one of those warm, calloused hands closed over my own. The second his skin touched mine, I felt something akin to an electric jolt course through my body.

  Except it wasn’t electricity. It was desire.

  Oh, no. This couldn’t be happening. I could not want Drew Hartwell. I could not.

  Who knows what might have happened next if the street hadn’t been abruptly lit up by a shaft of lightning so brilliant, it cast everything into stark white relief, bright as daylight. For a split second, I could see every smile line in his darkly tanned face, every threadbare patch on his faded blue shirt, every dark eyelash rimming those ocean blue eyes.

  Then we were once again plunged into semidarkness, and thunder crashed so loudly that I started, ripping my hand from his and nearly dropping my bike in alarm.

  “Wow,” Drew said, looking up. The clouds overhead were racing by at a noticeably more rapid pace, while the leaves of the gumbo-limbo trees had begun to tussle along with the palm fronds in the wind. “Something’s on its way, all right. Must be one of the first—”

  Feeder bands, is what he’d probably been about to say. They were the outermost rain bands of the hurricane, and the meteorologists had been telling us to expect them all day.

  But another crack of thunder, so loud and long it seemed to reverberate in my chest, cut him off.

  When it was finished rumbling, Drew glanced at his wrist. Like many islanders, he wore a heavy, water-resistant dive watch on an ancient-looking leather band.

  “Right on time,” he commented.

  I looked up at the sky, and the dark clouds sliding across it, and felt relieved. Not only because now I had a perfect excuse to escape—him, and whatever that white-hot flash of yearning had been that had shot through me at his touch. I couldn’t. I wasn’t ready. Not for this. Yet.

  “If you mean rain, I’m out of here,” I said. “This dress is dry clean only. Good-bye.”

  I tugged on my bike to get him to release it, but he only held on tighter.

  “Come on,” he said. “Don’t go. You did do me a solid tonight, so allow me to return the favor. I’ve got my truck here. Why don’t you let me drive you home before it starts to pour?”

  I burst out laughing.

  “Just how much of a Fresh Water do you think I am, anyway?” I asked, thinking of all of Angela’s warnings about him—that pickup truck of his, never parked in front of the same woman’s h
ouse twice. This was exactly the sort of offer a player like Drew Hartwell would make. “I’m not going anywhere with you. I’m going home, like I said. By myself.”

  I reached out to pluck his fingers from my handlebars, and this time, he did let go.

  “See you later, Drew.” I swung my bike around and began pedaling.

  He let me go. But not without trying to get the last word.

  “Phone my aunt when you get home, so she knows you got there safely,” he called after me.

  I waved—without looking back—to indicate that I’d heard.

  I was grateful my back was to him, though, so he couldn’t see through the thin material of my dress how hard my heart was hammering.

  Chapter Eleven

  Emergency Disaster Survival Kit Basics—Home

  First aid kit

  Prescription medicines

  Painkillers

  Mosquito repellant

  Watertight, easy-to-carry container to store essential documents such as cash and family records (birth certificates, proof of occupancy, important phone numbers in case your cell phone becomes inoperable, insurance documents, passports, bank and credit account numbers, etc.)

  I reached home just before the heavens burst. I thought about poor Mrs. Hartwell’s party, and hoped they’d managed to save the brisket.

  I texted Angela to tell her I’d made it home all right (I hadn’t seen another soul on the street), and asked her to let Mrs. Hartwell know, as well.

  Angela texted back that she would, and also let me know that it was a shame I’d left the party early: after the rain started, everyone had moved inside to the dining room, where they’d pushed back the furniture and begun dancing to “Rock You Like a Hurricane” and other storm-related hits.

  I figured I could live with the disappointment.

  Gary was waiting for me just inside the door, as always. I don’t know how he always knew exactly when it was me coming through the courtyard gate, but somehow, he did, and managed to race from his usual perch at the end of my bed to the front door before I even managed to turn the key.

  “Hey, big boy,” I said to him, as he launched a purring assault on my feet. “How have you been? What have you been up to while I was gone?”

  The answer was: licked his food bowl clean, dragged every toy from his basket to the middle of the living room, and generally acted like a well-adjusted, well-loved cat.

  After I was done texting Angela, I opened another can of food for him (chicken, his favorite, though I had to shred it a little with a fork before serving due to his lack of teeth), while listening to the eleven o’clock update from the storm hunters, which had just come on over the news.

  No change in Hurricane Marilyn’s strength or direction, let alone the urgency in the voices of the meteorologists. Anyone in its path was doomed.

  I should have known my mother would have been watching the same forecast. My phone rang, and the words Judge Justine flashed across the screen. I’d never been able to list her as Mom in my contacts. She’d always been Judge Justine.

  I felt guilty because it had been so long since I’d last talked to her, and the forecasts were so frightening. She had to be going out of her mind.

  “Things can’t get worse, right, big boy?” I asked Gary, whose only reply was a satisfied grunt. He was chowing down on his chicken medley as if he hadn’t eaten in days, when in fact it had been only a couple of hours.

  I pressed Call.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said.

  “So you finally picked up,” rasped the voice enjoyed by millions of daily listeners. “You’d better be on your way out of there!”

  “I’m not, Mom.” I slipped off my wedges and hauled a can of sparkling water from the fridge. This was going to be a long conversation. “I’m sure Caleb told you I’m staying put.”

  “Sabrina.” How did she manage to inject so much disappointment into so few syllables? “Why? Why on earth would you do something so foolish? That’s not how your father and I raised you. Have you even seen what they’re saying on the news?”

  “Yeah, I have, Mom.” I unclipped my bra, slipping it out from beneath my dress and letting it drop to the floor before settling down on the couch. “And I’m going to be fine. Lots of people here aren’t evacuating.”

  “Oh,” she said, in her loftiest Judge Justine tone. “And have those people been through Category Five hurricanes before?”

  “Mom.” I cracked open my soda. “Give it a rest.”

  “I just don’t understand it,” she said. “Explain it to me, Sabrina. A very nice man—a man who wanted to marry you, by the way. That’s right, Caleb told me—offers to come rescue you from a Category Five hurricane in his private jet, and you tell him no?”

  “He’s not that nice of a man.” I lifted the remote and changed the channel on the TV. But it was no good. Daniella and I had only basic cable, and storm coverage was on every station except PBS and the ones dedicated to sports and home shopping. And on PBS they were having a fund-raising drive.

  “Why are you still blaming Caleb for Kyle’s actions?” Mom demanded.

  “I don’t blame Caleb for Kyle’s actions. I blame Caleb for continuing to be friends with Kyle after I told him what Kyle did.”

  “In my day,” Mom said, ignoring this, “we would have called what Kyle did a bad date.”

  I rolled my eyes. She’d said this before.

  “I know, Mom,” I said. “There are only two things wrong with that. One, I wasn’t dating Kyle. I was dating Caleb. And two, if that’s what they used to call a bad date in your day, I shudder to think what they’d call assault.”

  “Oh, Sabrina,” my mother said, exhaling gustily into the phone. “What happened to you wasn’t sexual assault. If you talked to some of the women who call into my show, they could tell you about sexual assault.”

  “I’m sure they could.” I’d had to learn patience over the years in order to be able to deal with some of the things that came out of my mother’s mouth. “I feel very badly for them. Do you make sure to tell them that the best thing for them to do is invest in gold, like it says during all the commercials on your show?”

  Mom’s patience with me, on the other hand, was running out. I could tell by the clipped tone in her voice.

  “That is neither here nor there,” she said. “And you know most of my audience don’t have so much as a savings account, let alone a 401(k). They could do worse than investing in a few gold coins.”

  “Okay,” I said, as Gary, done with his evening meal, leaped onto the couch and came purring into my lap, ready for his nightly ear scratching. “Well, it’s been fun chatting with you, but I have to go to bed now. I’m working the breakfast shift tomorrow.”

  “It’s not too late, you know,” my mother said in desperation, just before I moved to hang up. “If you won’t accept a ride from Caleb, I can still send a plane myself.”

  “Mom, the airport here is closed.”

  “To commercial traffic. But I talked to your uncle Steen”—her entertainment lawyer, and not my real uncle; my parents had no siblings—“and he says he knows one of the executives with NetJets, and they can have a jet fly down there to pick you up tomorrow morning, as a personal favor.”

  “Mom.” The rain outside had stopped. I could no longer hear it beating on the metal shutters. All I could hear was Gary’s loud, staccato purring as he lay on me, his paws gently kneading my belly. He was blissfully unaware of the tension I was feeling. He wanted only for my fingers to continue stroking his furry gray ears. “That’s really nice of Uncle Steen. But I told you: I’m not leaving.”

  My mother sighed again into the phone. “Well, you’ll call me when you change your mind. God willing it won’t be too late.”

  I grinned. This was such a Judge Justine kind of statement.

  “God willing,” I said. “Good night, Mom.”

  “Good night, Sabrina. Remember, I love you.”

  This was a new thing. We’d never been the sort o
f family that said “I love you.” Not that we hadn’t loved one another, we’d just never said it out loud . . . not until after Dad had died, and I’d found out that my mother and I weren’t actually related—not by blood, anyway.

  “There just never seemed to be a good time to mention it,” Mom had said when I’d asked why she’d never told me about how I’d been conceived. “You were always such a serious, anxious little kid. I didn’t want to stress you out more than was necessary.”

  So it was better for me to find out the truth in my twenties, from a commercial DNA testing kit, purchased by one of my best friends as a joke to cheer me up?

  “I love you, too, Mom,” I said now, meaning it, and hung up.

  I looked at Gary, snuggled up on my stomach, still furiously kneading my belly with his paws.

  “I love you, too, little man,” I said, cupping his sweet face with my hands. “I love you more than anything in the whole wide world. And I promise to take the best, best care of you, and protect you since you can’t protect yourself.”

  Gary responded by purring harder, then flexing his front claws and sinking them through the material of my dress.

  “Ow, Jesus!” I cried, and rolled him onto the floor, where he meowed plaintively, not understanding why his petting session had come to such an abrupt end.

  But that was often the way with males. It took some of them longer than others to learn not to play too rough.

  Chapter Twelve

  Time: 5:17 A.M.

  Temperature: 80ºF

  Wind Speed: 19 MPH

  Wind Gust: 35 MPH

  Precipitation: 0.6 in.

  Emergency Disaster Survival Kit Basics—Home

  Gasoline

  Propane

  Coolers

  Gloves

  Garbage bags

  Battery-charged radio

  Batteries

  Flashlights