3. Caleb
Nick’s hands gripped the wheel harder than he needed to, and I couldn’t help but stare at the tattoos over his knuckles.
I thought he was fucking crazy when he got them.
They were so… permanent. And visible. No decent job wanted a guy with his hands tattooed, even nowadays, when ink was way more socially accepted than before.
But when I asked him about it, he just shrugged.
Told me that he’d been thinking about it and wanted to do it.
In the end, I even went with him to the appointment, even though I’d never been a huge fan of tattoos to begin with.
People always said, ‘Don’t put a bumper sticker on a Bentley,’ and my net worth made that old-fuck car’s price point look like a Prius.
Even if I wouldn’t dare to compare Nick to a Bentley—he was still more like a Maserati, stylish if not a little edgy, dangerous—he was still too quick to make impulsive decisions that’d impact him for way longer than the dopamine would last.
Either way, he’d started marking his skin before we even turned eighteen, and I’d gone with him every time, despite my many protests. Okay, fine, they were lectures. But, really? What sensible, reasonable alpha wanted to walk around looking like a billboard for their teenage bad decisions?
He already had perfect skin, immaculate curls that didn’t need gel to look good, and a body built through hard labor, and those looked different somehow than the ones earned in the gym—better, because it wasn’t vanity. It was just Nick.
I’d even started to come around on the ink a little bit. It was hard to deny that he looked, well… Hot.
Super fucking hot.
When I didn’t immediately respond to his question—and how the fuck was I supposed to know where to go anyway—Nick took a sharp turn away from the city, toward the beach.
“I keep worrying that it’s just gonna die on me,” he muttered. “So I’m trying to stick kinda close.”
“As if, you’ve brought it back from the dead,” I said. “You got AC?”
Nick snorted a laugh. “I only just got it to drive, and you’re worried about the temperature? Fuck no, man.”
The palm trees swayed in the wind as he sped us down the highway, and I pressed a button on my door to roll my window down, prompting him to do the same.
The scent of motor oil permeated the car along with the hum of the engine, but the smell didn’t seem to worry him, so I just tried to enjoy that we’d managed to get this far without it being awkward too much.
It was a bit loud, and the occasional sputtering made me nervous, but it was running, and that was more than could be said for the damn thing for the last year, so… I didn’t say anything about it.
Didn’t say anything at all for a long while, really.
We hadn’t gone this long without seeing each other since I could remember, and I wasn’t excited about the idea that I’d say something to set Nick off and get left on the side of the road.
He wasn’t exactly the most relaxed dude on the planet. But working on his temper hadn’t ever been a priority for him. Probably never would be, so long as he never had any lasting consequences for his outbursts.
The other alpha's hand landed on the gearshift, and he wobbled the knob as we switched lanes, his brown eyes nervously flicking between the road and the dash. I’d never bothered with manual transmissions myself, so I wasn’t entirely sure what the fuck he was doing, but with every jostle it seemed like we were picking up speed, careening us faster and faster as Nick whipped us off the highway and onto the back roads.
“Are you trying to get us killed?” I asked, only half joking as I checked to make sure my seatbelt was firmly secured in place. “You barely have it running; isn’t a hundred and twenty clicks overkill?”
The last thing I wanted—other than to let a bunch of strangers live in my house—was to be found wrapped around a tree in this thing. It had cigarette holes in the seats for fuck’s sake.
“Sure,” he scoffed, rolling his eyes but keeping his foot pressed heavily to the gas. “Maybe my life insurance will pay for everything.”
“If not yours, mine for sure,” I joked, figuring that keeping the ball rolling on our usual banter would be good… But Nick clammed right up, his jaw tight and angry.
Fuck.
Did I say something wrong? It felt like that’s all I was doing lately. Everything with him had been off since our parents ruined our lives. I’d always been under the hideously misinformed opinion that parents strived to make their children happy, but ours had done nothing but the exact opposite.
Somewhere, deep down, I hoped Mom would come back, Dad would kick out that beta slut, and we’d all live happily ever after, Nick included. I knew that was bullshit though. Reality was never that tidy. Mom made her choice, deciding to run away with Leo after they got caught.
We hadn’t talked much since. I wasn’t even home when things blew up, and these conversations weren’t exactly the best over the phone.
I’d come back from school to her closet cleaned out and some shitty letter left on my bed that I shoved in a drawer without opening.
She obviously didn’t give enough of a fuck to have a real conversation with me, and I didn’t see a point in humoring her when all she had to do was actually talk to me.
“What’s eating you?” Nick asked finally, cutting me a sideways glance. “Other than your dad hating me, of course.”
“For no good reason,” I muttered, unsure where to begin.
I wasn’t even sure I wanted to talk about it in the first place. Except… I must’ve. Because if I didn’t, I wouldn't have come to Nick. He was just about the only person I ever wanted to talk to—and maybe Ryker, when he remembered to stop being annoying—that hadn’t changed.
A part of me liked that realization.
The other part wanted to undo my seatbelt and jump out of the car while it was still moving.
“It’s just—” The warring thoughts and feelings made it hard to pick a starting point. I wanted to yell about my dad just about as much as I wanted to yell at Nick.
He should’ve known better than whatever the old man said didn’t make any difference to me, and that I didn’t hold Leo over him at all. But… time was funny when I spent so much of it away from Miami at school.
“Try again,” Nick prompted when I didn’t expand.
I sighed, trying to focus on one of the fifty thoughts that fought for my attention. “That beta my dad’s been letting stay in our house is bringing her daughter to live there too.”
“You mean the obvious rebound he’s toting around as a girlfriend?”
“Yes.” My blood boiled. My family and best friendship were torn apart by my mom’s selfish ass, and now I had to deal with this—this—woman.
Nick drummed his fingers on the wheel, ink shifting with the movement. “I guess he must be pretty into her…”
“Sure. I’d probably be into whatever hole threw herself at me first after a couple decades with the same woman, too. She just happened to be the lucky candidate.”
“Didn’t they meet at that work conference a few months ago? Like, before all this?”
“Yeah.” She actually lived further north and had traveled for it. It’s why he moved her out here. Some bullshit about being unable to stomach being away from her for even a day.
Seriously, who the fuck said things like that in real life?
Liars, I guessed. There was no way that sugarbear was really that good of company.
“I’d bet her daughter is hot though,” Nick said, like it would make any difference.
I fought a gag, recoiling into the door until the air whizzing by ruffled my hair. “I’m sure she’s a toad, like her mom.”
Nick laughed, and the sound made the corners of my mouth tilt up. “Whatever, man. Even I can admit she’s hot, gives that MILF energy.”
Something way too close to jealousy cracked through me like thunder, and I swallowed it like a dry pill. I couldn’t be jealous. I didn’t give a fuck about Nick’s taste in women, no matter how terrible it clearly was.
“Did he tell you her name?”
“What’s it matter to you?” I shot back, my eyes narrowing on his profile.
He shrugged, always too fucking casual about everything. “We could look her up and see.”
“I don’t want to look her up,” I snapped back, furious that he wasn’t taking my side. Obviously it didn’t matter what Ivy looked like; she wasn’t going to be around long enough for me to know more than her name. “I don’t even want to see her face. The bitch doesn’t exist to me.”
“Speaking of bitches,” he said, smirking my way. “You’re kinda acting like one.”
“Because I’m not interested in the girl living rent-free in my house?”
“You live rent-free in your house,” Nick pointed out unhelpfully.
“It’s my house!”
“It’s your father’s house,” he scoffed. “You have to be at least a little curious. What if she’s like a famous mass murderer or something?”
“I’m not. And she isn’t. She’s just some loser running from her equally loserish pack.”
“Fine, tell me her name, and I’ll look her up,” he said, leaning across me to try and grab his phone from where it’d slid away from him on the dash.
“Don’t look at your phone and drive,” I snapped, smacking at his hand. In part because I didn’t want him to, and because I might actually kill him if he crashed this thing after working so hard on it.
“Then you look.”
“Fine!”
I typed in her name, Ivy King, and way too many profiles popped up. Impatience licked up my spine as I changed tactics, first going to my dad’s page, and then clicking a sickeningly clingy selfie of him and the stranger, before clicking her tagged profile and scrolling to find—Ha! Got you slut!
Ivy had the same blonde hair as her mother—guess it was natural after all—and a similar face shape, but she couldn’t be more different in every other way.
Her eyes were a pretty blue, and she had long bangs that parted in the middle, sweeping back away from her face.
In the first photo I found, she was posed on a Suzuki V-Strom 800, with a red jacket thrown over her shoulder.
Her smile was bright, too bright, like when someone drove past you at night with their LEDs on and blinding you completely.
“You found her?” Nick asked smugly, and I realized I’d been staring for longer than I wanted to admit.
“I—maybe,” I huffed, scrolling to the next photo—a bikini shot and—
“Let me see!” He grabbed my phone from my hands before I could scroll past, or even decide whether or not I wanted to show him.
“Manners, fucking hell dude.”
Nick chuckled as he scrolled through, his eyes flicking from the screen to the road and back.
“Can you not kill us?” I asked moodily.
Just because I wasn’t sure where we were going didn’t mean I didn’t want to actually get there.
“Quit whining,” he said, continuing as if I’d said nothing at all. “God, I love being right.”
“About what?”
“She’s fucking gorgeous.”
I’d had the same thought, but hearing him say it made me want to grab the wheel and swerve us into oncoming traffic.
“She’s… fine.”
He raised a thick eyebrow, shoving the phone back at me. “Are you blind, or just stupid?”
“Can we talk about literally anything else?” I asked. “Hot or not, it doesn’t fucking matter. She’s still just a leech I’m going to have to deal with all summer.”
Nick shrugged. “Who knows, might be a bit of fun. Cooped up in a house with a girl who doesn’t know anyone—or how much of a whiny little beta bitch you are.”
My lip curled as he turned off the highway into a familiar parking lot. “I’m not even a beta.”
“Would it matter? Since you sooo don’t care?”
“Give it a rest,” I snapped. “What, did driving like a maniac make you hungry?”
Overhead, Steel Wheelz neon sign glowed against the darkening sky, storm clouds rolling in from the ocean toward the shore. We’d spent more evenings parked here than I could remember, talking and sharing a bag of salty shoestring fries with ketchup.
My heart fluttered for only a moment, memories of everything as it was hitting me hard.
“Yeah, aren’t you?” Nick asked as he pulled into the drive-thru.
“Starved,” I said, realizing I’d gone most of the day without a meal since my sandwich had found its way into the trash.
“Great. ‘Cause you’re buying.”