Bonus Chapter
Glory Box - Portishead
Cassidy
Three years earlier
It was too hot, and all I could smell were sweaty kids, sun-warmed asphalt and over ripe, uneaten lunches. Kids shrieked, cars idled, and parents jostled for the prime spot to see their child emerging from school. Roll on next semester when we’d have a more organized pick up line.
I stayed where I always did on the fringe. Half in the shade of the large overhang, half watching the chaos to make sure every child got picked up.
Lucas Keller’s backpack had a broken zip, and I wasn’t sure it had one more week left in it before the end of the school year.
The game of football he and the other boys had been playing with it at lunch break hadn’t helped.
I bent down to help him with the zip after he’d lost half the contents outside my classroom.
I adjusted the weight, so it didn’t dig into his shoulders.
He just rolled his eyes like it was fine, desperate to get to his dad who was waiting with his usual disgruntled demeanor.
“There you go,” I murmured, smoothing his hair down. “You’re ready to go without losing half your stuff.”
He gave me a half-smile and sped away across the grass to his dad.
And that’s when I saw him.
Leaning against the hood of his truck like a Marlboro ad that had grown up and developed a more judgmental stare.
Gunner Miller.
Of course he was here. It was his day to pick up Bertie. I knew because even though she wasn’t in my class, Bertie Miller could out-talk a talk-show host. Which meant I knew that Tuesday and Thursday were the day her uncle, the silent and infuriatingly attractive Gunner, showed up like clockwork.
He didn’t see me.
He never did.
Not that it really mattered. Not really.
Because no matter how much I told myself he was too arrogant, too vain to be even vaguely interesting, he still made my stomach twist every time he showed up. Which wasn’t fair or convenient.
I could have been totally wrong about him, but he looked like the kind of man who only liked his horses for company.
Horses and cattle. Yet somehow I just knew he was also the kind of man who would be on time for dinner and hold the door open for you while calling you ma’am.
There was something else, though, something in the way he watched the world, like he was always holding something back.
Like he had more to say but couldn’t be bothered—as I said, horses and cattle.
He probably thought of me the same way. Or worse, he thought I was like a cafeteria menu, bland and avoidable.
Fine. Like I cared.
Liar.
I turned my eyes away before they could linger too long. Before he could catch me watching and not react. No reaction would be worse than complete indifference. Like I was just another face in the sea of parents and teachers.
Probably wasn’t his type anyway. If he even had a type. Just a pity my interest in him was growing exponentially every damn week.
Then Bertie launched out of the building, backpack bouncing, hair desperate to escape the confines of the braid her dad made a decent go of. As he saw her Gunner pushed off his truck and opened the back door for her, like it was his prime job on this earth.
They exchanged words and he smiled. It was rare and knocked the wind out of me for a second.
I stepped further back into the shadows, swallowing the weird twist in my chest and telling myself that it didn’t matter that he had no idea that I existed.
It was just another day. Just another man who I had a crush on. I clearly needed to get laid.
None of it mattered.
Yet I still couldn’t stop wondering what a date with him would be like.