Better When He's Bold

She gave me a sad little smile. “One mistake is too many in this world, Race. This isn’t the Hill. Remember that.”

I watched her disappear into the office where I had left Nassir. I wished everyone would stop bringing up where I was from. I knew that Spanky’s wasn’t the Hill. Nothing here even looked the same as there, including me. I guess only time would tell if I had what it took to make the rest of the city see that.

I walked to the Mustang and pulled my phone out of my pocket. I called Brysen to see when she was going to get off work. Her laptop was a paperweight. There was no salvaging it. I pulled as much limited data as I could off the burned-up hard drive and transferred it to a new MacBook I bought for her. I knew she wasn’t going to want to take it, but I didn’t plan on giving her a choice in the matter. She needed it for school and Dovie mentioned she couldn’t afford a new one, so she was leaving with the Mac whether she liked it or not. Plus, I managed to dig most of her Math Theory junk out of the wasteland, so I was hoping that would smooth the way into getting her to accept it.

She answered in a rush and told me she would be off a little after midnight. That was only half an hour away, so I told her I would just wait for her in the parking lot. It would’ve been easier to go inside and have the showdown with her in front of witnesses, but I wanted to see if she had actually listened to me and was going to get an escort out of the restaurant to her car. I didn’t like the idea of her alone in this part of town after dark. Sure, my sister walked the same path, had even taken the bus to and from work, but Dovie had street smarts and could pick out a threat from a mile away. Brysen looked like an ice princess from a fairy tale. I didn’t think she was stupid, but I also didn’t think she had any kind of clue what really lurked in the shadows and the dark.

The front door of the restaurant opened and Brysen’s superblond hair glinted off the glass doors. She had on a tight T-shirt and a short skirt, and obviously hadn’t bothered to change after her shift. A tall Latin guy was walking next to her. She was laughing at something he said and tossed her head back. She really was the prettiest girl I had ever seen. There was just something so easy about her, so effortless, that it made my heart thud heavy in my ears. She put her hand on her escort’s arm and pointed to where the Mustang was sitting. The guy nodded at her, bent down to kiss her on the cheek, and turned around to walk back inside.

Brysen started walking toward me, so I kicked open the car door and rose to my feet. I don’t know where the headlights came from, don’t know how I missed another car idling in the parking lot, but the next thing I knew, there was a squeal of tires, the smell of rubber burning, and a sedan barreling right at her. I saw her go still as I broke into a run. There was too much space between where she was and where I was and the car was headed right toward her. I saw her throw her hands up as the engine revved up even higher. She didn’t scream, didn’t make any kind of noise, so I called her name. Her head snapped around to look at me and I hollered, “Move!” at the top of my lungs.

Right before the impact, right before I had to watch her end up splattered all over the windshield, the guy who had walked her out suddenly hit her from the side in a flying tackle that had both of them careening hard to the asphalt. I heard her shriek when she hit and turned to try and grab the license plate off of the fleeing sedan. I frowned as I reached the huddled pair on the ground because the plates on the car were missing, making this feel very deliberate and not like an accident at all. I nudged the Spanish guy on the shoulder and he looked up at me.

“Move.”

He huffed at me and rolled off of Brysen. She peeked up at me from between the fingers she had clamped over her eyes like that was somehow going to prevent her from getting run over by a speeding car. I reached down to pull her to her feet and felt my back teeth click together when I saw the bloody mess her arm and legs were from where she had hit the ground.

“Oh my God, Ramon!” She broke away from me and threw herself at the other guy. He wrapped her up in a hug and shook his head.

“That was crazy. A drunk driver maybe?”

Ramon muttered the words while he looked right at me as I just stared at him. I wanted him to let Brysen go—like yesterday.

She took a step away from him and cradled her injured arm to her chest with her other hand. “Thank you so much. You just saved my life.”

“Weird things are in your orbit, chica. You need to keep your head up.” He gave her shoulder a squeeze and looked at me pointedly. “Find someone to watch your back.”

We watched him walk away in silence, and she finally turned and looked at me. I frowned down at her and she lifted up her pale eyebrows to almost her hairline.