Swish

.23

Twelve minutes into my shift at the gym where the resident basketball team were conspicuously absent, and I was seething.

Seething, because I'd been escorted to my job via squad car, curious eyes on me as if I were a felon and some kind of menace to the campus, when that couldn't have been farther from the truth.

Seething, because Maddie had only taken my latest night shifts so that I would have to leave before Eli was done, and we wouldn't have alone time together but she would have that time, and everything was so new and I was too awkward to stay and wait on him to be finished because I was terrified of misreading how he felt about me, not to mention of seeming clingy when we hadn't defined a single thing about what we were yet.

Seething, because it was so clear that Maddie had feelings for Eli and was using Patrick to make him jealous, but it was obvious to me that Eli wasn't that kind of guy to steal his best friend's girl.

Seething, lastly, because my father had the gall and audacity to report the car that he'd bought for my sixteenth birthday as stolen and had taken it away from me.

I was trapped at this campus, trapped until Eli was available to take me back home for the weekend and even then, once there I couldn't leave until Sundays. Trapped, like I was at the house the night I'd had a mental breakdown, but even then I had my car to escape.

Trapped, like I'm sure now my mother was in a loveless marriage that she'd probably only stayed in for me.

Trapped, like my mother was in the car after my father had drunkenly run a red light and-

Suddenly, the lights were all too bright and too dim at once, the world swaying and spinning beneath my feet, the cacophony of sneakers squeaking against the freshly waxed courts compounding in on my eardrums and scraping against the raw nerves that held the memories of those nightmares and the night everything changed. When he changed everything.

And he'd done it again. He wanted so badly to have control over me and the situation, to make me be his little puppet on a string, that he had taken my only form of escape away from me.

I didn't notice the tears until my arm became saturated with the salty droplets, and even then the blurring obscured the figure standing before me.

I quickly rubbed my hands under my eyes before looking up and coming face to face with Chuck Manning, the man that my father had asked to hire me.

Oh, great. Was it time for him to rescind the job, as well? Not only was it enough for my father to crush my only way of escape and my spirit, but he had to take away my only outside source of income as well.

Tall and grey bearded, the man before me held a concerned look in his blue wistful eyes, creased around the edges from time.

"Are you alright? You're Virginia, Mike's girl, right?"

I sniffed, desperately wiping at my cheeks to rid the evidence of my almost breakdown. So unprofessional.

"I'm fine, I'm so sorry. I normally don't do this its just...been one of those days," I lightened up the ending, trying to joke my way out of it, but I could tell he didn't buy it.

He crossed his burly arms across his white t-shirt clad chest, eyes narrowed on me but in a way that told me he knew I was full of shit.

"What'd the asshole do?"

"W-who?"

"The one that has you all like this?"

I could've tried to hide from the truth, kept my job intact if he wasn't there to fire me after all, but I'd officially lost my filter. Permanently.