My two high school nemeses were looking the most uncertain I'd seen them in ages while the man who wasn't my mate strode up to them confidently and said, "Let me take a look. I'm kind of an expert."
They looked at him, then past him to me. Some of the bewilderment left their faces as they grew cunning and nasty again. "Friend of yours, is he?"
I grimaced at the stupidly familiar sound of their mean voices. Assholes.
"No, just someone I work with," Charlie said distractedly.
My mouth went dry. Okay, now that hurt — and he hadn't even been trying this time.
The boys raised their brows. "Oooh. Just someone you work with. Now, I could've sworn..." Doug took a deep, ostentatious sniff. "Could've sworn he was one of yours." He made a crude jerking-off movement with one hand, his eyes gleaming at the excitement of mocking me.
Jerks. "He's helping you," I pointed out in a rigid voice. "You might want to be polite."
"To you?" They both snorted and then guffawed, slapping their knees to drive the point home extra hard.
"He can't even get some tail when he works with another one of 'em," said Doug to Devin in an aside, as if he was pretending I couldn't overhear.
I tightened my hands into fists at my sides, my heartbeat speeding up as I tried not to visibly steam at the ears. They'd always been able to push my buttons, the assholes, but this had to be a new low. Not that they could possibly guess how much Charlie meant to me or how much it hurt that he'd never want me. And Charlie, of course, was completely obvious to everything except the engine.
"I can fix it to hold long enough for you to get to a garage," he said to the inside of the car. "But you almost certainly need a new fuel pump, at the least."
We all looked at him as he made this pronouncement, then back at each other, hostilities ready to be resumed.
"Do you have any duct tape?" called Charlie.
"I'll get it," said Devin. He swerved around to the passenger side and slumped inside, then rummaged in the glove compartment. Of course they had duct tape; how else would they keep this stupid thing running?
He returned, slapped the tape into Charlie's impatiently outstretched hand, and then returned to his buddy's side, arms crossed.What a jerk.
Doug gave me a shit-eating grin and then transferred his rapt attention to Charlie's ass. He spread the fingers of one hand wide and held it out, as if he was ready to cup and squeeze.
He wouldn't do it. He wasn't so much of a jerk that he'd sexually harass somebody who was in the middle of helping him. I didn't think. No, he was doing it to get a rise out of me — and it was working. Steam was almost certainly pouring out of my ears.
"What do you think, Radner?" he said, raising his voice. "A real peach, huh?"
I started grinding my teeth. A sharp pain jutted up from my jaw into my forehead. It felt like a migraine beginning.
Back in school, they used to play the asshole card full tilt. Rating people's butts, mostly the girls, of course, and mostly related to various fruits. It was disgusting; more than one girl had ended up in tears because of a nasty rating from one of them. Even their "compliments" had been degrading and objectifying. Nobody had really liked these guys back then — and nobody liked them now, either. At least, that was what I told myself, because if the truth was that people liked jerks just as well as anyone else, I didn't know how to handle that.
To be fair to them, these assholes were clearly genius in at least one way. This was their first time seeing me in years, and they'd honed in on my exact weakest spot, the place where tormenting me would hurt the very worst.Charlie.
He would always be my weak spot, wouldn't he?
I needed to stop caring so damned much. I had to wean myself off it, somehow. Maybe when he wasn't on the team anymore... I could barely swallow the howl of sadness that rose up inside me at the thought.
Charlie looked back at us suddenly with a troubled, distracted expression. Doug barely jerked back in time to avoid accidentally touching a butt.
"Something wrong?" He sounded vague, and he sought out my gaze to confirm or deny. Surely, he could hear my heart beating hard, smell the anger on me, and see the flush on my face. He didn't have to ask.
Why was he so clueless all the time?
I glared at him. "Would you just hurry up, Mr. Good Samaritan? I thought we had places to be?"
He shrugged and went back to work, unselfconscious about his ass. I wanted to move to stand in front of him, to guard him from their stares. Instead, I crossed my arms and glared at them.
"How's it going, boys? Earning lots of sweet folding cash from working at the fast food joints?"
The dart hit home; Devin reddened and looked angry; Doug shuffled his feet and looked embarrassed. Okay, so that was a shitty thing to say, but I wasn't playing nice after that "peach" display. Shitheads.
