Brock
Two Days Later
“So, who wants to work at a gas station tomorrow?”
It wasn’t the question I wanted to ask. I wanted to ask, “Who wants to fight crime in this town?” I wanted to ask, “Who wants to put an end to corruption in this town?” I wanted to ask, “Who wants to end this bullshit once and for all?”
But unlike the question I actually asked, I knew the answer to the rest of those. The answer was there was no answer, at least not a consensus. The sides were drawn and nothing seemed to unite all the sides. Even getting robbed and having luck save my ass couldn’t get us all on board.
So, though I had not given up on the possibility of getting an answer I wanted, I accepted the limitations of my dream and instead asked for something that seemed to have a possible positive outcome.
“Well, I’m about to drink and fuck one of the girls here, so seems bad for me to,” Garrett said.
“I’ve got class in the morning, so I don’t think I can except in the afternoon,” Zack said.
I may have been a tad too optimistic on this one.
“Well, we’re oh-for-two so far, that’s encouraging,” I said as I had a sip of my beer. “Mason?”
“What, you think construction takes off on Mondays?” he said dryly. “No.”
“Yeah, fair. Steele? Connor?”
Neither answered at first. Connor was staring straight ahead, looking at baseball highlights on the TV. Steele was looking at the TV, but he wasn’t paying attention to it.
“Yeah.”
“Definitely.”
Both answered at the same time.
“Well, that turned out much better than I could have hoped for after you assholes said no,” I said. “Which of you—”
“Let me,” Steele said. “I need something to distract me from the bullshit.”
Oh.
“You sure?” I said. “If you need a distraction, I’m not sure—”
“Trust me, I’d rather be distracted making money and pretending to be you than be drinking beer here,” he said. “Connor, all love, man, but I need this more than you. And I don’t think you need the money as bad as I do.”
“For now,” he growled.
It was an uneasy truce. Steele didn’t exactly mope or whine—we would have beaten his ass out of that state—but he tended to use “I will have this” at annoyingly critical moments of conversation. It hadn’t happened often enough for anyone to call him on it, but Connor’s tone suggested he’d used his last free one.
“All right, sounds good,” I said. “You can come by tomorrow around seven a.m. and I’ll show you what all needs to be done.”
“Seven?”
“I mean, the reason I’m doing this is I might have a better job elsewhere that I’m doing a trial run of,” I said. “I’ll throw in some beer on top.”
“No, I’ll do it,” Steele said. “We should probably call it a night soon then.”
I was already planning on doing that. Steele got some shit from Garrett and even Zack, both of whom said bedtime wasn’t a thing the group did. But the trash talk didn’t progress, and within half an hour, I was standing up, readying myself to leave.
“Brock.”
Steele called me just as I got to the front door. But instead of summoning me back, he came up to me. He walked with me outside the house to my bike.
