“I forgot to ask you about a ride home. My car’s on the fritz again and I dropped it off at the shop this morning,” he shouts, pushing his wet hair back and draping his towel over his shoulder.
I stuff my phone in my front pocket and point to the truck with my thumb. “Yeah. Climb in.”
Three minutes later Daniel’s managed to rip my music apart and tell me six times that my truck smells worse than the dirty socks molding on the bottom of his laundry basket.
I turn up the volume on my stereo and flick him off. My truck is a piece of crap but it gets me from one place to the next so who’s complaining? I’m on a limited budget and since I can’t manage a job in addition to the track team and school, I take what I can get. “Well, you can find yourself a different ride the next time you’re stranded after practice, fuckwad.”
“Or you could just clean up this junker.” He picks up an empty soda can from the floorboard and tosses it in the narrow space behind the seats. “I honestly don’t know how you manage to get girls to go home with you in this thing. It’s foul.”
“Look, I haven’t had any problems so far. And this is fair warning: me and my foul truck are about to get offended and you need to start asking yourself how you’re going to get two kegs to the house in one trip on Friday without my help.”
“Fair enough. I’ll shut up about it.” Daniel laughs and shakes his head. “I guess I forgot that you don’t need to bother with impressing girls to get them to sleep with you. At this point, I’m pretty sure that The Great Cole Everly could roll in dog crap and show up on a bicycle in nothing but a pink tutu and fairy wings and Kate Dutton and every other pretty girl within a ten mile radius would still be lining up for a piece of the action.”
I involuntarily squeeze the steering wheel and tighten my jaw. I don’t know why I’m annoyed, but I am. “Thanks for making me sound like a real douchebag, man. I appreciate that…” I let my voice trail off. “Anyway, I already told you and the other guys that I’m done with Kate. The girl’s been texting me and calling me almost every single day like she’s… like she’s…” I shake my head at a loss for words.
Daniel glances over at me with both of his eyebrows raised. “Oh, you mean that she’s been acting like she likes you? She’s been calling you like she wants a relationship with you after you’ve been fucking her on and off for the past six months?”
I ignore his mocking tone and roll my shoulders. “I’m just not interested in the girl like that and I think I was pretty up front with her about it. I told her from the beginning that I’m not a relationship kind of guy. So if Kate wants to change the game now, she’s going to have to find herself a different player.”
“And that has nothing to do with Aimee Spencer?”
My eyes meet his briefly before snapping back to the road. The sound of her name is still ricocheting around my chest like a bullet. “What are you talking about? What the fuck does Aimee Spencer have to do with anything I just said?”
Daniel shrugs his shoulders. He tilts his head toward the passenger side window and plays with the window controls. “Noelle Melker told me that Aimee’s back from wherever she ran off to last year.” He coughs twice. “Then I saw you with her at Dirty Ernie’s and you two looked cozy. I just thought that something might be happening between you and that’s why you’re kicking Kate to the curb.”
I snort. “Nothing’s happening there.”
I don’t tell him that I invited Aimee and her friend to the party at our house on Friday or that I spent at least an hour on Sunday stalking her online like a psychopath.
I skimmed through a few articles about the accident, but what drew my attention the most were the photos of Aimee from back when she swam competitively. It was strange—like looking at snapshots of a totally different person. Her hair was shorter and her body was thicker with a swimmer’s muscles, but that wasn’t what got me. In almost every single picture, Aimee was smiling. A real fucking smile. And her smile was just like I imagined it would be—so wide and beautiful that it put the sun to shame. It twisted something down in my gut and kept me transfixed to the point where I had to slam my laptop shut and go on a long run just to be able to think about something else.
I can feel Daniel watching me from the passenger seat. I look over. “Nothing’s happening,” I repeat.
“I wouldn’t mind if there was something there.” He takes a deep breath and rolls his tongue over his bottom lip. “I’m not going lie and say that it’s not a little strange for me that she’s going to school here now. Aimee—” He pauses and somehow the sound of the truck engine rumbling seems louder than it did two seconds ago. “She was… Cole, you wouldn’t know anything about this, but she and my sister were like the same person. They shared and traded everything—clothes, guys… everything. I’ve never known friends like that. They were so close that it was an ongoing joke with my family that Aimee and Jillian were the opposite of Siamese twins—one head controlling two bodies.”