Page 4 of When Wrecked Meets Ruined
To prove his point, he stepped into the clearing, tossed the bottle straight up into the air, and swung the bat.Thwack. It hit dead center and shattered. Shards of glass rained from the sky, and we stood back to watch the spectacle like it was a meteor shower.
“Go on.” He offered me the bat. “Hit something. It’ll make you feel better.”
“I don’t need your bat.” I held up my weapon of choice. “And I don’t need to hit anything.”
I began walking. Dead leaves and broken glass crunched under my boots, and I burrowed into my hoodie, shivering. It was January, and the temperature had dropped into the thirties tonight. Which meant that my house would be freezing.
“Why are you walking around with a crowbar?” he asked, falling into step with me.
“Because I don’t have a gun.”
He side-eyed me as we skirted a mountain of flattened, dirty metal and picked our way over the uneven ground and gnarled roots.
This place was eerie at night. Kind of cool, though, too, with the moonlight casting a silvery glow on the bare trees. They looked like skeletal hands reaching for the sky.
“Who are you running from?”
“How did you find this place?” I countered.
“Followed the railroad tracks.” He pointed toward the abandoned tracks, which was where we were headed. I was going home, but I had no idea where he was going.
“Just needed some space,” he said. “A place to think about shit.”
I glanced at him. “And you thought a junkyard was the best place to think?”
He shrugged, laughing under his breath like he was in on a private joke. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m homesick.”
“A junkyard reminds you of home?”
“Guess so.”
After a few minutes of walking in silence, curiosity got the best of me. “What happened to your face?” It was the first thing I noticed when he walked into class. The black eye. Split lip. An angry gash above his right eyebrow. The purple bruise on his cheekbone. It was hard to miss.Hewas hard to miss.
He rubbed his hand over his jaw, drawing my attention to his chiseled jawline. “I hitched a ride with a trucker. He got a call over the radio that a guy fitting my description stole another trucker’s wallet. Guess he thought he needed to teach me a lesson.”
“Was it you?” But I already knew the answer.
“I hadn’t eaten in a few days, and I was hungry.” He shrugged, not sounding the least bit apologetic. “So yeah, it was me.”
I wanted to ask him where he was from and why he was here, not just in this junkyard but in Cypress Springs, Texas. I could tell he wasn’t from around here. He didn’t have a Southern accent. But if I asked him too many questions, he’d expect me to reciprocate. That’s how it worked. And I didn’t want to talk about my life. Not with him. Not with anyone.
I didn’t even tell my best friend half the crap I dealt with at home. Quinn lived in a different world than I did. She was rich, with two parents and three brothers who loved and protected her. I didn’t want her to pity me or offer to help. All I wanted was for her to be my friend with no strings attached.
When we reached the tracks, I slipped through a narrow opening in the fence. He leaped over the top in one fluid motion. Agile. Graceful. So much raw power in that body. More like a man’s than a sixteen-year-old boy.
I had a feeling he was used to running away from bad shit. Maybe, like me, he’d been doing it all his life.
I scrambled down the hill, and his hand shot out and grabbed my arm, steadying me when I lost my footing on the loose gravel.
“Careful,” he said, his voice low. His big, strong hand was still wrapped around my upper arm, and I could feel the heat of his touch even through the thick fabric of my hoodie.
I cleared my throat. “I’m good.”
Instead of releasing me, he tugged me closer. Or maybe my feet had moved of their own accord because now he was standing right in front of me, the tips of his duct-taped high tops kissing the toes of my battered combat boots. So close that when I inhaled, I breathed in his scent. The whiskey on his breath. The clean scent of soap—cedarwood and cypress?
All I knew was that I liked it more than I should.
His gaze flitted over me, from my eyes to my mouth, where it stayed for a beat too long. When our eyes met, he reached out, wrapped a lock of my hair around his fingers, and tugged on it. The silky strands slipped through his fingers like water, and he shoved his hands in his pocket just as if it had never happened.
