Page 9 of Ignition

Fuck.

My cock stiffened in my jeans, and I shifted, clicking my seat belt into place as I rejoined Caleb in the front seat.

It wasn’t just the family stuff that’d driven a wedge between us. My stupid fuckin’ feelings were getting harder to hide, and I wasn’t sure how much longer we even had before Caleb figured me out.

I pulled out of the garage and into the street, letting out a breath of relief as the engine continued to propel us forward.

At least I didn’t have to deal with the awkwardness that would’ve come from the car shitting the bed immediately after she’d turned on. It would’ve just beenanotherin a long line of Caleb watching me fail at shit, and I couldn’t handle that right now.

Turning to my friend, pretending that one good whiff of his pheromones wasn’t enough to give me a god damn partial, I grinned, nodding toward the open road.

“Where to?”

Nick’s hands gripped the wheel harder than he needed to, and I couldn’t help but stare at the tattoos over his knuckles. I thought he was fucking crazy when he got them. They were so… permanent. Andvisible. No decent job wanted a guy with his hands tattooed, even nowadays, when ink was way more socially accepted than before. But when I asked him about it, he just shrugged. Told me that he’d been thinking about it and wanted to do it. In the end, I even went with him to the appointment, even though I’d never been a huge fan of tattoos to begin with.

People always said,‘Don’t put a bumper sticker on a Bentley,’ and my net worth made that old-fuck car’s price point look like a Prius. Even if I wouldn’t dare to compare Nick to a Bentley—he was still more like a Maserati, stylish if not a little edgy, dangerous—he was still too quick to make impulsive decisions that’d impact him for way longer than the dopamine would last.

Either way, he’d started marking his skin before we even turned eighteen, and I’d gone with him every time, despite my many protests. Okay, fine, they were lectures. But, really? What sensible, reasonable alpha wanted to walk around looking like a billboard for their teenage bad decisions?

He already had perfect skin, immaculate curls that didn’t need gel to look good, and a bodybuilt through hard labor, and those looked different somehow than the ones earned in the gym—better, because it wasn’t vanity. It was just Nick.

I’d even started to come around on the ink a little bit. It was hard to deny that he looked, well… Hot.

Super fucking hot.

When I didn’t immediately respond to his question—and how the fuck was I supposed to know where to go anyway—Nick took a sharp turn away from the city, toward the beach.

“I keep worrying that it’s just gonna die on me,” he muttered. “So I’m trying to stick kinda close.”

“As if, you’ve brought it back from the dead,” I said. “You got AC?”

Nick snorted a laugh. “I only just got it to drive, and you’re worried about the temperature? Fuck no, man.”

The palm trees swayed in the wind as he sped us down the highway, and I pressed a button on my door to roll my window down, prompting him to do the same. The scent of motor oil permeated the car along with the hum of the engine, but the smell didn’t seem to worry him, so I just tried to enjoy that we’d managed to get this far without it being awkward too much.

It was a bit loud, and the occasional sputtering made me nervous, but it was running, and that was more than could be said for the damn thing for the last year, so… I didn’t say anything about it.

Didn’t say anything at all for a long while, really.

We hadn’t gone this long without seeing each other since I could remember, and I wasn’t excited about the idea that I’d say something to set Nick off and get left on the side of the road.

He wasn’t exactly the most relaxed dude on the planet. But working on his temper hadn’t ever been a priority for him. Probably never would be, so long as he never had any lasting consequences for his outbursts.

The other alpha's hand landed on the gearshift, and he wobbled the knob as we switched lanes, his brown eyes nervously flicking between the road and the dash. I’d never bothered with manual transmissions myself, so I wasn’t entirely sure what the fuck he was doing, but with every jostle it seemed like we were picking up speed, careening us faster and faster as Nick whipped us off the highway and onto the back roads.

“Are you trying to get us killed?” I asked, only half joking as I checked to make sure my seatbelt was firmly secured in place. “You barely have it running; isn’t a hundred and twenty clicks overkill?”

The last thing I wanted—other than to let a bunch of strangers live in my house—was to be found wrapped around a tree in this thing. It had cigarette holes in the seats for fuck’s sake.

“Sure,” he scoffed, rolling his eyes but keeping his foot pressed heavily to the gas. “Maybe my life insurance will pay for everything.”

“If not yours, mine for sure,” I joked, figuring that keeping the ball rolling on our usual banter would be good… But Nick clammed right up, his jaw tight and angry.

Fuck.

Did I say something wrong? It felt like that’s all I was doing lately. Everything with him had been off since our parents ruined our lives. I’d always been under the hideously misinformed opinion that parents strived to make their children happy, but ours had done nothing but the exact opposite.

Somewhere, deep down, I hoped Mom would come back, Dad would kick out that beta slut, and we’d all live happily ever after, Nick included. I knew that was bullshit though. Reality was never that tidy. Mom made her choice, deciding to run away with Leo after they got caught.