From the Damage 1 - Opposites Attract (3 page)

“That’s because I kinda have been.” Turning, Kelly grabbed a coffee cup and, even though the white chocolate would’ve been delicious, she began filling the cup with French Vanilla just to be defiant.

“Don’t you think that’s a little...
rude
?”

She laughed as she snapped the lid onto her coffee cup. “Rude? Alex, I don’t care if I’m rude to you.” And with that she spun on her heel and walked away from him, heading for the cashier.

Circling around her, he stepped into her path. “Kelly, wait. Please just talk to me, okay?”

“What is there to talk about? You made things
crystal clear
.”

“I just wanted to see how you’re doing. You know…after everything that happened—”

“I’m fine,” Kelly said before he could finish, before he could cut open that wound she was trying so desperately to heal.

He stared at her with a look that said he saw right through the façade, just like he always did. “Come on, Kelly. It’s me.”

Kelly sighed, finally forcing herself to look at him. Every time she looked into those blue eyes, she was carried back to the prior year, when she’d been crazy-in-love with him and thought they’d live happily ever after. That was a dream that quickly shattered. “It’s hard…getting up in the morning, forcing myself to go to school and go through the motions of my day. It’s all just hard. Seeing you is hard. It’s all just really…hard.”

Pity swamping his features, he reached out to touch her arm, but she shrank back, giving him a glare.

“Don’t even think about it,” she whispered, her voice taut with the hushed warning.

“Look...Kel...I know our breakup sucked, but I wish we could just…” He trailed off, his gaze seeking hers as if trying to form a connection. “I don’t know…find a way to be friends, at least.”

Friends
?
After spending so long being his girlfriend, his cheerleader, his shoulder to lean
on when his dad pressured him too much?
They’d been friends—
best
friends—and then he broke her heart. “Alex,” she said, feeling exhausted and drained and just wanting the conversation to be over so she could get back to her cappuccino, “Do we have to do this right now?”

“I just want—”

“I know what you want,” she said with a sigh of aggravation, “but I’m not interested. So just leave me alone. Got it?”

Turning, she quickly walked toward the register, hoping he wouldn’t follow her this time. Seeing him was just too difficult; it brought back too many memories and way too much pain.

≈≈≈

Gage balanced Elizabeth on one hip and used the other to shut the back door to his car. She giggled and grabbed hold of the shiny silver chain around his neck.

He had to smile. “You like that, huh?”

She cooed and yanked on the chain.

He laughed. “Maybe I’ll give it to you someday.”

He maneuvered around the carburetors and motors strewn about the grass and stepped over a bumper and onto the low-sitting front porch built onto the trailer. He pulled open the screen door and went inside. The inside of the trailer was a big improvement from the outside; at least it was spotlessly clean anyway. “Sarah, you here?” he called.

“Of course I’m here.” Sarah stepped into the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands on her apron. “Bring that little darling over.”

He smiled. “She’s in a really good mood today.”

Sarah took Elizabeth and held the little girl in front of her. “How’s my favorite little niecey?”

Elizabeth squealed in response, and they both laughed.

“Mike’s waiting for you in the garage,” she said.

“Right.” Gage handed the diaper bag over to Sarah and lingered for a moment, then bent down and kissed his baby on the forehead. She grabbed hold of his necklace and tried to pull herself back to him. “Lizzie, I have to work,” he explained in a gentle voice, his heart melting. He held her for a minute anyway, then kissed her again and reluctantly handed her back to Sarah.

“Ah, he shows!” Mike called from under the hood of a Buick as Gage walked into the garage.

“Yeah, sorry,” he said. “Shane crashed at my place last night, and I had a hard time waking him up this morning.”

“I thought you didn’t let your friends do that anymore?”

He shrugged. “He needed a place to stay.” He looked around. “What work do you have for me today?”

“A car broke down over at the Stop-n-Shop on Elm Street,” he said. “You want to take that or work on this?”

“I’ll take the pick up,” he said. “What kind of car is it?”

“A green Neon.” Mike tossed him the keys to the tow truck.

Gage headed toward Elm Street, unable to get Lizzie off his mind. He loved that little girl more than he ever thought he could love anybody. At six months old, she was the spitting image of her daddy, with sandy blonde hair and wide, round gray eyes. He had never wanted to have kids after the bang-up job his parents did, and of course he never saw himself as a single father at seventeen, but now that he knew Lizzie and had fallen deeply in love with her, he couldn’t imagine his life without her.

Up ahead, the Stop-n-Shop came into view, and he saw the green Dodge Neon parked on the edge of the parking lot. He pulled over and stopped the tow truck behind it. “Did you call Mike’s?” he asked as he rounded the hood of the car.

“Yeah.” The driver was short and skinny, wearing a pink tank top and khaki capris with designer flip-flops. She wore her blonde hair in a tight braid that ran down to the middle of her back. After looking at her for a minute, he recognized her from The D-UC.
Kelly
. He froze for a second and then turned to the car. “So what’d it do?”

“I don’t know. It just...won’t start.”

He chuckled. “Is it the battery?”

“How should I know?” Kelly asked, shrugging her shoulders. “That’s your job.”

“I guess you’re right.” He leaned under the hood and tinkered with a few things.

“Looks like your fan belt snapped.”

“Is that bad?”

“Your car’s not going to work without it.” He started for the truck. “I’ll tow it to the shop, and you can pick it up in a few hours.”

“But I need my car now,” she said. “I have school.”

“I don’t exactly carry fan belts around with me, and we’re backed up, anyway.

It’ll be after twelve before I can get to it.” He eyed her as he opened the door to the truck. “There’s no one you can call?”

She looked down at the ground.

He rolled his eyes. “Alright. So get in.”

“No, no, it’s okay. I’ll walk.”

“What school do you go to?”

“Clearwater.”

“Well, if you want to walk ten miles, that’s your choice.” He shrugged and hopped in the truck and pulled it in front of the sedan, then got back out to hook up the car for a tow. “But the offer still stands for a lift if you need one,” he said, as he bent down to hook up the towing rig.

“Okay. Thank you.” She sighed and leaned into her car to get her backpack.

They started down the road in silence, with Kelly nervously folding and unfolding her hands.

“So, if you go to Clearwater, what are you doing on my side of town?”

“I had an errand to run.”

“An errand, huh?” He almost laughed at that, because he knew the rich kids from Clearwater only came to Westview for drugs. “You’re awfully preppy to be running errands down here.”

“I’m not preppy.”

He glanced at her, taking in the Abercrombie backpack, the American Eagle logo on her tank top and capris.
Those pants alone must have cost fifty dollars—on sale
, he reasoned and smiled at her in a yeah-right sort of way.

“Okay, so maybe a little preppy.” She sighed and dug in her bag. “You mind if I smoke in here?”

He played his fingers over the grooves in the steering wheel, full-on irritated by his good side, by his offer to give her a ride. “Roll the window down.”

She twisted the knob and slid the window down. She lit a Marlboro Light, and then held the pack out to him. “Want one?”

He eyed the soft pack with the white and gold wrapper as the smell of the smoke flitted to his nostrils and made the nicotine cravings kick in.
If I have one...just one…will it
matter? Yes,
he answered himself. He knew he could never stop at just one, just like those stupid potato chips on that commercial, and he didn’t have the money to waste by picking up the habit again. “No thanks.”

“Ah.” She nodded knowingly and blew her smoke out the window. “You’re what I call one of the converted.”

“Converted?”

“Yeah, you know...the people who quit smoking because television ads tell you it’s bad for you. What they don’t tell you is that you breathe in toxins every day—

especially you, working around cars, with exhaust fumes and stuff.”

He smirked as he turned down the road that led to her school. “Are you some kind of environmentalist or something?”

“No. Well, I used be on the Green Team. It’s our school’s—”

“I know what it is. We had a Green Team at Westview.”

“Oh. Were you on it?”

He laughed. “Hell, no! I was too busy getting arrested.”

The shock that washed over her face had him laughing even harder.

“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “It wasn’t violent crime. Vandalism mostly.”

“Oh.”

Silence fell over the cab of the truck for a few minutes. Then Kelly threw her cigarette out the window and turned to him. “So, that shooting—”

His grip tightened on the wheel as he cut her off. “This isn’t a therapy session.”

“It’s just…Ryder said the shooter was your friend.”

“And I said this isn’t a therapy session.” He tossed her a glare to make her back off.

She shrank back against the door. “Sorry.”

“What about you? Why do you make out with people you’re not dating?”

“I don’t know.” She picked at her fingernails. “He hit on me, and it just kind of happened…I guess I was lonely.”

He’d said it to be mean; he never actually expected her to answer and wasn’t prepared to handle her response. Something in her face made him fight the urge to say something cruel. It took him a minute, but he managed to come up with, “Well, people get lonely sometimes.”

She glanced at him. “Yeah.”

He pulled up in front of the school.

“Thanks.” She pushed the door open. “What do I owe you?”

“I’ll tack it onto the bill,” he said, even though he knew he wouldn’t. “You get out of school at three?”

“Three fifteen, I think.”

He nodded. “I’ll try to have your car back by then.”

She stepped out of the truck. “Thanks.”

“Yep.”

As soon as she shut the door, he took off.

≈≈≈

Meagan walked quickly down the crowded hallway of Clearwater High.

Classmates snickered and sneered in her wake, and she felt her cheeks burn with embarrassment. She was completely unable to shake the feeling that every single one of their jeers were aimed at her.

Stopping at her locker, she saw the word WHORE spray-painted on it in big, bright red letters. At first the word hit her with a sting of pain, but that pain quickly turned to anger.

With her hands on her hips, she turned to look at the crowd. She dropped her bag to the floor and stepped forward, facing them all with an expression that said she wasn’t about to tolerate this. “Okay, who’s the artist this time?” she asked, scanning the crowd of faces, not the least bit surprised that nobody answered. Her anger growing, she clenched her hands into fists on her hips. “What? You can tag my locker, but you don’t have the guts to show your face?”

The crowd parted as the culprit stepped up with a big grin on her face.

Lena
, Meagan thought in anger. “I should’ve known.”

“Oh, it wasn’t me,” Lena said with a snicker, pointing to a guy next to her. “It was him.”

“Seth,” she grumbled under her breath. Of course it was Seth; he was the mastermind and everybody else was a minion. “You never could come forward on your own, always hiding behind a girl,” she said to Seth as she turned back to her locker.

“Coward
!
”

As the warning bell rang, the teenagers scurried to their classes.

Meagan grumbled under her breath because she was running late yet again, and she still needed to file a report with the principal about the graffiti. There was no way in hell she was gonna let Seth get away with it this time. Grabbing her notebook, she turned, only to run straight into Seth’s chest. She backed away, right into her locker, sending her books raining down to the floor to scatter at her feet. Looking up at Seth, all she could see was his ominous grin. He was only inches away, and no one else was in sight. “What do you want?” she asked, trying to swallow the panic bubbling inside her.

Seth leaned forward and placed a hand on each side of her, trapping her between his twitching biceps as he leaned against her locker and brought his face close to hers. “I want you to stop running your mouth about me. Haven’t you done enough damage?”

“Haven’t
you
?” Keeping her voice steady was proving to be impossible.
If a
teacher would just show up...or someone, anyone...Please!
“I just want to move on with my life, but you and your little posse keep harassing me.”

He brought one of his thick arms down, tapping a finger against her lips and sending a shudder of disgust down her spine. “I’d watch that pretty little mouth if I were you, Meg. Nobody likes a girl who talks too much.”

“That’s funny,” Meagan shot back. “People seem to like you just fine.”

Anger taking over his face, he slammed his fist into the locker right next to her head with a loud
bang!
Meagan jumped, and Seth laughed at her. “You of all people know I’m not a girl, Meg.” Raising his finger, he traced a line down her cheek, lowering his voice to a soft whisper. “I’ll never forget how soft your skin feels...”

Another shiver skimmed down her spine, and she fought the urge to cry.

Regaining his posture, he tossed her a sly grin and then walked down the hallway, leaving her to stare after him.

She knelt to pick up her books, and that’s when she saw Kelly lingering on the other side of the hall, as if wondering whether to approach her or run.