“Are you gonna come and get her?”
“What the hell, Maverick! What the fuck is wrong with you?”
She’s back between us again, holding up her arms towards me in animated confusion, panic written all over her face, her eyes wildly looking around as if she expects someone else to hop out of the woodworks and join the party.
“We’re leaving,” I hear myself say and her brows form an M in her forehead.
“What?”
“You’re coming with me.” I grab her arm and she starts hitting me again.
Her friend is faster than I expect him to be, and he’s at my throat with a fistful of my shirt tightly gripped between his fingers.
“Let her go,” he growls, and I lose all reason.
I shove him out of my face and step towards him, but Beth finds her way between us again, falling flat almost instantly in the scuffle.
“Are you alright?” he asks, stooping down to her side and she nods.
The whole scene is annoying to watch. I can feel my scowl deepening and I hold my hand out to her, ordering her to take it.
“Let’s go.”
“I don’t want to go anywhere with you,” she barks back.
I stick my hand out. The look on my face is animalistic; a lion baring his teeth. “Take my hand and come with me or I’ll tell him exactly who I am to you.”
Her eyelids peel back so far they seem to have disappeared into her face.
“Maverick please,” she shrieks.
Good, she’s scared, I think. But for some reason, that doesn’t feel like such a good thing. This bastard means something to her; so much so that panic fills her eyes at the prospect of him finding out our relationship status.
“What is he talking about?” he asks her as she stands and swats my hand away.
“I’m sorry, Tyler. I have to go.” She whispers the words, her voice quivering with unshed tears. Good. I’m not exactly a happy camper either.
“Today’s her last day,” I inform him, marching out and dragging Beth behind me.
Lover-boy’s hardened expression gives way to confusion as he watches her leave behind me, and my inner caveman does a victory lap around the barren desert of my heart.
20
“What the hell was that?” I huff, wishing I could slam this ridiculous door. I drag the seatbelt down as hard as I can instead, hoping it will rip right out. If it does, maybe I’ll fucking strangle him with it.
As my back presses against the coolness of the leather seat, one thing becomes ridiculously clear. Maverick is a spiteful, vengeful, waste of space. I cannot believe he just threatened to out me, when he’s the one who’s so terrified to be associated with me.
“What the fuck is your problem?” I sail a fist into his shoulder and he jumps, apparently startled, but his expression doesn’t change. Why would it? It’s not like he actually cares.
“You need to get something straight.” He turns to face me with a dark, distant stare in his eyes. “In this, thing,” he says, waving his wrists between us. “I’m in charge. You don’t speak down to me ever. You don’t have the right to eve-”
“Oh get over yourself, Maverick,” I snap, cutting him off. “You’re always going on and on about how bloody important you are and how insignificant I am and how much God himself commissioned you vice fucking chancellor of the whole damn earth. Just shut the fuck up already and drive this damn car.”
“Excuse me.” His eyes widen marginally, and I turn to face him.
“I get it. You hate me. I’m not particularly thrilled about you either. But what just happened in there.” I pause, pointing behind me in the direction of the restaurant. “That will never happen again. Do you understand me? You want to threaten me with outing me to somebody that I care about? What kind of a monster are you? What the hell did I ever do to you?”
I can feel myself getting emotional and I’m trying my best to keep it together, but failing miserably.
“Don’t forget you have more to lose than I do,” I add.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he snaps.
“You could have told Tyler about me and I would have possibly lost a friend. A very special friend. And that’s just a maybe. But if I walk into your training rink and out you to your team, you lose everything. You lose the state game position. You lose the recruitment opportunity. You lose the possibility of getting your green card and you lose your dream of being drafted after high school. You want to call me a wild animal, Maverick? Go ahead. You see me as nothing? Fine! But if you back me into a corner, I will fight back. I’m not one of your plastic dolls or money grabbing lackeys. I may have no influence, but I will ruin you in the one way I know how, do you understand me?”
The car goes dead silent for a few minutes and I sit, stewing in my own annoyance, my arms crossed tightly across my chest as I wait for him to say or do something.
In true Maverick fashion, he does the complete opposite of anything I would have ever expected. He starts laughing. It’s a low, humorless laugh at first, but then it transforms into something bordering on insane and I wonder if he’s malfunctioning.
“You,” he starts laughing again, leaning his head against the steering wheel and I watch his shoulders vibrate until they stop suddenly, his entire body going rigid in an instant.
He turns to look at me, his laughter squeezing its way out of the car through the cracks in the window. The sudden shift sucks the air out of the vehicle and I feel like I’m suffocating under his intense glare.
“Do you think you can actually ruin me?” His words are glaciers, gliding slowly, chilling my skin, raising the hairs on my arms.
“I will not and cannot be ruined by you. I cannot be damaged by you. I cannot be affected by you in any way. And you seem to have forgotten a very important fact. Your entire future depends on this working out too. Your graduation from high school, matriculation into college and your tuition. It ALL depends on this.”
I smirk at him and he cocks an eyebrow.
“You don’t care?” he asks, his eyes squinting slightly as he examines the easy expression on my face and the truth behind my eyes.
“Just drive,” I whisper through gritted teeth and he holds my gaze for a few more seconds before starting the engine.
“Where am I taking you?”
I give him my address and turn to stare out the window.
This fight has fizzled out as quickly as it began, and it has me exhausted. We have resolved nothing. We have both hurled threats and now he’s driving me to my crummy apartment in a side of town I’m pretty sure he’s never been to in his entire life.
A Lamborghini in my neighborhood is sure to draw attention. My gold-digging landlady will probably want to raise the rent if she sees me coming out of a car like this.
When Maverick turns into my lane, my heart picks up speed. Why am I so nervous? It’s no secret that I’m broke as a joke, so why should I hide it from him? Still, everything in me wants him to stop the car so I can walk home.
“Umm...I can take it from here?” I mumble and he says nothing. When I glance over at him, he has a look of disbelief, crossed with disgust on his face.
“Is this where you live?” he asks, and I cringe at his tone.
“I’m further up, but I can walk from here.”
He keeps driving, so I repeat myself, but he’s in another world.
“Maverick,” I snap, and he finally turns to look at me. “You can stop driving.”
He turns, kills the engine and I spin around to stare at him. “What are you doing?”
“I’ve never seen anything like this before.” He opens his door and gets out.
“Get back inside the damn car Maverick,” I say because…where the hell does he think he’s going?
“Stop barking commands at me, Beth,” he snaps.
I scoff at him and stomp out of his car, glancing around to see if there are any visible eyes around. We enter the complex, and are immediately greeted by screeching cats
- on their way up to Mrs. Jenkins, no doubt.
Maverick takes the lead and I roll my eyes at him as he stops before the elevator and pushes the up button. I quietly head for the stairs, knowing full well, that the elevator doors will never open. They haven’t for years and they won’t just magically do so because boy wonder over there decided to suddenly show up.
I clear the first flight before he realizes I’m gone, and I can hear him angrily bellowing my name.
“Beth! Bethany! Where the hell are you?” he screams before realizing the staircase adjacent to the elevator. I can hear his heavy foot falls as he mounts the stairs and I start to sprint up the winding staircase.
“Hey!” he calls after me and I look down to see him gaining on me at top speed.
“Hi Beth,” Mr. Brown from the apartment beneath ours waves at me.
“Hi,” I pant, trying to escape this mad man behind me.
“Everything alright?” he asks as I zip past. I glance back to see him craning his neck up towards me, and almost getting knocked over by Maverick.
“What the…Beth do I need to call the cops?” he calls after me.
I wish we could. God I wish we could, but I keep running, until I see my apartment door.
There’s a volcano erupting in my lungs when I reach the final step and my legs desperately need ice, but I keep moving, reaching around into my backpack for my keys, silently praying that somehow, no one is home tonight.
I jiggle the handle and kick the door, but before I can fully turn the keys I feel Maverick’s firm, angry fingers wrap around my elbow before he spins me around and pushes me against the door.
The keys fall from my fingers and land between us with a miserable jingle. Maverick is panting heavily, and his stormy blue eyes look like a tidal wave is about to crash into the surface and spill out, drowning me in the noisy rage, but he stays quiet. Staring into me, adamantly chastising me, challenging me, swearing at me and I feel something besides fatigue tumble through me as I stare back at him with the same resolve. My lips part slightly as the rise and fall of my chest slows down to match his and I can feel the blood returning to my cheeks.
His strong jaw seems over-worked as the muscles ripple from him clenching his teeth.
He finds me infuriating. I can tell.
Good. I find him exhausting.
I can feel his breath against my face, dancing across my cheek, slithering down the bridge of my nose before fading away into the night.
I should push him away, especially after what he did tonight, not that he’s done anything other than be a total moron to me ever since the day we met. I should definitely push him away, but between my noodle arms and my inability to peel myself away from the edge of the shoreline of his eyes, I stand here, motionless instead.
“What the hell is your problem?” His growl is low and there are still tell-tale signs of a chase in his ragged breathing.
“You mean you haven’t figured it out yet?” I manage to snap back, jutting my chin upward in defiance. He narrows his eyes before sinking his teeth into his bottom lip.
“You insisted on bringing me here. You insisted on chasing me up the stairs. Do you plan on letting me go inside or are you just going to kill me right here and now?” I snarl and he steps away from me with his arms crossed. I see a wounded expression cross his face for the first time since I’ve known him.
Did I somehow manage to strike a nerve?
What was it that I said?
I should make note of it for future reference. It may come in handy when I want to shut him up.
I stand, staring at the conundrum pouting in front of me until he rolls his eyes. “So, are you going to open the stupid door or not?”
“You expect to come inside?” I ask, my voice going up into an almost inaudible shriek in the last word. Even from out here, I can hear my mom shuffling around in the kitchen and panic is rising up inside my throat.
“Well, I sure as shit didn’t come all this way just to look at a broken door.”
21
I remember going to speech therapy classes as a young child. I hated every dreadful second of Miss Celestine’s tutelage.
“Speak up, Maverick. Use your words. You have such a lovely voice.”
It was all bullshit. There was absolutely nothing lovely about my voice and I didn’t know as many words as she thought I did. I couldn’t remember most of them. She would pile homework up, giving me new words to memorize and sentences to say. Until finally, my brain reunited with my voice and I could express myself again in words that made sense. Words that didn’t hurt.
Somehow, as I stare around this cramped excuse of a flat, I am that boy again, incapable of finding the words to adequately describe what I see before me, and something tells me that Miss Celestine would be just as lost as I am.
“This is it?” I finally manage to say when my eyes return to Beth’s after scouring over the beige-washed walls, sparsely decorated with paintings and photographs in broken and cracked frames. Nothing sits straight here. Everything is just a little off angle, but I have a feeling that even if I were to try to straighten it out, every frame, every picture, every mirror would tilt right back into its imperfect place.
There’s a stain on the carpet that looks like it’s been there for years and I shudder to imagine the source of it. An L-shaped, tattered sofa sits smack in the middle of the room with the small piece missing and a plastic chair completing the shape.
I can see the stove from the door through an open arch, as an older woman who looks just like Beth steps out to greet her.
She pauses before the words leave her mouth when she sees me, and her eyes suddenly dart around the room as if she expected some kind of prior notice to give her enough time to change all this. It would all need to be thrown away, scrubbed raw and refurnished before it became even remotely acceptable, though it is remarkably clean.
Something well-seasoned fills the air and my stomach groans. I glance behind the lady to see a pot on the two-burner stove and immediately find myself wondering how the hell something that smells so good could ever come from something so…small…so inadequate. This has to be a joke.
Somewhere a toilet flushes and not long after, a tall, slender man emerges from a room. Beth’s face falls and from the tremor in her hands I assume this is her father.
“Beth, honey?” her mother greets her. “You’re home early.” It’s more of a question than a statement of the obvious.
“And you brought a friend,” her father tacks on, coming around to the door to face me. I expect some degree of hostility. All the other homes I’ve been to with fathers seem to find me repugnant, not that I give a shit.
Beth’s father, however, doesn’t chase me with a scowl or a 9mm. Instead, he extends a hand to me. I glance down at it in confusion for a brief moment before realizing he expects me to shake it.
I reluctantly reach forward and he shakes my hand with his right hand while covering it with his left.
“Is everything okay?” her mother asks, still eyeing me from across the room. She’s cautious, there’s no mystery about that. A heck of a lot more cautious than Beth’s father. I can’t say I saw that coming. Women of all shapes and ages tend to like me. Apparently, not this one.
“Yes.” Beth answers unconvincingly, still frozen beside me.
“And who is this?” she asks, clearly not waiting for Beth to make the introductions any longer.
“This is Maverick. He gave me a lift.”
Her mom folds her arms behind her and nods. “Maverick. From your school? That Maverick?” she asks. Her voice sounds laden with suspicion and inside information.
“Yes,” Beth whispers and her father’s shoulders square.
I see. They’ve heard about me before.
“I wasn’t aware that you two were friends,” her mother says with no trace of anger in her voice, just a buttery inquisition that makes no sense to me. If there’s one thing to be noted about this woman, it’s that when she wants to,
she’s very good at hiding her true feelings.
“Well, actually,” Beth stutters and I snort at the thought of her explaining this to her folks. It’s almost funny to watch her wringing her hands like a toddler about to get a thrashing for breaking a family heirloom or drowning the pet zebra.
“We’re not exactly friends,” she finally says, and her father’s jaw tightens. He knows. Well…I’m sure he thinks he knows. I can sense his intuition, but I’m pretty sure he’s not at all prepared for the actual truth.
Her mother is staring at me with veiled venom, but I’m an expert at detecting these things. She couldn’t hide it behind a screen door made out of titanium even if she tried. She doesn’t like me.
“Well, umm...I was going to tell you, I swear!” Beth stutters.
I think about stepping up and blurting it out, but she seems to be struggling. Because I’m a gentleman, and maybe even a coward, I allow her to struggle all on her own.
“Beth?” her father asks, his voice measured. “What did you do?”
“Beth?” her mother says again, more firmly this time.
Beth takes a deep breath and turns to look at me with a pained look in her eyes before hiding them behind bare lids. When she reopens them, I barely recognize her. She smiles sweetly at me and it makes me uncomfortable. Even more uncomfortable when she walks over to me and slowly puts her arm around my waist. I’m too stunned to push her away even though I can feel the tension in her arms.
“We eloped,” she says with more conviction than the tremor in her body says she feels.
“You did what?” Her father’s cool expression gives way to a horrified glare. He turns to look at me and for a second I forget where I am. I’ve stared down the barrels of guns and climbed out of the jaws of both death and life, but something about his glare feels eerily colder as he steps toward me.
“Why would you do that, Beth? That’s not like you,” he says and her mother goes back into the kitchen and turns off the stove before coming back out with a broom pointed at me.
Vile Intentions: A Dark Sports Bully Romance Page 11
