A couple of weeks passed by blessedly uneventfully. Things were still tense at home, with his parents fighting as much as ever, and Pilar taking much longer to get past her break up than any of them had expected. She still preferred to spend almost all of her time either out of the house with her friends or locked in her bedroom with her music turned up obnoxiously loud. Whenever Victor did run into her at home, she would give him weird, probing looks, or make some kind of cryptic remark, and it had him feeling really on edge around her. He began to feel grateful for the days when he didn't see much of her.
Aside from all of that, everything else in his life was going well. He went to his check up at the clinic and was given the okay to get back to playing basketball, much to Coach Harris' relief, and they even won the game they played the previous weekend against one of their local rivals. Andrew had been true to his word, staying out of Victor's way with Mia and getting back to a slightly colder but otherwise acceptable level of sportsmanship on the court. Victor and Mia finished their Chemistry project and got an A, and he'd been doing well in most of his other classes, too.
The truck had improved his life so much already, and it'd only been two weeks since he'd gotten it. He'd passed his driving test without any problems and received his license. It felt amazing to be able to drive himself, Felix, and Pilar to school (Felix was happy to let Victor have a turn being chauffeur) or to drive himself to work and not have to show up at the cafe all sweaty from the fifteen minute walk from school. Things at Brasstown were good, too, he and Benji becoming closer friends, chatting a lot during their slow periods and they'd gotten into a routine of sharing new music with each other whenever they had a closing shift together. Victor would spend some of his free time making playlists just to have something to impress Benji with, and he was forever surprised by Benji's very eclectic taste in music, which tended to bounce around between old country/western stars like Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash and then suddenly shift to Dylan and Pink Floyd, and artists he'd never heard of before like Massive Attack or Sufjan Stevens.
And then there was Mia. Everything with her was great, except for the inescapable fact that the better it got and the closer they became, the heavier the weight of the guilt inside of him grew. Despite that, Victor was enjoying the dates they'd gone on, even the disastrous one in which he'd taken her to an art exhibition that had turned out to have trash and dead animals as its central themes. He had thought that that one was going to be the one to convince Mia she'd made a huge mistake in dating him, but then they'd ended up kissing in a quiet corner of the gallery and it had all turned out okay.
It was a Saturday, the day before Halloween, and he had the day off. He hadn't been spending much time with Felix since he and Mia had gotten together, and Adrian had been having a hard time lately with all the fighting at home, so Victor had asked for permission for him and Felix to take Adrian out to a science museum in Dallas. Isabel's face had shone with pride when he'd asked her about it, and she'd just said, "You're such a good boy, Victor" and given him a hug before getting back to work on Adrian's Halloween costume.
Even though Victor was driving, Felix had insisted on walking over to the Salazar's house rather than Victor coming to pick him up. They were next door neighbors, so it wasn't like it was very far to walk, but it was the countryside and still took about five minutes to get from one house to the other. Victor still hadn't been to Felix's house since some time during freshman year, and he was beginning to suspect that maybe Felix didn't want him there for some reason. He was a little concerned, but they had Adrian with them, so he resolved to ask Felix about it another time.
"So where do you wanna go first?" Felix had asked Adrian when they arrived at the Perot Museum and got through the ticket line. "Gotta start with the dinosaurs, am I right? Or how about the space hall?"
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When You Think About Love - Part One
Fanfiction*Venji Texas AU* Victor Salazar still hasn't figured out who he is or what he wants, and living in the small, conservative town of Brandon, Texas makes that even harder. His confusion only gets worse when a new student enters his high school - the o...
