The Quirky Tale of April Hale (Quirky Series #1)

15: Of being Socially Inept and Physically Frail

15: Of being Socially Inept and Physically Frail

I was pretty sure that Ryder was angry.

I didn’t even know why, he was acting like his normal self: quiet, brooding, and a maybe he looked a little bit murderous at some angles. He kept sighing loudly from time to time on the drive to my house, and the sighing intensified when he caught a look at my face.

I didn’t know why, but I had a feeling that I was the cause of Ryder’s anger.

Too bad that I couldn’t really cook this idea inside my head. The way Ryder’s drive made me unable to really concentrate on anything else but the road. When I said ‘murderous’ before, I wasn’t lying. Driving at maximum speed and deliberately tailgating some cars before then making a sharp turn to outspeed them? That’s the kind of driving that had brought good people to the other dimension of the world.

I let out a screech when Ryder suddenly hit the brake. We had just been 5 cm away from into a collision with a Hummer. 

5 cm. I’m not even making things up.

“Shit!” he cursed as the seatbelt sprung his body back to the seating. His breathing was audible and he curved his neck downwards, a long lane of busy cars speeding in front of us and hordes of angry people honking behind us.

I looked at Ryder. He rested his forehead on the steer, the backlight from the street lamps provided a lot of toning on his muscled body. If I were an artist, I would be having a muscle tick to draw him right in the moment.

But unfortunately, I was more worried about Quentin waking up in this godawful situation.

“Um, Ryder?” I asked him. “Ryder, can you please do the crazy madman drive again? Lots of people honking behind us.”

He exhaled really loudly. “Fine.”

He was driving again, and it was quiet and peaceful for a while. But Ryder then decided that he wouldn’t leave me alone now. 

“Do you even have the slightest idea on what you’ve done to me?”

I tried to search for his eyes, anything to code me on what I was missing, but to no avail. He kept his sight on the road, his jaw twitched slightly in concentration as we were going on Murderous MPH. We were just talking at the party, and then I asked him to drive us home, and now he was mad at me?

This was beyond what my limited social skill had prepared me for.

Plus, the fact that I knew he was angry at me made my stomach churn. It was even worse than when he had kissed me. I felt much worse.

“Um… can you please… elaborate?”

“Really?” he looked incredulous. “April, fuck, are you honestly this dense? Or is it part of your femme-fatale scheming in which you toy with me and then completely crush me?”

His words made no sense like what Darwin’s theory made no sense to me.

“What?”

“For Christ’s sake,” Ryder was in the verge of screaming now. “I like you, okay? I. Like. You. Not in a friend way, in a way that makes me want to kiss you and… stuff. Well, now it’s supposed to be ‘I used to like you’, because you decided to play dumb on every single advances that I made and it really turns me off.”

“But I don’t play dumb-“

He turned his face towards me, and my mouth was clamped shut. We were in the middle of the street, lights blinking in and out, people talking and screaming with the utter urgency of our car stopping, and I was pretty sure that there would be lots and lots of people cursing at us.