“I’ve messed up before too. It happens,” I added, trying to make him feel better. “It’s fine. It can be fixed. It isn’t a big deal.” We didn’t have to tell Rip, so he should be grateful for that.
He wasn’t. “It’s a lot of fuckin’ work for a little bitty—”
All right, maybe Mr. C was going to end up owing me if I survived this.
“It isn’t a little bitty mistake. It’s a big one. I don’t want to argue about it anymore,” I told him, trying to keep my voice calm and my expression light and not like I’d just kicked him in the balls twenty-one times in my head. “Let’s roll it out of here and into the room so you can get started on it, and I can keep going. I need to finish that hood sooner than later, and I still have to tape the lines.”
He didn’t move, and he didn’t respond. All he did was keep giving me that ugly look I had seen too many times by people a lot better at doing it.
Oh freaking well. I pointed toward the wheels. “Let’s do it now.”
His jaw clenched, but he nodded after a moment, and it was only because of that, that I turned my back to head toward the big double doors that took up nearly an entire wall of the booth. They had to be big enough for entire cars to go inside easily.
And it was the second that I turned my back that I heard a mumbled, “Fuckin’ bitch.”
Maybe if he had been a teenager, I could have let it go.
If he wasn’t always a douchebag to me, I could have let it go.
If I hadn’t known he was a liar and a cheat, I could have let it go.
But that wasn’t the case.
I turned around slowly, deciding whether or not I was going to tell Mr. Cooper afterward, when the door connecting my room to the rest of the facility opened. Appearing there was the handsome face that had been pretty freaking nice to me less than twenty-four hours ago.
…and one more person who had a small idea of the mess I had come from. But he would never say anything to anyone. He wouldn’t tell the rest of the guys at the shop who my dad was or that he’d been in jail.
But no one knew that had happened because of me.
Rip held the heavy door open with a shoulder, his coveralls buttoned all the way to the top. His face didn’t reflect that he thought any differently of me. “Luna, you mind staying tonight and helping me with that GTO we found at the auction?” he asked in the same way he’d asked two hundred other times in the past.
I should have said no. After dealing with Jason, I just wanted to go home. I wanted to purge myself of how frustrated he’d already made me. Plus, I really did have things I needed to buy for tomorrow.
But… I still nodded.
That’s what twenty-four-hour stores were for.
“I only need you for a couple hours. I wanna get it flipped as soon as possible,” he went on, his gaze slid to Jason and rested there for a moment.
I wondered if he could sense the lazy-pain-in-the-butt vibe coming off him too, but Jason had worked on the floor long enough that I bet he did just enough for it to not be noticeable. Otherwise… well, otherwise, I figured Rip would have fired him.
“Sure,” I replied.
“’Kay,” he answered. His gaze stayed on the other man, but I could tell that notch between his eyebrows had formed. Maybe he really could sense it too. “Everything good?”
No, but I said, “Yeah.”
Rip swung that gaze back to me.
I gave him a smile that, if he knew me even a little well, he would have seen right through.
“Let me know if anything’s up,” Rip said in a voice that was too calm.
Let him know if anything was up? Could he tell I was seconds away from putting this person on my permanent shit list? I had just literally been thinking about ratting Jason out to Mr. Cooper, but even for me, telling on him to Rip seemed a little harsh.
I wasn’t in that bad of a mood.
I waited until Rip was out of the room before turning my attention back to the imbecile I was going to be stuck with for the near future.
