Lonely and Tired

Afterlife

"You got your insurance details?" Mr Hotness asked leaning into his car and rifling around in the glove box. Shit this was it! The moment he went all Dirty Harry on me...

He unfolded his long body from the window and instead of the gun that my inappropriately vivid imagination expected he clutched a sheaf of papers.

"Fuck I don't know man," I exhaled defeated. Where the hell would Cathy even keep those? I rubbed my eyes and began to shiver. Fuck I was cold. I turned around without another word and stalked back to the rear door of Cathy's car. Wrenching it open I pulled out my fleece hoody and slid my arms in poking my thumbs through the little thumb holes. I zipped up and jammed my hands into the pockets glad that even if my life was going to shit I could be warm whilst it happened.

"Insurance?" He didn't sound angry, just determined.

"Oh yeah. That..." I pulled my hand from my hoody pocket and dug into the pocket of my jeans for my phone. I felt like crap and the adrenaline rush that had surged through me when I'd heard the crunch of vehicles colliding had begun to wear off. I continued on around the bonnet and dropped to my arse on the gutter. My eyes were on my phone but in my peripheral vision I saw a pair of black booted and black jean clad legs move up beside me.

I pressed my thumb to the home button on my phone. Nothing happened. Swearing under my breath I tried again. Still nothing. I turned my face to the sky and I didn't exactly shriek although it may have been close, "Are you fucking kidding me?" My phone being out of juice was almost unprecedented. Not because I was obsessed with it but because my career, such as it was, depended on it. I threw it at the grass because although I would have dearly loved to have hurled it at the bitumen road surface I'd retained just enough sanity to realise that replacing my phone would be just one more drama that I didn't need.

"Bad day?"

I dragged my thoughts back from wondering if smashing my phone beneath the heel of my Converse would really be that bad an idea. I looked up at my current tormentor. His arms were folded casually across his chest, his sunglasses now hung through the neckline of his t-shirt tangled with the bunch of necklaces he wore – why that was hot I couldn't explain. Eli had worn a gold coin around his neck that he'd made me buy him in Italy. I'd always hated it, maybe because he thought it made him look sophisticated and international and I just thought it made him look like a poseur. Mr Hotness's necklaces made me want to use them to drag him closer. Such a bad idea, especially as he was currently watching me carefully with inscrutable dark eyes. He looked kind of familiar.

"Try bad couple of years."

I scuffed the heel of my shoe across the ground, the rough scrape of it against the asphalt suited my mood. I looked up at him and made eye contact, be still my beating heart, I hadn't had the flutters like this since I was twenty years old and I'd first met Eli. "Look, I'm sorry about your car. This is my cousin's car and as you may have noticed," I flung a dramatic arm in the direction of my phone, "I can't call her right now. Just to be clear, she's going to be pissed off that she didn't just let me rent one like I wanted to. My Uncle Bob will probably fly up from Texas with his gun, one of which I note you don't seem to have, just to tell me how much he disapproves of me crashing his baby girl's car. Or maybe threaten her husband Jeff for not taking time off work and driving me around. It could go either way." Oh my god, shut up Steph!

He burst out with a startled laugh. Just perfect. My verbal incontinence had made the hot guy laugh at me. I wasn't laughing so I was fairly certain he wasn't laughing with me.

"Sorry," I mumbled, "way to much information."

He gave me a delicious smirk, really the only thing that had stopped the entire day going completely down the toilet was his hotness. Maybe Ryan was fucking with me from beyond the grave. It was the kind of thing he would have done. He'd lived to mess with me when we were kids.