Page 29 of Female Fantasy
“Hold that lackluster thought,” I tell Nico.
Tey greets me, skipping the pleasantries. “Why haven’t you moved in the last twenty minutes?”
“What ever happened tohello, how are you?”
“Are you stuck in traffic? Was there an accident?” he asks, ignoring my question.
“Yeah, you could say there was an accident.” Shit. I haven’t even thought about how Tey’s going to react when he learns we fucked up his truck. “You don’t happen to, uh, have Triple A, do you? Or does Oliver, maybe? He’s, like, super boring and responsible, right?”
“Ollie always flies or takes the train when he visits. I’ll haveto check with Baba, but I doubt he coughed up the money for that when he’s already insuring the truck.” He pauses. “Holy shit, Joonie. Did you—”
“Before you finish this sentence, just know that Nico was driving.”
“It was her fault!” Nico calls from beside me.
I narrow my eyes at him.
He smirks.
“Wait a second. How did you even know we were stalled?” I raise my voice a little in an attempt to sound intimidating. “Teymoor Saboonchi, are youstilltracking my location?”
Silence on the other end.
Crickets.
“That’s it. I amsoblocking you on Find My Friends!”
“Call a tow truck in case your phone dies and I can’t reach you,” Tey manages to say before I hang up.
Nico stares at me for a second, his eyes flitting between the frown lines on my forehead and my pursed lips. “He’s only looking out for you. You know that, right?”
“Shut up and call a tow truck.” I pause for a second and reconsider my words. “Wait, that was rude.Pleaseshut up and call a tow truck.”
Nico straightens his clothes and opens the car door. “So polite. Fine. I’ll go assess the damage.”
I sigh, then kick up my feet up on the dashboard and busy myself by updating the group chat, then opening Find My Friends and turning off my location.
There. That will show Teymoor what happens when heinsists on treating me like a child instead of the fully grown twenty-five-year-old teenage girl that I am.
I take in our surroundings. We’re on some sort of hidden path, a dirt road instead of the larger route that leads straight to the highway. An ill-conceived shortcut, no doubt.
Classic man. Always trying to find the easiest path forward. Forgetting that when something looks too good to be true, it usually is.
To the left of the road, there’s nothing but forest. Red maple trees taller than buildings, older than the majority of the houses in Mystic. They’re starting to shed their leaves, baring their speckled spines before the harsh realities of winter. To the right is abandoned farmland. Grass that’s brown and overgrown, mixed with dirt and debris. A tumbleweed blows by, innocent to what it’s stumbled upon. This is the last place anyone would want to be in an accident. The odds of someone finding us feels like close to zero. We could easily die out here from starvation or dehydration, whichever comes first.
That is, if one of us doesn’t kill the other first.
Nico knocks on my window, startling me. I roll it down an inch.
“Password?” I quirk a brow.
“Go ahead. Laugh it up. You won’t be smiling in a minute.”
My face falls. “That bad, huh?”
“Do you want the bad news or the bad news first?”
“Um.” I pretend to think about his question really, really hard. “The bad news, please.”
