She’d always called me on my shit. At least that hasn’t changed. I know where she lives—in a shotgun house off the main highway. I’ll admit I’d followed her home a few times after the track. I needed to find out as much about her life as I could; I couldn’t chance her trying to run again. I couldn’t lose her.
I pull in her driveway next to her beat up old car. “You didn’t drive tonight?”
“Nope. That’s why you gave me ride home,” she smirks.
“What’s wrong with it?” I ask.
“Nothing Crank can’t fix.”
“Crank?”
“Track mechanic.”
“Ah, right. The kid who checked out my car the other night,” I say.
“That’s him,” she says as she opens the passenger door. “You might as well come in. We both know you ain’t gonna leave.”
That damn smirk is plastered on my face again. I turn the car off and follow her inside her house. It’s as small as it looks from the outside. We walk into a quaint living room. Minimum décor, light neutral colors—the total opposite of Shady’s personality.
I follow her into the kitchen, which is equally as quaint. A small window over the sink looks out into the backyard. The daisy patterned curtains covering them are the most lively thing I’ve seen in this house so far.
“Beer?” Shady asks, pulling my attention back to her.
“Sure.”
She pulls two beers out of her dated fridge and pops the top off one before handing it to me. She plops down into a wooden chair at the small, round kitchen table and takes a long pull of her beer. A small sigh escapes her lips as I take the seat across from her.
“What do you want, Nikolas?”
“You know what I want,” I say to her as I take a pull from my bottle.
“You want a fantasy. A dream,” she says. Her eyes glaze over. Her thoughts are in the past.
I sit up and look down at the table, contemplating my next words. The books sitting on the edge of the table next to me distract me from my train of thought. Textbooks. Macroeconomics. Information Systems.
“You taking classes?” I ask.
She glances up to me then over to the books. “Yeah, online. For business.”
“Nice. How long you have left?” I ask.
“In my last semester.” She gulps down the rest of her beer and gets up, leaving me nursing my own.
She drops her bottle in a trashcan next to the fridge before turning back to me. Her eyes narrow and she cocks her hip, leaning against the countertop. “Look, I don’t know what you want from me but you’re not going to get it. I’ve got a life here, one that I love. If you’re looking to get me to go back with you, I’m not going. Might as well carry your ass back home and tell whoever is paying you that I’m lost forever.”
I watch the storm radiate off her. I lift up my beer and take another swig before slowly setting it back down on the table.
“Did you hear me? Go back home and pretend you never found me,” she says. Her words tell me to leave, but the wavering in her voice, the lack of total confidence, says otherwise.
I stand up and slowly make my way to her. With each step I take, she stands straighter, taller. She always was a fighter.
But even as kids, I was the only person who could get through her anger.
Shady
“I’m not going anywhere,” Niko growls, looming over me. “No asshole paid me. I found you because I wanted to.”
He looks at me as if I’m his, like he owns me. But the joke’s on him. No one owns me. He can take his panty-dropping looks back to the hell he crawled out of.