Graffiti Wars

two

It took a moment before he realized that it would've been much quicker if he helped me into the car. His arm wrapped around my waist and pulled me into him, holding my weight up and helping me move towards the car. 

The campus police car came to a painfully slow drive while moving around us. I tucked my head further into the boy. He smelled like fresh laundry. Clean and crisp. 

I could feel the driver peering at me through his tinted windows, but to my relief, he didn't stop the car and soon it was accelerating away from us. 

"Hey, you're tense. Relax, you're good." His grip on me tightened and I leaned into him, letting him carry most of my weight. 

You know those moments when you smell something and it brings you back to a very specific memory from when you were in third grade? Well, this boy was bringing back memories of calmer days and of lazy Sunday mornings. 

I almost didn't want him to put me down. 

Funny how fast my opinion of him changed because just moments ago I was telling myself that he was an asshole. 

He propped the car door open and I slid in. 

"God damn you're heavy." He took a step back and wriggled a little, feigning that he was shaking his muscles out. I shot him a glare, "ok ok, maybe you're not, but that's only because I'm on the baseball team" He winked at me, and I grabbed onto the door handle, pulling the car door shut in his face. 

He laughed and moved around to the driver's seat. 

Of course, he's on the baseball team. Why should I have expected anything else from the man with a metallic purple sports car?

It was a push start too. 

When he turned the car on a song started blasting through the stereo, we both jumped and his hand quickly shot out to turn the volume off. I only needed to hear a couple of beats before recognizing it. It was one of my favorites and leaned towards indie rock, definitely not something I would've expected him to listen to.

"Why'd you turn it off?" He sat rigidly looking straight ahead at the road. The playful energy we had going on earlier had been sucked out of the car. 

"Aren't you a nosy one?" He was trying to play it off, but his voice was pressed and his knuckles had turned white from gripping the steering wheel. 

I turned towards the window. Maybe he had something against small talk. Strange boy. 

With a lack of distraction, my mind turned back to the pain in my ribs. Leave it to me to run full force across the street at a car without looking. 

I was usually pretty good at looking both ways before crossing the street, but being caught by the campus police really got to me. Surprisingly, that was the first time I'd ever been caught. I'd never graffitied on campus before, and the police were easier to avoid than campus security if you kept to smaller alleys.  

In the back of my mind, I knew there was the potential that he might be taking me somewhere completely different than the hospital. A small part of me wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he wouldn't do something like that, but it's exactly that type of naivety and ignorance that gets girls in trouble. He hadn't even turned on a GPS to tell him where to go, which was putting me off. Generally, knowing where the hospital was wasn't common knowledge. 

"Why were you running?" He took his eyes off the road for a second to make eye contact. 

"Who's the nosy one now?" I raised my eyebrows at him even though I knew he couldn't see me. He tilted his back, a smile on his face, to look at the road over the tip of his nose.