I struggled to compose myself, structure a cheeky smile on my face. “Well, a girl’s gotta find fun where she can in this Podunk town,” I said with a lightness I hoped didn’t sound as forced as it was.
Luke returned my smile, crossing his arms across his chest. I tried not to focus on the way his biceps flexed when he did that. I failed. I was a teenager with a mess of hormones, after all. It wasn’t just boys who had sex on the brain. It was girls who had barely been kissed thanks to everyone in a sixty-mile radius being too scared of their brother’s wrath to even touch her.
Though I wasn’t interested in boys touching me.
“Hmmm,” he pondered, the vibration of that sound in the air creating goose bumps on my exposed arms. “So you didn’t do that in order to stop bullies from hurting a shy and fragile girl?” he asked playfully, his eyes hardening slightly.
“Who me?” I asked, pointing at my chest with faux dramatics.
I didn’t miss the way his eyes flickered, for less than a second, to my exposed cleavage.
I developed early, and dressed ‘provocatively,’ to quote the principal, so I was used to boy’s gazes flickering there. But not men’s.
I swallowed roughly. “Never,” I said, breathless. “I’m the bad girl, remember? I blow up things for fun. You won’t tell on me, will you? Rat me out to the cops?” I paused, focusing on his badge. “The other cops.”
He furrowed his brow, smile disappearing with my insinuation, my subtle reminder for him, and me, of our respective positions on either side of the law.
“I’m guessing if someone’s BMW does go down in flames, you’ll have no knowledge and an airtight alibi?” he said by way of answer.
I grinned, megawatt and completely fake. “Ding, ding, ding!”
He regarded me. “You’re different than them, Rosie. You always have been. I don’t want to see you get hurt. You’re a good person.”
The words, the seriousness of them, punctured me. Right in the stomach. For all the wrong reasons.
I cocked my hip, my own brow furrowing. “No, I’m not different than them. And I’m not ashamed of that. Because it means that I’m not the same as everyone else, all of these people.” I waved toward the empty halls. “The people you serve and protect. The people who torment innocents because it’s fun and most likely that’s what their parents do to them. Good is a construct, Officer. Just like bad. They don’t exist. Not in my world, at least. Like I said, I’m just trying to get out of this alive. Have some fun.”
He stared at me a long time after that. Really looking. Really seeing. Or maybe it was a trick of the light. A hallucination brought on by the fantastical hope that life might actually be like all those books and movies. He even opened his mouth, preparing to say something… real. I could feel it, the way the air was charged with someone electric.
But then it fizzled as he shook himself back into the uniform that held him and his worldview together.
“Fun and trouble aren’t usually mutually exclusive for most people,” he said instead.
I hid my disappointment well. Oscar-worthy, I reckoned. “Well, I’m not most people.”
His eyes twinkled again. “I’ve noticed.”
“Have you really?” I asked, my façade breaking to whisper those three words.
They did something, those words. Hit him somewhere.
His response was silenced by the buzzing of the radio at his hip. I didn’t hear the words coming out of it, but they killed the moment.
He lifted it to his mouth, eyes still on me. “I’ll be right there.” He put it back on his hip. “I gotta go.”
I nodded. “Going to enforce the law.” The words did what they were meant to do, opened the chasm that separated us, that always would.
He eyed me. “Try to stay out of trouble.”
I smiled. It hurt. Near crippled. “Not sure that’s possible. You do that so much better than me.”
His eyes hardened, and he gave me the brisk professional nod that was customary when were in public.
I hid my swift intake of breath when that nod hit me physically.
He turned, leaving, then glanced back at me, eyes liquid once more. “Yeah, Rosie. I have to,” he said so lightly that I was afraid I’d imagined it.
That would’ve been it.
You know, the movie moment when it all clicks for the couple that was meant to be, destiny or whatever lined up for them and they started the romance that Hollywood and Disney were built on.
Except I was a Fletcher. By extension and definition, an outlaw.
Not Hollywood.
Definitely not Disney.
I blinked after him, the air still tasting sweet and clean from his presence. My heart thundered from my ribs so hard that I put my hand on my chest just to make sure it hadn’t broken the skin.
“You like him.”
The voice was so unexpected from the hallway I thought was empty, I jumped. And I didn’t jump. Ever. Nothing could scare me at that point.
My scowl went toward a flushed and beautiful—despite being makeup-free—face, blonde hair wild and tumbling down Laurie’s back. She was grinning, her eyes light with her perpetual happiness.
“You like testing to make sure I have a heart condition?” I snapped.
Her grin didn’t waver. “No, I think someone already did that.” She nodded toward the closing door.
I bit my lip and started to walk in the opposite direction. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She wasn’t perturbed as she walked with me, pushing her arm through the crook of mine. “Oh I do. You like Luke.”
I snapped my head toward her. “I don’t like Luke.”
“Babe, I know you. I’ve known you since you ate glue and beat up boys you liked. You didn’t punch him, but I still know you’re smitten.”
“I don’t like Luke,” I repeated. “Because I can’t like Luke.” My tone was defeated, sad, bordering on pathetic. I didn’t like that. I wasn’t pathetic.
Laurie’s smile disappeared and she stopped walking, causing me to as well. “What are you talking about, Roe?” she asked. “Of course you can like him. In fact, you don’t get much choice in who you like. That’s the fun in it.” Her eyes went dreamy and I knew she was thinking about Bull. She’d been obsessed with him since she’d bumped into him at the club. She fell into him and he caught her. Literally.
If I hadn’t seen it with my own two eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it. It was like one of the movie meet-cute moments that made you so sick you threw popcorn at the screen knowing it could never happen in real life.
But it did happen.
The world stopped for the two of them right then. I almost felt it stop spinning as they locked themselves in a little world that existed here and yet someplace altogether different.
Bull felt it too. I knew it.
I also knew he wouldn’t act on it. Not until Laurie was old enough. Much to her frustration.
But he’d protect her. Be there for her. Ensure that beautiful smile stayed on her face. And I loved that. That I could pass the torch to him and know he’d never let it go out. That’s what we all had an unspoken agreement about. Laurie was a rare person who was untouched by the world’s evil, naïve and so genuinely good you knew that something in this ugly world so rare had to be preserved. Maybe it was because I’d seen so much ugly that I didn’t want to think of Laurie having to experience that.