Page 18 of All In Good Time

She saw Mal watching her from the back seat, waiting for her to get in, the door left open for her on the other side. She nodded and walked around, sliding in and shutting it.

They were moving the second it closed, and Becca was in Derek Stokes’s passenger seat for the second time.

She expected Derek to take her right home, but he didn’t. He continued along the way Mal had been leading her, and Becca hadn’t recovered enough from the term “friend” to figure out how to ask where they were going.

The music on his radio filled any awkward silence with Van Halen’s guitars and drums. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel.

It was hard not to stare at him from the corner of her eye. This was the first time she had seen Derek Stokes this close in daylight, and all she wanted to do was search his face for some sort of answer she was sure she would not find there.

Instead, she stared straight ahead and focused on the road, giving her hands something to do by rubbing at the soreness that started to swell in her injured wrist as it thawed in the warmth of his car.

The movement caught Derek’s attention, and suddenly his hand wrapped around her forearm. An outsider might think the grasp looked tight, but his touch was gentle as he pulled her coat sleeve up to look at the area her hand had rubbed red.

“Are you hurt?”

Mal answered for her. “She fell on my board and hurt her wrist.”

“I told you not to ride that thing when it’s icy out,” he said over his shoulder.

Mal crossed her arms and leaned back with a frown.

Becca pulled her arm out of his grasp, and he let her. “I’m fine, really, it wasn’t her fault I wasn’t paying attention to where I was walking.”

The car slowed down next to a new curb, in front of a small house.

“Get out. I’m gonna take her home,” he ordered Mal, who, surprisingly, did not object. With a little seat shifting from Becca, she slipped out of the car and threw a small wave to Becca and flipped her middle finger at Derek.

“I didn’t know you had a sister,” Becca said, watching Mal walk up to the house and in the door with the broken skateboard still in her hands.

“Stepsister. And she’s a pain in my ass.”

“According to her, you’re the asshole.”

“Of course, she told you that.”

“Well, are you? An asshole?”

He looked at her, his eyebrows raised and lip twitching with amusement. “What do you think?”

Whatdidshe think? Before Halloween she would have said, yes. Absolutely. Derek was an asshole of the highest degree. He picked fights with anyone he could, he didn’t care about anyone but himself. But, then, after Halloween, her view of him shifted seemingly overnight—Derek Stokeswasan asshole with scars and bruises up his body, and she wasn’t sure how deep they went. “It’s still up for debate.”

He huffed a small laugh, and put the car into drive, turning back the way they came and toward her house.

He drove like he had driven it a million times. The road between their houses was long, with many twists and turns she wasn’t sure she would remember. But Derek did it with ease.

“Why did you tell her that?” Becca bit her lip.

He leaned one elbow against the bottom of the closed window while the other hand settled on the top of the wheel. He peeked over at her for a moment then turned back to the road. He knew exactly what she was asking about. She half expected him to pretend he didn’t, but he just shrugged. “Was it a lie?”

“I didn’t realize you thought of me as a—”

“Friend?”

“Yeah. A friend.”

He shrugged again. “Friend or not, you’ve seen more of me than most people.”

Becca resisted the overwhelming urge to blush. She looked out the passenger side window to hide her face at the way that sounded. “I doubt that.” She murmured, and he laughed.

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