MAD

chvpter 16

"Well, I'm sure you're great at manual labour but you're probably a bit too smart for it." I pick at the red dye on my finger again, "Must suck spending the day with Trent and Saxon."

He grins, "You callin' me smart?"

"Called them dumb, actually." I grumble, but the edge of my lip lifts.

"Elias got moved to Logistics. Lucky prick."

"Smart cookie is E." I quip.

He bounces his brows, "He'll get flicked back to manual soon as they catch him tryn' pull some sly shit."

I smile, liking his analysis of E. He's deceptively intelligent, but he sucks at going unnoticed. "Gisselle is on one of my shifts." I'm not in the mood to admit that the kid is bloody funny, and she's smart too. A born liar, born thief. She's got keen eyes and the quickest hands I've ever seen. "How do you know her?" When we were at the shop today, she robbed them blind. Sticky fingers.

"She used to bother me and Thai. Beggin' like all the other kids whose parents were too poor for an apartment in the estate." The estate is another word for Haven. He scratches his arm, "Stole my phone once, tried to sell it back to me."

I rest my chin on my knee, "You buy it?"

"Yeah." He admits like he knows it was a sappy move. "She made friends with Bloom, and, well I don' know how but I'm pretty sure most of Bloom's rations went to Teacup."

I raise an eyebrow, though a smile dances on my lips.

"Bloom knew her parents weren't in the picture, and she knew all she had to do was give me a bit of grief and I'd just steal more rations for her..." He shrugs like its explanation enough. It reminds me of those months he spent living with my family when I was a scared little kid with a marching war rally against him.

For a teenaged deviant prone to violent tendencies, Reid was remarkably thoughtful.

"Why you call her Teacup? Because she's small?" I ask.

A bright smile flashes across his face at the mention, shaking his head like he wants to laugh. "It's stupid." He clears his throat.

"Tell me," I murmur, but something in my soft tone snags his attention because he finds my eyes.

"Uh. Back in the city she was always chatting shit about counting pounds, like, 'gotta get that, P, man'," he mimics, not really putting effort into it, "Don' think she even realises that we used the dollar before the war."

I laugh through my nose, enjoying the way his masculine features warm. He lays back, his amusement nearly palpable as he grapples with disguising it. Normally he's this disinterested and intimidating pillar of stone, or at best, a speculative and sarcastic prick...

"An' when she was a kid she broke her pinky, but it healed wrong, so it's got this crook in it..." He bends his pinkie as a demonstration, snickering like he's unable to get through the story without laughing. I admire his perfect smile. His lips are satisfyingly symmetrical, and his eyes are set so there's a feminine lilt to them. It's no secret that he's hot, but fuck, with a smile like that, it makes sense why half of the girls in the city used to get in a spin about him. "Sometimes Bloom would wait for me to get off shift with the beggar kids like Gisselle. This one time, Thai and I were walking over and they were all chattin' mad game, you know, talking about how they'd make a house out of olden day money if they had the cash. An' you know how rich people pick a teacup up with a crooked pinky?"

I nod, already grinning.

"So these dumb ass yout's are sitting in a circle, and Gisselle doesn't realise Thai and I are walking over, so she gets up in the middle, spinnin' crazy game about how she's already got a plan to get her pound's, like she's already coutin' her P's," He shakes his head, breathing out a laugh, "keep in mind she bellyached for weeks to get me to buy that phone back. Played poorer than poor." I bark a laugh. "So naturally these kids start raggin' on her, but she just starts goin' like this," he pretends to sip from a teacup with his pinky crooked, "Fuck all yous, fuck all yous, I'm already countin' my pinkies up!"