Fighting Solitude (On The Ropes #3)(9)

He promptly closed his mouth and became engrossed with his shoes.

“Jeez, Mom. Chill out. We’ll be good.” I smiled.

Her shoulders sagged in relief. “Okay. You have your iPad, right?”

I nodded.

“Q?” she called.

His gaze lifted to hers.

“Keep her in line.”

“I always do.” He smirked.

She narrowed her eyes.

“I mean…yes, ma’am.”

She didn’t look any more convinced, but she relented and headed out the door.

Finally alone, I turned to Quarry and punched his shoulder. “I didn’t know you were coming tonight.”

He shrugged. “Yeah. Flint asked me if I’d come help. Of course—”

Flint immediately cut him off. “You’re so full of it. He paid me twenty bucks to bring him.”

Quarry’s eyes flared wide. “Dude! What the hell?”

Flint laughed as he walked away.

I grinned, because well…Quarry was there. “Best twenty bucks you ever spent,” I said, bumping my shoulder against his.

“We’ll see about that,” he mumbled under his breath as he glared at his brother.

He was wrong. There was nothing to see about. We had a whole night to hang out without anyone bothering us. I’d have sledgehammered my piggy bank months earlier if I’d thought it would have bought me more time with him.

A large pepperoni pizza and a two-liter of pop later, we sat on the large leather sectional in Slate’s rec room, arguing over which movie to rent. I loved a good comedy, but Quarry wanted an action flick. And, regardless of how hard I tried, I couldn’t sweet-talk him into letting me have my way.

It was infuriating.

And more fun than I’d had…since the last time I had seen him.

“Give me the remote.” I dove toward him, but he quickly jumped to his feet, holding it high above his head.

He was at least eight inches taller than I was, but that didn’t stop me from trying to snatch it from his hand. I was jumping when my sequined flip-flop wedged under the edge of the rug, tripping me. I would have fallen completely on my face if his hand hadn’t snaked out and caught me at the last second.

“See? That’s what you get for wearing such girlie shoes,” he teased, settling back on the couch and flipping to the action movies on Netflix.

“Well, seeing as I’m a girl, it’s my God-given right to wear girlie shoes.”

He laughed. “Oh, please. You’re not a girl.”

“Excuse me?” I gasped, clearly offended.

It wasn’t lost on me that I was, in fact, a girl. I was actually a very girlie girl in some ways. But it was the way boys used the term girl as if it were an insult that pissed me off. But, before that moment, I had no idea that someone—especially Quarry—telling me that I wasn’t a girl could be equally as insulting.

He must have heard the hurt in my voice, because suddenly, the remote had been discarded on the coffee table and his attention was focused solely on me. His hazel eyes looked confused as he explained, “I just mean that you aren’t like other girls. You’re tough and funny. They’re all wimpy and helpless. I’ve seen you hold your own against boys double your size. Real girls cry when their pencils break.”

Wow. A compliment and an insult. How does a girl even attempt to respond to something like that?

I punched him hard on his arm. “You’re an idiot.”

“See!” He smirked as he rubbed his shoulder. “What girl punches a guy like that? Like you’re freaking Rocky Balboa, raised on the streets. Not in a cushy Chicago mansion. None of the girls at my school—that’s for sure.”

And that was the first time Quarry Page broke my heart.

There were two parts of that statement that wounded me so deeply. The first being that I’d thought Quarry liked that I was tough. I hadn’t always been raised in a cushy mansion. I’d had five years of struggle under my belt, even if I did only remember a few silent nights of those years. That was enough. I didn’t need the rest of those memories. Not when only one nearly incapacitated me on a nightly basis.

The second way was that, for the very first time ever, I felt a dose of jealousy. I wasn’t stupid. I had known that Quarry had girls at his school. I’d just never thought they were any competition for me. Or, better yet, that I would ever consider someone else competition when it came to him. Quarry wasn’t my boyfriend or anything. That’s not how our relationship worked. However, in that moment, I kinda wished it had been like that. Maybe he’d want to hold my hand while we watched a movie. He could get a ride up to Chicago and go to my middle school formal with me. We would have had so much fun together. I didn’t want him to bring me roses and mushy cards, but even thinking of him doing that with someone else suddenly burned.

I’d never thought of Quarry like that before, so as I blankly stared at him, I couldn’t figure out why my mind was trudging into such uncharted waters when, honestly, I didn’t even like to swim.

Yet my mind wanted an answer and went directly to my mouth to get it, bypassing my self-restraint altogether.

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

His eyebrows popped high in surprise. “Not really.”

“Not really” was not an answer. It was an evasion.