Page 30 of No Cap

I stiffened, all the niceness he’d managed to coax out of me vanishing with his words.

What an asshole.

Maybe he was right.

Maybe what Taite did to Keda wasn’t actually his fault. He didn’t tell her to go kill herself. He didn’t hand her that bottle of sleeping pills. He didn’t hit her that night she was in the accident.

But Taite was still an asshole.

The motherfucker had tortured a young woman.

He had no clue what these people were going through. He didn’t know that his jokes were detrimental.

Pulling myself away from the asshole cop’s delicious heat, I twisted and started moving toward the mouth of the alley.

Since I’d planned out the entire day, being sure to take note of all my exits, I knew where I was and what direction I needed to head in.

I was also very aware of the footsteps that followed behind me the entire way to my car.

Fishing the key out of my bra, I shoved it into the door and fell inside.

The moment I was in, I locked the doors like any smart girl would do upon entering her vehicle, then started the car up.

If there was one thing I could say about my shitbox, it was that it always started, no matter what.

It may have looked like a POS—piece of shit—on the outside, but the motor was pristine, and I made sure to keep it fully tuned.

I changed my own oil every four thousand miles in the parking lot of my apartment complex. When I needed to do more maintenance on it—something I’d learned from a teenager who used to live on our street when I was growing up—I went to the now grown teen’s shop and did whatever I needed to do there.

Kinny Fink had shown me the ways of the world. He was well over six years older than me, saw a scrawny, scraggly, pain in the ass thirteen- to his nineteen-year-old self, and took pity on me since he saw the way my parents and siblings treated me.

Kinny had become a pretty good friend over the years, and I called him one of my greatest friends. I’d tried to set Kinny and Keda up once, and they’d hated each other. Honestly, they had that really fine line between love and hate, and had things gone differently—ie: her not getting nearly killed in a drunk driving accident—I think they might’ve made that change from hate to love.

But now, Kinny was seeing someone new, and she semi-hated me because I showed up at her boyfriend’s shop to work on my car when I needed to, and sometimes that was too much female contact.

Honestly, Kinny could’ve done way better.

But I secretly felt like he was trying to punish himself with this woman.

A hard knock on my window had me glancing up to find a narrow-eyed Quincy staring at me. He was making the universal sign above his left shoulder with his hand and pointer finger in a ‘hurry up’ gesture.

I nearly snorted.

If he thought making that gesture at me would get me to move any faster, he was sorely mistaken.

And, just sayin’, but my shitbox took some time to warm up. If I tried to leave now, it’d die again, and that wasn’t something I was interested in doing in the middle of a busy street.

I rolled my window down just enough that he could hear what I was about to say and said, “Listen. I’m trying to leave, but this thing takes some warmup time. If I tried to leave now, it’d just die at the stop sign when I came to a stop. These things take time.”

His sigh of aggravation wasn’t nearly as sexy as it would’ve been had he not yelled at me earlier and told me he’d arrest me if he saw me near Taite again.

When he went to say something, his mouth opening just as the words started to come out of that stupid sexy mouth of his, I rolled the window up.

He narrowed his eyes, saying something that I could clearly make out as ‘pain in the fucking ass,’ and went back to scowling at me.

I revved the engine, hoping to help it along, and it growled like the awesome beast that she was.

Quincy’s eyebrows went up, surprised at the sound of the motor—most people were when they were shown the outside first—and I looked away.