“No surprise there,” I murmured.
When I parked my truck and he started to open the door to climb out, he turned back and said, “It’s too bad she’s such a stickin-the-mud. She’s actually pretty fucking hot.”
I nodded in agreement as I stared ahead. He wasn’t kidding. Clara was extremely attractive. Not in an obvious, needed to wear slutty clothes and lots of makeup kind of way, but in a soft way, almost as if she didn’t even know how beautiful she was. Too bad her looks were shadowed by her tyrannical personality.
When I glanced back to Marcus, he was smirking at me, and shaking his head. “You want to sleep with her.” He wasn’t asking, he was stating it. What the fuck ever.
“Pfft. She’d likely rather get mulled by a bear than hook up with me.”
“That wasn’t a no, Paul.”
“It wasn’t a yes, asswipe,” I argued.
“But still not a no,” he snickered. “Really, Paul? You’d do the shrew?”
“Get out of my truck,” I grunted. “We gotta work tomorrow.”
Shaking his head, he sighed, “Yeah, okay. See ya.” Then he slid off of the seat slowly until he hit the ground, shut the truck door, and went inside.
I rounded the building. As I approached the office’s lot, I still didn’t know why I pulled in. I told myself I wanted to see her suffer; see how she looked when she realized she couldn’t just whoosh in here and change everything. This was my fucking domain. I wanted to see her broken. But, I know now, no matter what I told myself then, I just wanted to see her.
When I entered, the intense paint odor hit me at once. She’d successfully painted one wall and was standing near a table looking through some of the framed photos she’d taken down as she placed them in a box. Her head whipped around when she heard me enter. Her surprised expression faded quickly into a look of annoyance. “Here to gloat?”
“Maybe,” I teased as I approached. She was wearing a pair of sweats that did absolutely nothing for her ass. Her hair was tied up in some weird bird’s nest looking thing and she was wearing a faded Michael Jackson T-shirt that was two sizes too big for her. But damn. Even amidst the paint fumes that smell of clean linens found me. “You’re not throwing those out, are you?” The photos were of me, some of the few I still had from my short career as a stuntman. Those photos were some of my prized possessions. Once upon a time, people thought I’d be the next Evel Knievel. I was hot shit . . . or at least they thought I was.
“How’d you get into that kind of business? The stunt business, I mean.”
Small talk. Really? Tilting my head, I studied her, searching for a hint of sarcasm, but didn’t find a trace. Shit. Did she really want to know something about me? “When I was a kid, I was always skateboarding, snowboarding, biking, and causing my mother to panic.” I chuckled as the memory of my mother worrying her head off came to mind. The things I put that poor woman through. “When I was eighteen, I attended this motorbike event in California and won. Someone there was a director and they liked what they saw.” I shrugged one shoulder. “Voilà. I became an instant stuntman for movies.” I was invincible. Fearless. “They were the best days of my life,” I admitted as I picked up a photo of me riding a bike off a burning building.
“Why’d you stop?” Clara asked as she placed more frames in a box.
“Got injured.” I shrugged. “Too much risk after that.”
Her gaze flicked to mine, with a hint of sympathy in them that quickly vanished. Her lips were tight, in a flat line, before she asked, “What happened?”
I could tell she hated herself for asking the question. After all, asking indicated that she gave a shit, and she didn’t want me thinking that. Remembering what happened, what caused me to retire, wasn’t something I liked to think about. Oddly enough, it wasn’t a stunt that ended my career.
“Betty Lee Ozman.”
She furrowed her brows in confusion. “What?”
“I was changing a tire on the side of the Interstate and I got clipped by a car.”
Her eyes widened with disbelief. “Are you serious?”
“Yep,” I confirmed with a sad chuckle. “Little old granny didn’t see me. Luckily she wasn’t going the speed limit. She might have killed me.”
“Damn,” Clara muttered. “How bad were you hurt?”
“I was unconscious for a week. They weren’t sure I’d even wake up, and when I did, they informed me one more blow to the head could kill me. My mother made me swear I’d quit the stunts.”
Looking down in the box, she frowned slightly. “I’m sorry, Paul.”
It was one of those weird moments in life. I hated her. She hated me. But she was being nice to me. At any moment a series of phenomenons; hurricanes, tornadoes, or tsunamis, would ensue.
I quickly changed the subject. Spinning around, I gave the room another once-over. “You just went ahead and started painting by yourself, huh?”
“Yep.”
“You’ll never finish this tonight.”