North & West

Fourteen

I'd grown up with an overbearing mother, so I was no stranger to embarrassment.

However, standing in the little drug store, a ten dollar bill in my hand and a box of Trojans in my other was a whole new level of embarrassment, something I'd never imagined myself reaching.

I don't even know what made me do it. I don't know why I grabbed ten dollars and headed down to the drug store. West and I hadn't gone far – for fucks sake, we were just friends – but after watching some movie at two in the morning where a teen girl got pregnant, I'd had a last minute worry about that happening to me.

Not only was I an unfixable drunk, but now I was a paranoid sexual fiend – or so it would seem to the boy at the counter.

When I handed him the random box of condoms that I'd chosen, he simply raised his eyebrows and rang it up. I had to force the blush away from my face when I took the bag from him and muttered, “They're for a friend.”

When I left the store, I tied the bag shut and held it close to my side just in case someone could see inside of the bag. It was ironic, really, the society of today. If you were doing it, you were a slut. But if you weren't, you were a prude who hated men.

It was a nice day outside and I regretted wearing jeans instead of shorts. I needed to stop at my work before heading home, so I turned onto the street that would lead me to the cinema. On the way, I saw a group of girls dressed in beach attire, and I suddenly wished that I lived closer to the beach.

The closest beach was the one that West and I had went to for our cliff diving and where we had gotten off the day I decided to recklessly get us onto the bus. West's sister had had to come out and get us that day, but she'd been rather understanding and only smacked West in the shoulder a few times.

He hadn't told her that it was my fault, but I almost wished that he had. It only seemed right that I'd be blamed for it, seeing as I was an awfully bad influence on him, and everyone, really.

With that thought in my head, I stepped into the cinema, immediately spotting Anthony 's red hair. It was the sort of red that appeared blonde at some points, and when we'd first met, I'd found myself staring at it. It was a bright shade, whether it appeared red or blonde at first glance.

When I walked over to him, he had his arms elbow deep in the popcorn machine and I had to stifle a laugh at the look of concentration on his face. His eyebrows were scrunched together as he carefully tried to fill two bags of popcorn at once, one of his hands holding the popcorn scoop while trying to keep the popcorn in the glass box, the other holding the two bags and trying to keep them steady.

After watching him struggle for a bit, I slid behind the counter beside him and tapped his shoulder. “Anthony.”

That clearly wasn't my best decision, for he jumped, obviously startled by my sudden intrusion. His hands were shaking and he was trying to steady the two partially filled bags, but they fell to the ground and spilled all over the ugly blue carpet before he could stop them.

I quickly bent down, cursing a bit as I tried to stuff the popcorn back into the bags. “Shit, sorry, I didn't mean to make you spill your popcorn.”

He squatted down beside me and helped me clean up the popcorn, turning to look at me with a little smile. “I guess that makes us even then.” He replied, referring to the night he'd spilled extra buttery popcorn all over me.

I shrugged, grabbing the two bags and picking them up once we'd cleaned up all the big pieces of popcorn that we could. “Is Gloria here?”

He shrugged, taking the bags from me and dumping them into the trash since it wasn't really safe to give customers bags of popcorn that had been all over the floor – for more than five seconds, too. “Not really sure. I thought you didn't work today?”