Page 11 of Ignition

“It’smyhouse!”

“It’s your father’s house,” he scoffed. “You have to be at least a little curious. What if she’s like a famous mass murderer or something?”

“I’m not. And she isn’t. She’s just some loser running from her equally loserish pack.”

“Fine, tell me her name, and I’ll look her up,” he said, leaning across me to try and grab his phone from where it’d slid away from him on the dash.

“Don’t look at your phone and drive,” I snapped, smacking at his hand. In part because I didn’t want him to, and because I might actually kill him if he crashed this thing after working so hard on it.

“Then you look.”

“Fine!”

I typed in her name, Ivy King, andwaytoo many profiles popped up. Impatience licked up my spine as I changed tactics, first going to my dad’s page, and then clicking a sickeningly clingy selfie of him and the stranger, before clicking her tagged profile and scrolling to find—Ha! Got you slut!

Ivy had the same blonde hair as her mother—guess it was natural after all—and a similar face shape, but she couldn’t be more different in every other way. Her eyes were a pretty blue, and she had long bangs that parted in the middle, sweeping back away from her face. In the first photo I found,she was posed on a Suzuki V-Strom 800, with a red jacket thrown over her shoulder.

Her smile was bright, too bright, like when someone drove past you at night with their LEDs on and blinding you completely.

“You found her?” Nick asked smugly, and I realized I’d been staring for longer than I wanted to admit.

“I—maybe,” I huffed, scrolling to the next photo—a bikini shot and?—

“Let me see!” He grabbed my phone from my hands before I could scroll past, or even decide whether or not I wanted to show him.

“Manners, fucking hell dude.”

Nick chuckled as he scrolled through, his eyes flicking from the screen to the road and back.

“Can you not kill us?” I asked moodily.

Just because I wasn’t sure where we were going didn’t mean I didn’t want to actuallygetthere.

“Quit whining,” he said, continuing as if I’d said nothing at all. “God, I love being right.”

“About what?”

“She’s fucking gorgeous.”

I’d had the same thought, but hearinghimsay it made me want to grab the wheel and swerve us into oncoming traffic.

“She’s… fine.”

He raised a thick eyebrow, shoving the phone back at me. “Are you blind, or just stupid?”

“Can we talk about literally anything else?” I asked. “Hot or not, it doesn’t fucking matter. She’s still just a leech I’m going to have to deal with all summer.”

Nick shrugged. “Who knows, might be a bit of fun. Cooped up in a house with a girl who doesn’t know anyone—or how much of a whiny little beta bitch you are.”

My lip curled as he turned off the highway into a familiar parking lot. “I’m not even a beta.”

“Would it matter? Since yousooodon’t care?”

“Give it a rest,” I snapped. “What, did driving like a maniac make you hungry?”

Overhead, Steel Wheelz neon sign glowed against the darkening sky, storm clouds rolling in from the ocean toward the shore. We’d spent more evenings parked here than I could remember, talking and sharing a bag of salty shoestring fries with ketchup.

My heart fluttered for only a moment, memories of everything as it was hitting me hard.