I Knew You Were Trouble - Cassie Mae Page 0,70
finger to the back corner and mouths, “Skeeball.” I rush over there before I lose my nerve.
I got no clue what to say or how to say it, and I’m praying that whatever spews from my mouth is more articulate than what I said to her last night.
I weave through the ticket games, past the racing games, and find her crouched in front of the middle Skeeball, the metal front where the card reader rests propped open. The closer I get, the more I hear her grumbles.
“Stupid, son of a b-word…”
“Giving you trouble?” I kick my foot up on the Skeeball lane. Her shoulders jerk with the surprise of my arrival, but her eyes brighten when she looks up.
“Hey. I actually need to talk to you.”
“You want me to fix it?” The Skeeball reader is notorious for going out, and we’re all trained, but some of us are better at getting it back up than others.
She’s better than I am, and we both know it, so she ignores my lame attempt at a joke.
She locks the game up and rises from her crouch. Grease stains her forefinger. She actually let herself get messy.
Or she doesn’t know.
Yeah, I’m going with that one.
“So, I know we only agreed on a month of lessons, but humor me for a second,” she says, diving in before I get a word in edgewise.
“Okay…” I say hesitantly. I don’t want to talk about her “rebelessons.” I don’t want to think about the money she paid me to help her get a guy that I no longer want her to go after.
“Well, we didn’t even get halfway through my list.”
“That list is huge.”
“Exactly. So I was hoping to hire you for another month or five. Tackle them all one by one.”
Month or five? “Candace… I don’t think—”
“I know I’m not the easiest student,” she butts in, her voice tense and determined. “But I’ll get better, I promise. I’ll be more badas… badas… flexible, and you won’t have to drag me into stuff. Just sort of hold my hand through it. Metaphorically, of course. You don’t have to actually hold my hand. I mean, unless we’re bungee jumping or something together and then you must definitely hold my entire body, you got it? Not that I’m suggesting bungee jumping because heights are level blue and I need to work up to that before we go for the biggies. I know that sounds like the same old Candace, being all bossy and controlling, but I’m going to change, I know it. If you help me, anyway. I’ll be less bossy and more gung ho about breaking rules and—”
“Stop.” I put my hand up. Frustration runs its slimy tentacles up my neck and curls my tongue, and I find myself biting my words out at her. “I can’t listen to that anymore.”
Pain and confusion twists her features, and she blinks those dark brown eyes. “Sorry…?”
I take a deep, shaky breath, my nerves wound so tight I can’t seem to control them. I grab at my hair, tugging on the ends, hoping for some sense to come through my tone. “Damn it, Candace, I can’t help you anymore, okay? I don’t want to.”
“Pete,” she says, her voice small, taken aback. “I didn’t mean to… I mean, if you don’t want to teach me, if I’m taking up too much of your time…”
I let out a sigh, but it comes out like a growl, and I hate that I’m scaring and confusing her. Words don’t come easy to me when I have to fish them out of the depths of my heart. I tug and pull at them, wanting them to break the surface, but they keep coming out in inarticulate chunks. “Stop.” I pause for a second and add, “Please. Just give me a second to paste together coherent sentences.”
She nods, and the inside of her lips folds in between her teeth. She’s so damn cute, just like that, just how she is. Why in the hell doesn’t she see that?
I scratch at my eyebrow, my hand trembling against my forehead. My jumbled thoughts feel like a Rubik’s Cube, slowly piecing themselves together and then breaking apart before I can complete a solid side.
I try to start from the beginning, from when I started falling for her, but for the life of me, I don’t know when that was. So I pluck a random memory instead.
“You remember the first shift at the mini golf that we worked together?”
Her brow furrows. “We’ve