All Strings Attached

17. Chase

Family dinner wasn’t entirely a nightmare. He and Lydia had gone out afterward to catch up, which mostly consisted of her grilling him with questions and him testing out different methods of verbal and nonverbal armor to shield himself from her prying.

What came next, though, was a nightmare.

Zak was impossible to miss on the side of Interstate 5. A silhouette he had spotted across a crowded room, and certainly wouldn’t miss when she was the only other person on the road at three in the morning. She shuffled through the gravel as she walked along the highway. Her station wagon was parked at the next mile marker.

He slammed on his brakes, and, since there were no other cars on the road, threw his vehicle into reverse and caught back up with her. He parked.

She seemed more irritated than alarmed to have company until she recognized his car, and even then, the irritation didn’t entirely subside, but that wasn’t the first thing he noticed. The first thing he noticed was her ripped shirt and the blood spilling down her shoulder.

Every muscle in his body stiffened.

He was out of the car before she could take her next step.

“What happened?”

She winced as she brought a hand to the cut. He’d gotten bruised and torn up enough in his lifetime to know how badly it stung. “Don’t worry. It’s just a scratch.”

“Worried doesn’t cover it, Zak,” he said. “What happened?”

That job had always been a terrible idea. He knew she had her reasons. The tips were good, the health insurance was cheap, and most importantly, nobody else wanted to work there, so it was next to impossible to get fired. But Salt Surf was practically a strip club posing as a restaurant. If he couldn’t keep his eyes off her while devoting every scrap of mental energy to the cause, then the sickos who ordered drinks from her definitely weren’t.

But until now, he had talked himself into not freaking out every time she went to work by reasoning that at least they kept their hands off her.

She squinted like the question hadn’t registered. “It”s just a scratch. I tried to pop the hood of my car, but the support bar wasn’t working. It got caught on my shirt and I guess I didn’t back up fast enough.”

He tried to breathe. In the seconds it had taken her to answer, he’d run through every solution including buyinga new bar for her to work at, throwing her into his car and driving her to the police station, and straight-up homicide. Thankfully, he could now talk himself out of doing something that would make her never speak to him again, but there was still the matter of her being hurt.

He pulled her hair to the side to get a better look at the gash and could have sworn that he saw something else flash over her eyes before that intense guard shuttered back down.

“Wait, you thought someone attacked me?”

“You don’t have the safest job in the world, Zak, and you’re out here by yourself with no damage to your car. Well, no new damage,” he said. “Is it out of this world for me to believe that?”

“And what were you going to do about it, tough guy?” She leaned away from his touch but stayed in place. Too close for him to think straight. “Newsflash, Chase, I have plenty of experience dealing with shitty people. I don’t need anybody to protect me.”

“I know you don’t need anyone to protect you. Hell, sometimes I think I could use some protection from you.” That got a small chuckle out of her. “But seeing you bleeding and stumbling around on the side of the highway isn’t fucking comforting, either.”

“Well, don’t worry about it. Any of it,” she said. “The worst they do at work is catcall and get a little handsy. But joke’s on them because by then, they’re usually drunk enough to leave their wallets lying around for me to double dip.”

“I hope you rob them dry.” He calmed down. Slightly. “What happened to your car?”

“What is it, exactly, that makes me look like a mechanic to you? The booty-shorts? The red lipstick? The fact that I’m walking to a gas station to call for a tow instead of standing over there with a wrench?”

As if tonight hadn’t been enough of a clusterfuck, she just had to call attention to her ass when he was trying to be helpful. On the bright side, it distracted him from the torn front of her shirt.

He took a deep breath, which she seemed to interpret as impatience rather than self-restraint because her defensive posture dropped as she dug the toe of her shoe into the sand.

For a second, he thought she would give her pride a rest for the night, but instead, she said, “You don’t have to come with me or anything. I’ve got it handled. Believe it or not, this isn’t my first time.”

“Oh, I believe it. But you’re insane if you think I’m going to leave you alone right now.” He opened the passenger door to his car. “How about you get in, and I’ll drive us both there so you aren’t stuck walking three miles to the nearest Shell station?”

Not even Zak could argue with that logic, apparently, because she climbed in and let him shut the door after her. When he got back in on his side, she was sitting up rigidly like she was trying to stay awake.

She reached for the volume knob on the radio and nudged it up a few ticks. “You really do have good taste in music. Wouldn’t have expected that from the guy with terrible taste in everything else.”

He pulled back onto the road. “Terrible taste, huh?”

“You played an ice sport in one of the sunniest cities in the country. You still dress like it’s the eighties. You have fuzzy dice hanging in your luxury car.” She smacked one of the bright yellow cubes dangling from his rearview mirror. Lydia had gotten them as a gag gift on his sixteenth birthday, and he couldn’t bring himself to get rid of them when he sold his beater car and upgraded. “Need I go on?”

There must be something seriously wrong with him, that he took so much pleasure in fielding her personal attacks. “Half of that music you love so much is from the eighties, you know.”

“Hey, it might be controversial, but I’ll hold on to the arena rock and glam metal. People who think it’s too derivative just don’t know how to have fun. But they can keep the double denim,” she said, giving his jeans and denim jacket a once-over to illustrate her point.

“What did you think I listened to, then?”

“I dunno. I pictured some kind of white noise going on in there all the time.” She pushed the side of his head with her index finger. “All the concussions from the rink, you know?”

Zak was the only person brave enough to talk to him about his past so freely. Everyone else either tiptoed around the topic or only cared to talk about the end. Never the in-between, the time he spent enjoying what he did. She reminded him he was happy once, which made it seem possible to find his way back there again.

“As much as I love the sound of my brain rattling around in my own head, I have to say I prefer a good guitar solo. Why do you think I asked you about what your band was working on all the time?”

She looked out the window in contemplation. “I thought you were mocking me, I guess. I was the weird kid with no friends, and you were the hot, charming guy everybody loved.”

“That’s funny, ‘cause I always thought you were cooler than me,” he said, trying to figure out if he should call attention to the way she had glossed over the word “hot” like she’d found him attractive for so long it had become fact instead of opinion.

It would be better for both of them, he decided, if he filed that one away in the back of his brain before anything else slipped out of his mouth.

She sank back in the seat and covered the barest of self-satisfied smiles with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “I’m surprised you didn’t just think I was mean.”

“You’re an ambitious woman.” As he rolled to a stop at the end of the exit, he stole a glimpse of her. Bright flashes of gold from the streetlights reflected in her tired eyes. “If you really wanted to hurt my feelings, you would have tried harder.”

He pulled into the vacant parking lot of the nearest gas station and went inside to grab a few items while she used the pay phone. The store bell chimed while he waited at the counter for the missing cashier to show up, and Zak walked in with her wound looking much worse under fly-corpse-speckled fluorescent lighting than it had outside in the dark.

“The tow truck won’t be here for another two hours.” Her eyes scanned the cigarette display rack and lock boxes full of lotto scratch-offs around where a store attendant should probably be. “What are you doing?”

Ah, yes. Because it would be irrational for him to want to do anything to help with her bleeding, swollen injury, especially if it involved a five-dollar expense.

“I was hungry.”

“For three pounds of ice, a roll of gauze, and some ginger ale?” she pressed.

He grabbed a box of candy and threw it on the counter, too. “Better?”

“I thought you didn’t like Red Hots?”

“Whoops, I forgot.” No one had shown up still, so he left a few bills on the table and bagged his own items. “You do though, right?”

“You’re impossible,” she said, but took the bag from him anyway when they were back in the car. “And you need to cool it with the sweets. I’ve gotten my years’ worth of sugar already with all those donuts you brought us.”

Chase was glad it was just the two of them, because the guys had only recently stopped calling him Krispy Kreme, and they didn’t need a reminder to start back up. “You think those donuts were only for you guys? I spent four years not eating donuts. Four years of oatmeal, grilled salmon, and broccoli. I missed donuts.”

She chuckled but didn’t say anything for the remainder of the drive back to her car. Not to tell him to go home instead of staying with her when he parked and took the key out of the ignition. Not when he opened up a square of gauze and reached slowly toward the cut, waiting for her to snatch it out of his hand and tell him she didn’t need help.

He clicked on the courtesy lights and wiped the blood from her arm to get a better look. She could probably get away without stitches, which was good news because getting her to the hospital would have required some serious coercion.

She inhaled sharply as he applied pressure to the wound with a new packet of gauze. “I had it in my head that I was going to take care of myself from the moment I left home. I thought it would be easy. Way easier than taking care of a bunch of kids. So taking money from people, or asking for help, makes me feel like I’ve failed.”

“You haven’t failed.” He wrapped up some of the ice to make a pack for the swelling and held it to her shoulder. “Your parents failed you. The system failed you. All this I’m doing? It’s just what friends do for each other. And I’ve spent enough time around your other friends by now to know they’d do the same if they were in my place.”

And they probably wouldn’t be losing their minds over you in the process.

Zak blinked back at him. “You think of me as a friend?”

He had to bite back some incredulous sound. “I’ve spent nearly every waking minute with you for the past two months. At the risk of sounding pathetic, you’re probably the closest friend I’ve ever had.”

Zak’s face flushed. He wanted to know everything that ran through her mind in the time it took her to weigh his statement.

“I didn’t realize you thought of me that way.”

“I didn’t realize you thought of me as hot and charming. I guess we both have a lot left to learn about each other.”

She pushed his arm, her fingers curling over his bicep for a moment before she pulled back and brought one knee to her chest.

His mind flashed to how those fingers would feel digging into his skin. Holding on from beneath him. God, he was depraved. Friend. That was what he’d called her, as though saying it aloud would hold him accountable for where his not-friendly thoughts drifted whenever she was around.

He let her take over holding the ice pack and scooted back against the driver’s side window.

“Why were you out so late anyway?”

“Dinner at my parents’ house,” he said. “Figured it was about time to warn them before they saw me on TV in a much different context than they’re used to.”

“Way to casually bring up how often you’ve been on TV.” Her yawn ended in a smile. “How’d it go?”

“It could have gone worse. But that’s not why I told you. I just don’t want you to think it took me so long because I’m ashamed to be a part of your band. That’s not it at all. It’s that I keep waiting on myself to fuck it all up.”

“There’s still plenty of time for you to do that.” Her eyes were fully closed now, her body wedged between the seat and the door.

He reached over her lap and lowered the seat. “Take a nap, smartass.”

“Wake me up when they get here?”

“I will.”

It was quiet for another few minutes. No sound except for the steady exhale of air conditioning through the dashboard vents.

Chase pried his eyes away from Zak as her breathing evened out and watched the shadows outside, thinking maybe he could see the subtle shifts in colors as the sun inched closer toward rising.

Only because of the complete stillness of night did he hear her murmur, “You won’t fuck it up.”