Hopeless (5 page)

“I think he’s talking to you,” she says. I grab the last of the sacks and ignore her, walking as fast as I can toward the exit.

Once I reach my car, I let out a huge breath as I open the back door to put the groceries inside.
What the hell is wrong with me?
A good-looking guy tries to get my attention and I
run
? I’m not uncomfortable around guys. I’m confident to a fault, even. The one time in my life I might actually feel what could possibly be an attraction for someone, and I run.

Six is going to kill me.

But that
look
. There was something so disturbing about the way he looked at me. It was uncomfortable, embarrassing, and somehow flattering all at once. I’m not used to having these sorts of reactions at all, much less more than one at a time.

“Hey.”

I freeze. His voice is without a doubt directed at me now.

I still can’t distinguish between butterflies or a stomach virus, but either way I’m not fond of the way that voice penetrates right to the pit of my stomach. I stiffen and slowly turn around, all of a sudden aware that I’m nowhere near as confident as my past would lead me to believe.

He’s holding two sacks down at his side with one hand while he rubs the back of his neck with his other hand. I’m really wishing the weather were still shitty and rainy so he wouldn’t be standing here right now. He rests his eyes on mine and the look of contempt from inside the store is now replaced with a crooked grin that seems a bit forced in our current predicament. Now that I have a closer look at him, it’s apparent the stomach virus isn’t the root of the sudden stomach issues at all.

It’s simply
him
.

Everything about him, from his tousled dark hair, to his stark blue eyes, to that…
dimple
, to his thick arms that I just want to reach out and touch
.

Touch? Really, Sky? Get ahold of yourself!

Everything about him causes my lungs to fail and my heart to go into overdrive. I have a feeling if he smiles at me like Grayson tries to smile at me, my panties would be on the ground in record time.

As soon as my eyes leave his physique long enough for us to make eye contact again, he releases the tight grip he has on his neck and switches the sack to his left hand.

“I’m Holder,” he says, extending his hand out to me.

I look down at his hand, then take a step back without shaking it. This whole situation is entirely too awkward for me to trust him with this innocent introduction. Maybe if he wouldn’t have pierced me with his intense glare in the store, I would be more susceptible to his physical perfection.

“What do you want?” I’m careful to look at him with suspicion rather than awe.

His dimple reappears with his hasty laugh and he shakes his head, then looks away again. “Um,” he says with a nervous stutter that doesn’t match his confident persona in the least. His eyes dart around the parking lot like he’s looking for an escape, and he sighs before locking eyes with me again. His multitude of reactions confuses the hell out of me. He seems close to disgusted by my presence one minute, to practically running me down the next. I’m usually pretty good at reading people, but if I had to make an assumption about Holder based on the last two minutes alone, I’d have to say he suffers from split-personality disorder. His sudden shifts between flippant and intense are unnerving.

“This might sound lame,” he says. “But you look really familiar. Do you mind if I ask what your name is?”

Disappointment sets in as soon as the pick-up line escapes his lips. He’s one of
those
guys. You know. The incredibly gorgeous guys who can have anyone, anytime, anywhere and they know it? The guys that, all they have to do is flash a crooked smile or a dimple and ask a girl her name and she melts until she’s on her knees in front of him? The guys that spend their Saturday nights climbing through windows?

I’m highly disappointed. I roll my eyes and reach behind me, pulling on the door handle to my car. “I’ve got a boyfriend,” I lie. I spin around and open the door, then climb inside. When I reach to pull the door shut, I’m met with resistance when it refuses to budge. I look up to see his hand grasping the top of the car door, holding it open. There’s a hard desperation in his eyes that sends chills down my arms.

He looks at me and I get
chills?
Who the hell
am
I?

“Your name. That’s all I want.”

I debate on whether or not I should explain to him that my name isn’t going to help him in his stalking endeavors. I’m more than likely the only seventeen-year-old left in America without an online presence. With my grip still on the door handle, I discharge a warning shot with my glare. “Do you mind?” I say sharply, my eyes darting to the hand that’s preventing me from shutting my door. My eyes trail from his hand to the tattoo written in small script across his forearm.

Hopeless

I can’t help but laugh internally. I am obviously the target of Karma’s retaliation today. I’m finally introduced to the one guy that I find attractive, and he’s a high school dropout with the word
hopeless
tattooed on himself.

Now I’m irritated. I pull on the door one more time, but he doesn’t budge.

“Your name.
Please
.”

The desperate look in his eyes when he says
please
prompts a surprisingly sympathetic reaction from me, way out of left field.

“Sky,” I say abruptly, suddenly feeling compassion for the pain that is clearly masked behind those blue eyes of his. The ease at which I give in to his request based off of one look leaves me disappointed in myself. I let go of the door and crank my car.

“Sky,” he repeats to himself. He ponders this for a second, then shakes his head like I got the answer to his question wrong. “Are you sure?” He cocks his head at me.

Am I
sure?
Does he think I’m Shayna/Shayla and don’t even know my own name? I roll my eyes and shift in my seat, pulling my ID from my pocket. I hold it up to his face.

“Pretty sure I know my own name.” I begin to pull the ID back when he releases my door and grabs the ID out of my hand, bringing it in closer for inspection. He eyes it for a few seconds, then flicks it over in his fingers and hands it back to me.

“Sorry.” He takes a step away from my car. “My mistake.”

His expression is glossed over with hardness now and he watches me as I put my ID back into my pocket. I stare at him for a second, waiting for something more, but he just works his jaw back and forth while I put my seatbelt on.

He’s giving up on asking me out that easily? Seriously? I put my fingers on the door handle, expecting him to hold the door open again in order to spit out another lame pickup line. When that doesn’t happen and he steps back even further as I shut my door, eeriness consumes me. If he really didn’t follow me out here to ask me out, what the hell was this all about?

He runs his hand through his hair and mutters to himself, but I can’t hear what he says through the closed window. I throw the car in reverse and keep my eyes on him as I back out of the parking lot. He remains motionless, staring at me the entire time I pull away. When I’m heading in the opposite direction, I adjust the rearview mirror to get a last glance at him before exiting the parking lot. I watch as he turns to walk away, smashing his fist into the hood of a car.

Good call, Sky. He’s got a temper
.

After the groceries are put away, I grab a handful of chocolate from my stash and shove it in my pocket, then crawl out my window. I push Six’s window up and pull myself in. It’s almost four o’clock in the afternoon and she’s asleep, so I tiptoe to her side of the bed and kneel down. She’s got her facemask on and her dirty blond hair is matted to her cheek, thanks to the amount of drool she produces while she sleeps. I inch in as close as I can to her face and scream her name.

“SIX! WAKE UP!”

She jerks herself up with such force that I don’t have time to move out of her way. Her flailing elbow crashes into my eye and I fall back. I immediately cover my throbbing eye with my hand and sprawl out on the floor of her bedroom. I look up at her out of my good eye, and she’s sitting up in the bed holding onto her head, scowling at me. “You’re such a bitch,” she groans. She throws her covers off and gets out of bed, then heads straight for the bathroom.

“I think you gave me a black eye,” I moan.

She leaves the bathroom door open and sits down on the toilet. “Good. You deserve it.” She grabs the toilet paper and kicks the bathroom door shut with her foot. “You better have something good to tell me for waking me up. I was up all night packing.”

Six has never been a morning person, and from the looks of it, she’s not an afternoon person, either. In all honesty, she’s also not a night person. If I had to guess when her most pleasant time of day occurs, it’s probably while she sleeps, which may be why she hates to wake up so much.

Six’s sense of humor and straightforward personality are huge factors in why we get along so well. Peppy, fake girls annoy the hell out of me. I don’t know that
pep
is even in Six’s vocabulary. She’s one black wardrobe away from being your typical, broody teenager. And fake? She’s as straight shooting as they come, whether you want her to be or not. There isn’t a fake thing about Six, other than her name.

When she was fourteen and her parents told her they were moving to Texas from Maine, she rebelled by refusing to respond to her name. Her real name is Seven Marie, so she would only answer to
Six
just to spite her parents for making her move. They still call her Seven, but everyone else calls her Six. Just goes to show she’s as stubborn as I am, which is one of the many reasons we’re best friends.

“I think you’ll be happy I woke you up.” I pull myself up from the floor and onto her bed. “Something monumental happened today.”

Six opens the bathroom door and walks back to her bed. She lies down next to me and pulls the covers up over her head. She rolls away from me, fluffing her pillow with her hand until she gets comfortable. “Let me guess…Karen got cable?”

I roll onto my side and scoot closer to her, wrapping my arm around her. I put my head on her pillow and spoon her. “Guess again.”

“You met someone at school today and now you’re pregnant and getting married and I can’t be a bridesmaid at your wedding because I’ll be all the way across the damn world?”

“Close, but nope.” I drum my fingers on her shoulder.

“Then
what
?” she says, irritated.

I roll over onto my back and let out a deep sigh. “I saw a guy at the store after school, and holy shit, Six. He was beautiful. Scary, but beautiful.”

Six immediately rolls over, managing to send an elbow straight into the same eye that she assaulted a few minutes ago. “What?!” she says loudly, ignoring the fact that I’m holding my eye and groaning again. She sits up on the bed and pulls my hand away from my face. “What?!” she yells again. “Seriously?”

I stay on my back and attempt to force the pain from my throbbing eye into the back of my mind. “I know. As soon as I looked at him it was like my entire body just melted to the floor. He was…wow.”

“Did you talk to him? Did you get his number? Did he ask you out?”

I’ve never seen Six so animated before. She’s being a little too giddy, and I’m not sure that I like it.

“
Jesus
, Six. Simmer down.”

She looks down at me and frowns. “Sky, I’ve been worried about you for four years, thinking this would never happen. I would be fine if you were gay. I would be fine if you only liked skinny, short, geeky guys. I would even be fine if you were only attracted to really old, wrinkly men with even wrinklier penises. What I haven’t been fine with is the thought of you never being able to experience lust.” She falls back onto the bed, smiling. “Lust is the best of all the deadly sins.”

I laugh and shake my head. “I beg to differ. Lust sucks. I think you’ve played it up all these years. My vote is still with gluttony.” With that, I pull a piece of chocolate out of my pocket and pop it into my mouth.