“Yeah, I’ve heard about you.”
“From whom?”
He wiped his hands on the rag and leaned against the workbench, studying me but not answering my question.
“I heard you’ve been making the rounds, though I’m not sure why you want to talk to me,” he said.
“I’d like to ask you a few questions about Audrey.”
His jaw tightened. “Figures.”
I stepped around a discarded tire and got a little closer. “I’d like to know about how the two of you met, and what interactions you had with her.”
“There’s not much to tell. My first day at school, I saw her walking toward her locker, giggling with a couple of her friends. She flicked a piece of hair out of her face, looked back at me, and smiled. I thought she was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. I asked a few of our classmates about her, and they told me she was dating Logan.”
“You knew about Logan, and yet you still pursued her?”
“I mean, there are guys like Logan, and then there are guys like me. Didn’t see him as much of a competition.”
Guys like Logan.
What did that mean?
“You seem to have a high opinion of yourself,” I said.
He swished a hand through the air. “Don’t act like you don’t know the feeling. I mean, look at you. If I was into cougars, you’d be at the top of my list.”
“Let’s keep the focus of this conversation on Audrey.”
“Like I said before, there’s not much to say. I made a move, she shut me down, and I backed off.”
“That simple?”
“That simple,” he said. “I don’t chase women who aren’t interested.”
“How long after you showed interest in Audrey did you begin spending time with Talia?”
His eyes flickered, suggesting he was uncomfortable with the question.
“Talia’s super chill and easy to be around. So yeah, we started hanging out right after Audrey said she wasn’t interested.”
“Were you spending time with Talia to make Audrey jealous, or because you were hoping to spend more time with Audrey, or …”
He pushed off the workbench. “It was nothing like that. Audrey missed school because she was sick one day, and Talia passed me in the hall and asked if I wanted to grab lunch. I figured, why not? We started hanging out here and there, and the more we got to know each other, the more we realized we had a lot in common.”
I may not have known Talia long, but from the brief interaction we’d had, they seemed like opposites.
“Audrey didn’t like that you and Talia spent time together,” I said. “Were you aware of that?”
He hesitated. “Talia mentioned it to me a couple of times. It didn’t change anything for me. It was something they needed to figure out.”
“That’s it?”
“I don’t know what more you want me to say. I didn’t see why Audrey was so bent over us hanging out. If she wasn’t interested in me, why should it have mattered?”
He was confident.
Almost too confident.
