Page 64 of American Hellhound
She fucking loved this car.
Thankfully, she arrived home before her dad left to pick her up outside the church. She parked the Monte Carlo behind his Beamer and stayed in the car a long moment before she killed the engine, hands gripped tight on the wheel. Explaining this wasn’t going to be fun.
Through the windshield, she watched the side door off the garage open, and her mother stepped out, brows pinched together.
Maggie sighed.Here goes…
~*~
It had become a regular thing, this staring up at the ceiling business. Ghost lay in his underwear with the covers pushed down around his shins, hands folded over his belly, counting the individual bumps of his popcorn ceiling. Aidan had gone down quickly and easily tonight, still recovering from strep and tired from playing with his skateboard – Ghost thought maybe he shouldn’t have let him do that. Should have made him go inside and rest. Drink fluids. Something. Hopefully he wouldn’t have relapsed in the morning.
The sound of the phone ringing out in the kitchen startled him. He jackknifed upright, catching the time on the bedside clock: just after one. Middle-of-the-night calls were never a good thing.
He walked down the hall with dread pooling heavy in his belly, all the hair standing up on his arms by the time he pulled the receiver off the hook.
“Hello?”
“Hi,” a female voice whispered. “It’s me. Maggie.”
“Mags,” he said, automatically, surprised.
She took a quick breath on the other end of the line.
“What?” Worry washed over him. Was she hurt? Did she need him? He could feel his chest inflating, some instinctual, alpha male instinct.
“Nothing. I just…like when you call me that.”
He exhaled, instinct taking a dark, pleased turn. “You alright?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I wanted to say thank you for the car. It’s amazing.”
He leaned back against the counter and stared down at his bare toes against the linoleum. The fluorescent tube above the sink droned into the quiet. “You already said thank you.”
It was hard to tell, what with her whispering, but he thought he could hear a smile in her voice. “It needed saying again.”
Warmth blossomed in his chest and unfurled slowly. A sensation he only experienced around Aidan these days. “It handles alright?”
She breathed a quiet laugh. “It’s powerful.”
“That’s an SS for you.”
“Yeah.”
It was quiet a beat, but it didn’t feel awkward.
Ghost said, “Did you have to wait ‘til your folks fell asleep before you called?”
“Uh-huh. Mom was…let’s just go with pissed-off.”
“You showed her the bill?”
“I thought she might rip it up. But I reminded her how much babysitting money I had saved up, that I could pay for gas and insurance. Dad managed to talk her down a little bit – he said it was a ‘beaut’ by the way.”
“It is.”
“And he told her it would be good for me to have my own wheels.”
“So they’re gonna let you keep it?”
