Homewrecker

48 - 𝓭𝓲𝓯𝓯𝓮𝓻𝓮𝓷𝓽

It took around another fifteen minutes before I caught a glimpse of headlights beamed against the pavement of the otherwise vacant street, the familiar echo of a sputtering and deafening engine finding us where we were still standing around Ethan's crossover, ice cream cones already consumed and melted against our wrists when Kingston pulled into the parking space beside ours, streetlights reflecting off the tinted windows.

Inside, I heard the muffled rhythm of a classic rock song I barely recognized from through the opened windows of my trailer in the middle of the night. I turned to glance at Ethan, already weary of what he was about do—apparently, he thought it was pretty amusing that Kingston was jealous in the texts he sent earlier—watching as he stared at the truck, tires elevating the cab several inches higher than his crossover.

Then I shifted my gaze toward Andi, who was less than thrilled when she found out that Ethan had invited him to have ice cream with us, especially when she pointed out that we would all be finished when he came. She mentioned to Ethan and Taylor-Elise that he was older, too old in her opinion, and that launched Ethan into a longwinded series of jokes about how the real reason I didn't want to invite him here was because he was probably in eighties.

Taylor-Elise got quiet before finally, after maybe the second impression of an elderly man, asked, "Okay, seriously, how old is this guy?"

"Not old," I responded.

"He's got to be in his twenties," Andi pointed out.

I shrugged. "So, he's in his twenties. Not mid-twenties or anything. He's, like, twenty-two at the oldest."

"You don't know?" Andi asked, her eyes widening, and her lips didn't quite come together again after she finished her question.

Now, a few minutes later, still slumped against the warmed hood of Ethan's crossover with crumpled white napkins and dislodged rainbow sprinkles and chips of chocolate scattered across the glittering paint job, with the thunderous roar of Kingston's engine abruptly coming to a stop, the vibrations under my shoes stilling, I felt a pang of self-consciousness.

Before, I never really cared about the age difference between me and Kingston, how he would've been at least three and a half years old than me, out on his own with a real job whereas I had a curfew I was probably about to violate. Before it never really mattered, because it never seemed to matter to anyone else, even if it was something that Indie brought up periodically, but overall, it was fine.

No one made jokes about him being a geezer, impersonating him with a croaking voice or a hunched back, or him being a cradle robber. No one glanced at me the way Andi was looking at me now, a knowing glint in her eyes as she rubbed a napkin against her palm. No one acted like it was a problem before.

He opened his driver's side door a second later, carefully to keep from scratching the paint of Ethan's car from how closely he had parked his truck, and I took in a slow breath through my nose. He was wearing a weathered t-shirt from a concert I wasn't sure he actually attended—a common result of thrift store shopping—and a pair of jeans worn in the knees and the hem that would've caught under his heel, adorned in gray socks and sandals.

He looked over before getting out of the car, his eyes drifting between our faces until he found mine, and then offered a small smile. It was tight, kind of awkward, like he knew three others were watching him smile too, but it reached his eyes.

"Hey," I said, then hesitated because I wasn't sure of what else I was about to say to him. I knew I had to be the one to talk to him, to include him between us all, but I didn't know what to say to him with them here. I would've been flirtatious before, asked if ice cream was what he really wanted at almost ten at night, but I felt too aware of how Andi and Ethan were watching me to say anything like that. "What's up?"