Page 19 of Turn

He blinked. “Huh?”

“You called my name. What did you want?”

He focused on me in the blazing heat of the parking lot. The color of his eyes was lost somewhere between brown and green, nothing remarkable, yet an unwitting shiver rolled through me. There was a brief flash of the look I’d seen earlier. Just a quick spark but enough for me to catch a glimpse. Then, as now, I understood why. Basic lust. That shouldn’t have excited me, not from him. But it did.

Just then the doors of Scratch swung open and Terry, another of the tattoo artists, exited while whistling a Jimi Hendrix song. He stopped whistling long enough to give us a smile.

“Drive safe, kids,” he said before climbing on his motorcycle and revving the engine. Terry was older than Uncle Deck and had been working at Scratch for at least a decade. He’d lost his wife to lung cancer last year.

“Look,” I said to Curtis after Terry made a right turn onto the main road. “I think we started off on a sour note.”

Curtis didn’t agree or disagree. He didn’t apologize or say thank you or suggest that we ought to just forget our prior confrontations. He tossed an object in my direction without warning.

“You won’t get far without those,” he said after I caught my own car keys, which I must have left behind on the counter at Scratch. That explained why Curtis had been trying to get my attention.

I didn’t have time to comment on the matter because Curtis was already climbing into his crappy car. The engine sputtered and coughed to life after exhaling a small cloud of acrid smoke. The car itself was a grey sedan full of dents, scrapes and ugly patches where someone had made a half ass job at painting over something worse. The whole vehicle looked as if it was maybe one kick away from falling to pieces. Whatever unlawful enterprises Curtis had involved himself in before turning over a new leaf must not have been very lucrative.

Instead of standing there stupidly in the parking lot and staring after Curtis’s departing car, I got behind the wheel of my Toyota. I rooted around in my purse, popped three sticks of spearmint gum in my mouth and swore to myself that would be the last time I’d make the slightest overture of civility toward Curtis Mulligan. As far as I was concerned there was no such thing as Curtis Mulligan. The hulking, brooding former citizen of Emblem’s underworld was just part of the furniture and nothing he had said or did bothered me in the slightest.

But…

“Thanks for granting me permission to eat, princess.”

The words were as clear as if they had just been spoken, and with the same vague contempt that had infected them the first time.

“Who the fuck does he think he is?” I asked my steering wheel.

As I rolled out of the parking lot I decided I was abandoning my brand new health regimen and stopped to get something deep-fried from the nearest drive thru. By the time I was done soothing my indignation with junk food I discovered I’d need to rush a little in order to make it to class on time.

Sonora Community College wasn’t a huge, beautiful campus like Arizona State. It was small and functional and populated by people who were always rushing around and full of purpose instead of lounging on one of the grassy areas. I was slightly out of breath when I reached my statistics classroom but I noted with satisfaction that there were still two minutes to spare before the start of class.

There were some empty chairs at the front because, true to form, people had gravitated toward the back rows. I slid into a front row seat near the door. The instructor wasn’t in sight yet so I took the time to check on my email. While I was reading a reminder to pay my vehicle registration fee a creepy feeling overcame me, as if I was being quietly examined.

I thought it was my imagination. So when I glanced up I nearly fell right out of my chair and onto the green linoleum because there was a pair of eyes locked on mine. The eyes were attached to someone unexpected, someone who might be the most unwelcome person to possibly inhabit the chair beside mine in statistics class.

My first instinct was to bolt right the fuck out of there. But I needed this class. It was an easy way to fulfill the math requirement. Plus I’d registered for it months ago. I wouldn’t be the one to leave. If anyone was leaving it was going to be him.

“Son of a bitch,” I whispered.

A slow, rather sheepish smile spread across his lips. “Hey, Cassie.”

I didn’t say hello back. Instead I said the words that had been on my mind for the past five years. “Go to hell you callous prick!”

Unfortunately I said them just as the instructor was walking into the classroom. A thickset man in his fifties, he paused and blinked at me behind a pair of glasses that were too small for his fleshy face.

“And what do we have here?” he wanted to know.

What did we have here?

I looked at my unwanted neighbor. He looked back at me.

“Nothing,” I said, calmly removing a notebook from my purse and resolving to absorb something meaningful despite the deafening noise of blood roaring through my head.

As for the aforementioned ‘callous prick’, I didn’t look his way again for the rest of class. Not once.

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