6. Chloe
CHLOE
I DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHERE YOUR MOUTH HAS BEEN
Except my car is leaning at a bizarre angle when I walk into the parking garage, and as soon as I round the front bumper, I realize why. My front left tire is flat. Not slightly low. Flat flat. The rim is basically resting on the concrete.
I consider my options and discard them all immediately. I don't know the bus routes, a cab would take too long, and Britt will be unconscious until at least noon.
I’m frantically doing the math on the exact percentage this zero will cost my overall GPA when a large vehicle idles to a stop right behind me. I don't even need to turn around to know it’s him.
“Hey there, Backcheck Girl.” He calls out of the open window. He takes one look at the tire, and then at me.
“That’s flat,” he says.
“No shit, Sherlock,” I mutter, but he hears me anyway and just grins.
“It’s not a big deal, we’ll just call someone.” He gets out of his truck and walks over to where I’m standing.
“I don’t have time to call someone. I have a test at nine, which I’m now going to miss. So if you’ll excuse me while I quietly lose my mind—”
“Pop your trunk.”
“Why?”
He sighs. “Because I’m trying to help you, Chloe. Can you open the damn trunk?”
I click the button and the trunk lid opens and I watch while he finds the jack and the wrench instantly, then drops down onto the filthy concrete of the parking garage, and starts working the lug nuts off without even being asked.
The main problem is that he looks incredibly competent while he does it.
I don’t want him to be. I’ve met plenty of athletes and found every single one of them exhausting, but he works fast and he doesn’t glance up once to see if I’m impressed.
He hauls the spare out from under the trunk floor and drops it onto the concrete, where it lands with a completely hollow, rubbery thud.
“Well,” he says. “Your spare’s flat too.”
“Of course it is.”
“You never checked it?”
“Why would I check a spare tire? Isn’t that the entire point of a spare tire? To just sit there and be ready when you need it?”
He stands up and wipes his hands on his shorts. “Okay. Come on, I’ll drive you.”
“Absolutely not.”
“You’ve got a test and a car going nowhere. What’s the plan? Walk?” He’s already got his keys out. “Get in the truck, Chlo. You can be mad while we drive.”
His truck is meticulously clean and surprisingly doesn’t smell like hockey, which does nothing to ease my annoyance. He lifts a to-go cup of coffee out of the center console and offers it to me.
“No, thank you,” I say.
“It’s just coffee. I don’t have cooties.”
“I wasn’t worried about cooties.”
“No?” He pulls out of the garage, steering with one hand. “Then you just don’t want to put your mouth where mine’s been.”
I stare out the passenger window and swallow hard because the image that he just put in my head of places where his mouth has been isn’t something I want to think about at eight in the morning
“I don’t want to know where your mouth has been.” I hate how incredibly prissy I sound, but his casual, effortless confidence is infuriating.
“So what’s the test on?” he asks, completely ignoring my petty response.
“Cell biology.”
“You’re a bio major?”
“Pre-vet.” I don’t know why I tell him that. “I want to be a veterinarian.”
“Yeah? You always want that?”
“No.” I look down at the index cards clutched in my hand. “When I was little, I wanted to move to Alaska and race sled dogs.”
He laughs, a big, easy sound, and I don’t laugh with him. It takes him exactly one second to catch on.
“Oh,” he says. “Oh, damn. You’re serious.”
“I had a whole binder. I researched the breeds and mapped out the race routes.” I shrug, looking back out the window. “Then I found out you can’t exactly make a living doing it.”
He’s quiet for a second. When I glance over, the grin is gone, and he’s looking at me like I actually managed to surprise him.
“Are you always this quiet?” he asks as we stop at a red light.
“I'm recovering,” I tell him. “My entire morning had a highly structured plan, and you weren’t in it.”
“I’m rarely in the plan.” He flashes that huge, devastating smile again. “People usually like me better once I am, though.”
I point to a visitor lot near the science building and he pulls in.
“Your tire’s still flat,” he says, like I might have forgotten. “You’ll need a ride home.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“Or.” He pulls out his phone and holds it toward me. “You put your number in, text me when you’re done, and I come back for you. And I’ll swap your spare so it’s not sitting on a flat all day.”
It’s a highly logical plan, which is the infuriating part. It solves all of my immediate problems at once, but it also happens to get him my phone number. He knows this, holding the phone out like there was never any question about how this would go.
I take his phone, type in my number, and hand it back. “There. This is also not a date.”
“You’ll know when it’s a date.” He’s already looking at my name saved on his screen. “Go pass your test, Backcheck Girl.”
I get out before I have to say anything else, and I walk into the classroom and sit down and open the booklet, and for a solid thirty seconds I can’t produce a single fact about cellular respiration, because I’m thinking about his smile.
I have never once in my entire life blanked on a test.
I force the image out of my head and pick up my pencil. By the time I hand in the exam an hour later, I’ve almost successfully convinced myself that it was just the flat tire that rattled me.
I know it wasn’t the tire.
An hour later I push through the heavy glass doors of the building, annoyed at myself for everything that happened that morning.
Now, I have to figure out how to get home.
He told me to text him, which would be the smart move except I don’t exactly feel like swallowing my pride to ask him to come back to get me.
I’m still glaring at the screen when I look up and see his truck is idling directly in front of the building, parked in the fire lane. He’s got the windows rolled down and he’s watching me, which means he probably saw all the internal gymnastics I was just doing with myself.
“You're in a fire lane,” I tell him as I climb in and drop my backpack by my feet.
He puts the truck in drive the second my door shuts. “Well, I knew you wouldn't text me so I needed to be where you could see me. How was your test?”
“Fine.” I buckle my seatbelt, refusing to look at him because if I do, I'll have to acknowledge that he was completely right about the text, and that it’s incredibly nice of him to be here. “I probably passed.”
“That’s amazing!” And he sounds actually excited for me. “I called a tire shop. They’ll sell you a new spare and once we get it on your car you can drive over and then we’ll get the flat fixed too. Sound good?”
I can only stare at him. “Why would you do that for me?”
He shrugs. “You let me crash on your couch. It’s the least I can do.”
“Thank you,” I say quietly, staring down at my hands.
“Don't mention it.” He flashes that devastating smile, turning his eyes back to the road. “So, ready for our mission, that’s definitely not a date?”