Christian chuckled. “And he's too much of a pussy to ask you himself.”
Or maybe he just doesn’t want to go with me. I bit my tongue as I roughly started throwing my hair up in a ponytail. I didn’t have time to think about if Ollie liked me like that. Jason was stuck in a cockroach-infested trailer, Ollie was racing for Tank, we had over ten thousand dollars to pay back before Tank would let my brother go, I had to figure out a way to get Ollie out from Tank’s slimy grip, and I had seven million things to do for winter formal. Oh! And a stupid, five-page paper to write on the fucking Great Depression.
And don’t think I didn’t see the irony in writing about the Great Depression. My life was pretty fucking depressing at the moment.
My head slowly twisted toward the incoming car. Hmph.
When Ollie stepped out of his Charger with his black baseball hat on backwards, wearing an English Prep bulldog shirt—much like the one I had stolen from him—my stomach flipped. Every time I saw that glowing smile of his, it did something to me. He was good-looking. So good-looking that I always found my breath catching when he was near, but that didn’t stop me from rushing down the front steps to get to him, and it didn’t stop me from smacking him upside the head, either.
“Whoa, what the hell, Piper!” He caught his hat as it flung off his head.
“You are such a pig, Oliver Powell! What? You can’t stand to see another guy take me to the winter formal?”
He tried his hardest to wipe the grin off his face, but it stuck, staring at me, taunting me. But the only thing it did was piss me off further, because my knees wobbled a bit.
“I don’t want to hear a single word out of your mouth right now. Get inside so we can figure this bullshit out with you racing like you’re trying out to be on the Fast and the Furious cast. I need to get home and get started on the other part of my life where I have papers to write and decorations to make!” I stepped aside to let him walk up to the cabin. Eric was outside now, and everyone but me had smiles on their faces. Even my best friend.
“Oh! And you need to do your homework, too!” I shouted as Ollie began walking past me. “I know you’re smart enough to be in senior-level classes, but you can’t get away with not doing your homework...not if you want to keep those scholarships promised to you next year.”
A deep chuckle hit my ears as I stared at his back. He looked over his shoulder, raising an eyebrow. “You just can’t help but care about me, huh?”
“I do not care about you!” I do. Even more now because he kept swooping in, saving the day.
I rushed past him, still trying to keep a tight grasp on my anger that was washing away, when he snuck a hand around my waist. A gasp caught in my throat when his palm connected to my hip. His minty breath hit that tender spot right below my ear. “Say it like you mean it, Piper.”
My mouth was suddenly glued shut. All eyes were on me, and yet, I couldn’t say a single thing. Ollie chuckled again as I pushed his hand off me.
There. Now I can breathe.
I stormed past all my friends and went right to the kitchen and flung myself onto a barstool.
It was time to get my head on straight and focus on the bigger picture. So what, Ollie gave me butterflies. So what, he made my heart stop. So what, he held me last night while I cried. And so what, everyone knew what I was hiding.
I couldn’t focus on that. Not right now.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Ollie
Sinking down onto the barstool, a smile overtook my face. I couldn’t help it. Seeing Piper all riled up, a glint in her eye as she stewed in her annoyance for me, made the world seem right again. Like it was spinning the proper way on its axis. Like global warming was nonexistent, and we’d have sunshine-filled days for the rest of eternity. Piper had fought this connection we’d had since day one, and I proved to her today that the fighting was over.
Yes, she was annoyed with me.
Yes, she smacked me on the head.
Yes, she was sitting with her arms crossed over her perky chest as it heaved up and down. But... She didn’t deny it. She didn’t deny that she cared about me, and suddenly, the future didn’t seem so dull anymore. My problems seemed to fade. Fuck Tank, and fuck having a different dad than my brother.
Piper cared about me.
“So, are we gonna figure this shit out, or are we all gonna sit in here and explode from the rising tension you two have compiled up together?” Eric lazily leaned back onto the counter, picking at the label on his beer. I glanced at the clock. 2:43. I watched as he tipped back the bottle and chugged it like it was water. What the hell was going on with him? I pushed back my concern for later, after my own shit was handled.
“Can someone fill me in?” Christian leaned forward on the bar top and propped his elbows up. “Right now, all I know is that my girl dragged me to the place she grew up, and we had a lengthy conversation with a fucking shit-bag about her mom, and I’m still feeling the after-effects of anger.” He turned to me and Piper. “How the hell are you two involved with that guy?”
Christian leveled me with a glare, and I held it. I loved my older brother, and I knew in the past I’d given him absolutely no reason to think I could handle shit on my own, but he had no fucking idea. He was going to be pretty pissed when he found out I’d been racing. He was going to demand answers, wondering how I’d gotten roped into all of this.
My eyes shot to Piper for a moment. Her long hair was pulled into a ponytail, her face free of any makeup and, ironically, clear of flaws. She was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen, and I never thought girls were pretty. They were hot, bangin’, fuckable. Baddies. I didn’t use words like pretty to describe a girl. But fuck me, Piper was pretty.
“Ollie!” My eyes flung to her. “Pay attention.”