2. Nick
“You stupid fuckin’ piece of trash!”
I turned the key again and again, expecting to hear the purr of the engine kick on—I even would’ve accepted a chugging or a high whine—but was met with silence after the initial tick, tick, tick of the ignition trying to breathe life into the car’s battery.
Fuck, fucking, fuckeration.
Maybe Ryker was right, I thought grimly.
He usually wasn’t, at least not about anything involving manual labor.
Or, really, any kind of labor at all. But after six months and a couple grand sunk into parts with zero success at getting this piece of scrap to start…
I was starting to think that it was hopeless.
Or maybe that I’d find more enjoyment in towing the thing outside and smashing it with a baseball bat than I would another half of a year of playing surgeon to a finicky Camaro.
In the car’s defense, she was old enough to have a learner's permit, and it wasn’t her fault that my old man walked out on us halfway through her refurbishment.
Nah, that fuckshow was a mess he made by himself, shitting on my entire god damn life in the process.
The car, a 2010 Camaro SS, was probably most iconically known for its role in the rally yellow colorway as Bumblebeta in the Transformators movie franchise, but time on the silver screen didn’t help her run for shit.
Besides, I thought that all that robot stuff was sorta tacky, and hawked the special edition bullshit the second I could for a couple extra bucks to put toward new parts.
Probably even worse than stripping the car of its molded wheel center caps, fenders, and armrest was that once the old girl was up to speed, my plan wasn’t a breezy retirement of car shows.
Nah, I wanted to race her. Like she was made for.
No one painted goddamn racing stripes on a car unless they planned for you to be driving it fast.
And that yellow?
Fuckin’. Legendary.
I wiped my sweaty face with the hem of my shirt, the late afternoon sun pelting down onto the pavement out the open garage door and baking just about everything in the process.
Luckily, it was Sunday, so the rest of the garage was quiet, leaving me to my thoughts and curses without having Frank or Bill breathing down my neck about what I could—or should—be doing to make the car go.
Even though they were just trying to help, and had more years under their belts as mechanics than I’d been alive, their good-natured advice always grated on me.
This was supposed to be me and my dad’s thing, refusing to talk to eachother about our feelings and losing ourselves in work, and now that he’d gone ghost and it was left to me, it felt like something that I needed to do on my own.
Instead of companionable, easy to understand silence, it felt opressive now. He left me to deal with a whole new onslaught of unfamilliar emotions created by his sudden exit from my life, and my new role in the family.
Man of the house.
“Still not running?” Ryker’s voice crackled from my phone where I’d tossed it on the dash, and I jumped, totally forgetting he was still on the line.
“No.”
Like that wasn’t fuckin’ obvious, but Ryker wasn’t the most—what was a nice way to put it—perceptive alpha on the planet. Self-absorbed in the way that I’d only seen on reality TV.
Maybe it was a rich person thing, keeping your head down and your eyes on your own paper to the point that you abandoned your community.
Coming from a family like mine, with parents who’d come to this country after being fed the never ending American propaganda mill about the dream, you learned that caring for others meant that hopefully when you landed on hard times that they would do the same for you.
If I really wanted to, I was pretty sure there wasn’t anything that I couldn’t fix. I wasn’t like Ryker, I couldn’t just go out and buy a replacement because it was easier, especially not now.
“And you’re sure all the fuses are tightened?”
“I’m not a fuckin’ idiot, Ry.”
His loud laugh on the other side of the phone made me briefly consider chucking the damn thing across the lot. But I couldn’t do that; there was no way I’d be able to afford another one. Or even replace the screen if I was careless and fucked it.
Honestly? Even the bill was a struggle right now, too.
“Then you’re on your own until I’m there in two weeks,” he said. I could hear the rush of the city behind him as he walked down the block. The honk of car horns and shouts of angry pedestrians filled the space between our words.
Living somewhere that was constantly that loud would’ve made me want to kill myself, but whatever made him happy, I guess.
“You’re actually coming?” I asked. Everything was a shitshow here right now, so avoiding us like the plague made sense to me.
“I’m certainly not going home,” he said the word like it was something particularly nasty, like a cockroach. “It’s cold and rainy in London. I’d much rather hang by Caleb’s pool, The Three Menskateers at it again!”
“Isn’t it Musketeers?”
“As if, bro. Those guys’ moustaches were ugly—” Ryker drew out his ‘y’ extra long. “And the only one of us who can even grow one is you.”
I laughed, my eyes flicking up to catch a glimpse of the strip of short, well-maintained hair darkening my upper lip in the rearview mirror. “True.”
“It’s been forever since we’ve all been together. I’m not letting either of you assholes out of my sight. We’ll be sleeping top to tail all fucking summer!”
My chest thumped at the thought. I hadn’t seen Caleb much since everything happened. It was obvious his dad wanted me as far away as possible, and Caleb being Caleb meant he was avoiding anything that felt less than comfortable for him.
Two weeks he’d been home, and I hadn’t seen or heard from him once. It stung, but I understood… or I was trying to.
“I don’t know how much of that there’s gonna be,” I said, getting out of the car and leaning back over the engine, testing wire connections and tubes to distract myself. “I’m not exactly welcome at the Braye’s right now.”
Ryker made a psh sound dismissively. “Come on, Marty can’t still be holding a grudge! Doesn’t he have some new bird in the house?”
“He is, and he does.” And I really didn’t want to talk about it. I’d been avoiding talking about it at all since it happened.
“Fine, not at Caleb’s, but we can still go to the beach. Pick up some girls of our own. I’m running dry over here.”
That I could get on board with. But then I thought about all of the little finicky costs of a beach day… Parking fees were atrocious, and everyone would want to eat out at least once. Not to mention the drinking. There’s no way I could afford any of that right now.
Nina’s graduation was breathing down my neck, and I was already struggling to come up with the money to help cover her fees to even apply to college.
I hadn’t even started thinking about the tuition; whenever I tried, it was like everything I’d eaten in my entire life tried to push to the front at once to come back out the way it went in.
But the idea of finding someone, even for the night, sounded nice. Someone pretty I could sink into. Forget what a shitshow my life had turned out to be, even for a couple of hours. I’d been so exhausted taking care of my kid sister that I was too tired to even bother with scrolling the apps.
I’d never had a dry spell like this, and I was certainly starting to feel it. Even thought about going to a heat hotel just to shake the needy buzz at the base of my skull that a good fuck with a heatdrunk omega would cure just about instantly.
“Maybe,” I said noncommittally.
“Hey! Teagan! Stay right there!” Ryker shouted, and I knew that I’d lost his limited attention for good. The man was like a talking ADHD medication ad. “I gotta go, but I’ll see you soon. Menskateers!”
The line went dead before I could say goodbye, and I was back to my own thoughts for company.
Dangerous.
I picked up my phone as it vibrated, knocking loudly against the textured plastic of the dash, and I reached into the car to grab it, my sister’s contact flashing over the screen.
NINA
I’m staying at Kendall’s tonight.
Nina wasn’t my kid, obviously. But she might as well have been.
Even before he’d dipped, our dad worked all the time, and Mom died when I was eleven, so I’d basically been looking out for us both since then.
But at least when my dad was around, I had some financial help.
Now it was all on me, and it was hard not to feel like I was drowning.
How the fuck were prom dresses just as expensive as quince, while from what I could tell, they were about a third of the fabric?
Being trust into the position of the sole provider wasn’t fair, but I didn’t didn’t see what else I could do.
My sister needed me, and now that I was the head of our small family unit I neeced to suck up whatever bitter feelings I had about it and get on with making sure that Nina had whatever she needed.
She made it worth it though. Nina was pretty much my best friend, and now she was the only family I had left.
So even though every day felt like we were one unexpected bill away from bankruptcy, it felt good to let her live out the last bit of her childhood as removed from the horrifying realities of reality as possible thanks to credit cards and careful budgeting.
All good, see you tomorrow.
Have fun!
What did it say that she had a better social life than I did? Probably that I was at least doing one thing right.
Oh my god, is that what being a dad was? Staying home to watch Jeopardy! reruns so that your kid could go out and live their best life?
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spent my night out with friends. Probably before Cal left after the winter holidays. And after that… fuck.
Happy New Year, Nick! Welcome to being the sole provider of the family!
I let the self-pity well up for a few more seconds while I fiddled with a few more things, barely paying attention to what my hands were doing.