4. Nick
It wasn’t the best food on the planet, but it was cheap and edible. And that’s what mattered. Mostly because I’d spent my last ten bucks filling up a gas can to put some gas in this useless fucking car.
Not so useless now, I thought proudly.
That was the thing about mechanics: they always had a fuck load of projects, but nothing that was ever really fit to drive. But me? I didn’t have the time or space for all that shit.
I needed a car that’d get me from point A to point B, preferably as quickly as possible, so I could actually bring home enough money to afford being alive.
My dad was one of those guys, and our garage was full of evidence to his addiction to projects, along with a couple of cars out back that didn’t run for one reason or another.
But that shit all had to go before the house sold.
I was just lucky that Frank didn’t mind me keeping this car at the shop while I fixed it up since I had to hawk most of my dad’s tools to stretch out a couple extra mortgage payments.
I’d kept a single rolling tool chest, covered in stickers from my emo teen days, so that I still had most of the essentials. But all of the big machinery was gone now. And what I hadn’t been able to move myself on buy and sell groups was getting picked up by a scrap guy in a few days.
That should give me enough cash to pay mine and Nina’s phone bills for a bit, so at least we wouldn’t have to worry about that.
Drumming my fingers on the wheel as I pulled up to the illuminated menu, reaching to turn off the radio to order our usual—two double cheeseburgers, no onions, extra pickles for Caleb, who would also get mine, extra large fries, and a pair of sodas.
Diet for him; he claimed that he liked the aspartamey taste, but I never could get around it.
He handed over his shiny black metal credit card across me and out the window to the cashier in exchange for an overfull bag. She swiped it and handed it back, the window into the restaurant sliding shut between us.
Most people didn’t get why I didn’t hate Caleb. Since he was a fancy cunt who looked exactly like his fuckin’ mother, even if he thought he looked like his dad. Especially when I looked at him sidelong in the passing beams of the street lights.
But Caleb wasn’t his mama, even if he acted more like a prissy omega than an alpha half the time. He was just… Caleb.
Handsome fucker, never said the right thing… And currently obsessing over some girl that wouldn’t be relevant long enough to cause any lasting impact. If he was less self-absorbed, he’d probably have realized that for himself.
Even with all of that, there was still something I found so… endearing about him. It was impossible to stay mad at the guy when you saw him for what he was—a scared kid trapped in the body of an adult man.
“Where are you going?” Caleb asked as I drove us out of the lot and back onto the highway.
“I thought you’d want a view with dinner,” I said with a shrug. “Unless you like sitting in a parking lot looking at rusty pickup trucks?”
“Well, I don’t have anything against it…”
I ignored him, flipping the radio back on to fill the silence while I drove us a couple miles down the road to the beach so we could watch the water while we took turns tossing fries into each other's mouths with limited success.
As much as Caleb was a rich asshole, he was also just a guy. And, now that my dad was gone, probably the most important guy in my life.
Like this, I could almost pretend that things were normal between us.
I knew there was some resentment lingering in our laughter—he blamed my dad as much as I blamed his mom—and that it wasn’t something we were going to be able to sweep under the rug forever.
But at least for right now, we’d silently agreed to put all that aside.
Caleb took a big bite out of his burger, holding it out for his phone camera with the beach in the background, and I rolled my eyes.
“I thought the camera ate first?”
“It does. This is called visual storytelling, Nick. Or are you too dense to understand art?”
“I’m not sure your half-chewed burger is the next Mona Lisa,” I drawled, unwrapping my own with a crinkle of the foil-treated paper to take a bite.
“Oh, fucking please, what do you know about the Mona Li—ugh, fucking hell.”
“What?”
“My dad just commented on my story, telling me to come home. You know he threatened to cut me off today? Be nice to the girls or else. What a load of fucking bullshit…”
I watched as Caleb opened his father’s profile for the second time since he’d been in the car, his eyes narrowing on the most recently posted image.
“I think I’m gonna enter on Friday night,” I said, mostly to change the subject as Caleb’s fingers moved, navigating from post to post, nearly shaking with anger.
He was taking the divorce hard, which was a little ironic since his life didn’t change that much, but I was left fuckin’ busting my ass with gig work on top of my job at the shop to make sure that Nina’s senior year wasn’t affected.
Caleb wouldn’t get that, though; money wasn’t even something on his radar. Imaginary numbers that never amounted to anything.
“This piece of shit?” he asked incredulously. “I know we all had a phase where we were like, really, really, into Rihanna. But she didn’t mean zero to sixty in three point five minutes; she meant seconds.”
“Vete a la chingada.” I scowled. “It’s not that slow.”
Sure, it’d taken a little longer than I’d wanted to get up to speed on the highway, but it just needed tweaking. And I had enough time to do it.
“Nick, it practically crawls. There’s no way you can put money on it doing anything more than rolling out of the driveway.”
“I only just got it running,” I argued. “It’s not like it’ll always run like this; I’ll make improvements.”
“Improvements,” Caleb scoffed, chomping down a few more bites of burger until he was tossing his empty wrapper into the bag and wiping his mouth with a napkin. “Like what? Hauling it to the junkyard and buying a new car?”
“Some of us can’t afford to throw things away just because they need a little work,” I snapped, feeling heat rush to my face with my anger.
Of course, to a rich prick like Caleb, the car was inconvenient. But it wasn’t like I had the money to replace it. Even if I managed to sell it, I’d sort of fucked over the resale value by getting rid of the special edition parts anyway.
“I didn’t say throw it away, you could sell it for scrap at least.”
My scowl became a glare, frustration bubbling up inside me and making the space feel tighter than it already was with two big alphas crowding the front seat. “Change the fuckin’ subject, man.”
“Touchy,” Caleb muttered in a tone that reminded me more of an omega than an alpha. He had a habit of sounding like that, and, if I wasn’t so annoyed, it would’ve been cute.
I shifted to grab my soda from the cupholder and was immediately assaulted with the earthy sweetness of his scent in the rapidly rising temperature in the car. Pheremones stuck to my tongue and the roof of my mouth in the humidity, and I took a big gulp of soda in an attempt to wash them away.
“Little hot in here, isn’t it?” I mumbled, fiddling with the controls of the fans.
Going without AC in Florida was insane, and the heavier the air got, the more oppressively sticky the heat felt. Though maybe that was just the stick of my clothes to my body with sweat.
“I don’t think so,” Caleb said, letting out a low, irritated hiss as he navigated through his phone. “Ha! I knew it…”
“What?” I said, hardly listening. His scent was clinging to my nostrils and the back of my tongue, making my skin feel tighter and itchier by the second. My cock swelled in my shorts until I was sure there was no way Caleb wasn’t going to notice.
Well, if he ever looked up from his fucking phone.
“Marissa messaged me back,” he said triumphantly. “I knew she would.”
“I thought you guys broke up.”
Marissa was his on-again, off-again… girlfriend felt like a strong word.
But hookup wasn’t quite right either. I was pretty sure I’d heard Nina use the term ‘situationship’ once, and that seemed to fit the bill.
One minute they were practically fucking through their clothes at some party, and the next they were screaming at each other, usually ending with her trying to take his head off with whatever heavy object was closest.
Sometimes, I sort of thought she had a point. It’d be nice to throw something at Caleb once in a while.
“Yeah, she posted some soft launch bullshit with another guy today.”
“Don’t you think that means she moved on?” I asked, chewing on my straw in an effort to coat my tongue with the last few drops of soda lingering in the plastic.
He scoffed. “It means she was trying to get under my skin, and once she realized she didn’t, she messaged me.”
I didn’t get him at all. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether or not he liked fucking her, or fighting with her more.
Both sounded fuckin’ exhausting.
“Why don’t you drop her for good this time? It’s obvious the two of you don’t work.”
“We work just fine,” he huffed, irritation potent as his thumbs tap, tap, tapped away on the screen.
Normally, I’d just let it go and leave him to continue doing whatever he wanted, but right now it felt harder to do that, my irritation at an all-time high.
I was tired of watching Caleb waste his time with someone he obviously didn’t even like, especially when she treated him so poorly.
“If you want a hookup, just go find one. It doesn’t have to be her.”
“Has it ever occurred to you that I like her?” Caleb shot back, finally looking up.
I laughed. “No.”
“Well, I do.”
“You’re lying,” I scoffed. “If it’s just to me or to both of us is unclear, but to someone for sure.”
“I’m not lying,” Caleb snapped, the slightest bit of alpha growl coming through in his voice, which definitely wasn’t helping my cock soften. “Is it so hard to believe that I’m into her? She’s hot, smart, fucking filthy—”