Going 78 Miles Per Hour | ✓

22 | Toyota, Ford, Mustang

SÁBADO
9:39 PM

Reid Harlow

There's something fake about her smile.

I steer back into the parking lot, shifting the gear into a steady park. I press down on the parking brake, while the car still hums with running ignition. I turn to Dahlia, a hand on the steering wheel while I notice her staring out. Beyond.

Her fingers fidgeting in her hands, with nothing but empty air, and her eyes blankly casting over the windshield and admiring the view of the desolated park. The streetlamps illuminate the craved pathways, benches lined up in rows with comfortable distance in between.

"You good, Violet?" I query, cocking a brow at her. She snaps out of her daze and meets my gaze. Her brown eyes begin to clear into focus and she swallows a lump in her throat—before fronting on a big smile.

"Of course." She grins; something too wide, too hard, to be true. Her smile doesn't reach her eyes and instead, fills the gap with a hollow void. "Why wouldn't I be?"

The first thing that gave off the impression that she wasn't her normal self today—was her lack of awareness. She breezed through my newly coined nickname for her without a fight, she stares off in different directions while we're in the middle of a lesson, and when I snap her back into focus—she smiles at me like we're old friends.

But we're not old friends—I don't even know what to fucking classify our relationship.

I swallow the instinctive reaction that there's something wrong. That there's something going on at home and she's not fucking telling me about it. I know she has her friends—friends she could talk to about her situation—but that's a slim chance that she does. I think I'm one of the few people that knows her issues at home, and actively tries to help her about it.

If she's not telling me, she's holding it in.

She can't fucking do that.

But fuck, who am I to judge when I do the same fucking thing?

"Anything going on at home?" I ask, reminding myself to soften the features on my face. I scream asshole with a capital A, and when dealing with someone like Dahlia, you do not want to repeat my steps.

She bites her bottom lip, but doesn't say anything. Instead, she glances down to her hands for a good second before she raises her gaze to meet mine, and widens a smile, before shaking her head.

"No, nothing," she beams, forging normalcy. "What about you? Anything going on at home with you?"

I know what she's doing: trying to push the spotlight off of her and project it onto another target—which happens to be me because I'm the only other person in the fucking car—and I should be pissed off. But I can't help but drop my shoulders for a moment, because it's been a while since I was asked that question too.

I blink, because the question momentarily stunned me, before I shook my head solemnly. I stiffen, clenching my jaw and sharpening my eyes. Appeasing to my appearance. "Not the fucking point, Violet," I bare with gritted teeth.

A small smile peeks through her full lips, and this time, it meets her eyes. She leans back against the leather seat, satisfied by my reaction. "You know, I don't know anything about you either," she muses, "and it's not fair that you know so much about me. In a friendship, there's an equal trade. We don't have that."

"We're not friends." I bark back, the words slipping through my tongue too easily. It was almost mechanical.

Her smile falls into a frown, and she has to gravitate to the reality of the situation. We're not friends. We're anything but. "You're right, we're not friends." She deems, nodding her head to this affirmation. My chest tightens. "So, um, let's get back to the lesson then."