Another text vibrated on my phone.
Hunter: Good thing I didn’t sneak over there to fool around, huh?
“Good thing,” I muttered to myself.
32
Hunter
I wanted Erica with every fiber of my being. It took every ounce of restraint I had not to smash through the bathroom door like the Kool-Aid Man and take her, hard and fast, the way I had been dreaming of.
Oh yeah.
But I couldn’t have her. Not yet. Not while Brad was around, and not while Erica was afraid to tell her brother about us.
So I waited, and threw what should have been sexual energy into enthusiasm for fixing up the Mustang.
Erica’s dad had gotten close. The Mustang didn’t need much work before it would be purring like a kitten and roaring like a tiger. If Mrs. Porter had never gotten sick, he might have gotten to experience it himself.
Life sucked sometimes, that was for sure.
While laying on my back underneath the rear axle, I felt a wave of guilt for leaving five years ago. If I had stayed with the Porters that summer, wedefinitelywould have finished the car. He could have had it for the past five years. It would have been his pride and joy, something to take out on weekends rather than sitting under a sheet in the garage.
Like I said: life sucked sometimes.
I set up my camera and recorded background video of me working on the car. It would make for a good video when everything was done.
For my channel on YouTube, I made three different kinds of videos. The first were videos about car models, the new features they had in them, and comparisons to other cars in the same class. The second kind were engineering heavy. Gear shift ratios, fuel economy, the different kinds of engines and transmissions. I used my whiteboard and explained the math and physics behind the machinery.
Not bad for a kid who skipped college.
The third kind of video was project-oriented, like the Mustang. Taking a broken-down car and fixing it up. I didn’t have a lot of these videos, because they were labor-intensive and because it was tough to get my hands on cars that neededsomework, but not too much.
But these videos generated a lot of views on YouTube. I was excited to get the Mustang up and running so I could piece together one of these videos and add it to the channel.
After recording a segment in the garage, I wiped the grease off my hands and went inside for lunch. Erica had the day off from the brewery, but she was hunched over her laptop in the dining room, squinting at the screen.
“Hard at work?” I asked.
Her face lit up when she saw me. “Hi! Yeah, I’ve been finalizing some stuff for the past hour. Wow, is it lunch time already?” She blinked at her phone.
“Sure is.”
Erica got up and went to the fridge. She was wearing a yellow sundress that made me die a little inside when she bent down to retrieve the deli meat from the bottom drawer of the fridge. And based on the small smile she gave me when she turned around, she knew it, too.
I gave her a little glare, but nothing more. Brad was on the living room couch, typing away on his laptop. He was oblivious to what was happening, but that didn’t mean we could get careless.
“What kind of business stuff are you finalizing?” I asked.
“Ordering demo gems,” she said in a long, exhausted exhale. “One for each jeweler that plans to offer our gemstones in their store, so they can show their customers. People like to touch and feel what they’re going to buy.”
I lowered my voice and said, “I’d like to touch and feelyou.”
She giggled and whispered, “Stop it.”
I gave her ass a pinch through her sun dress. Her eyebrows shot up with surprise, which made me grin harder.
“We still going over the advertising plan tonight?” I asked. “My marketing guy wants to know if you have any questions.”