Gen Pop

by Vale, Lani Lynn

  The watch itself looked really expensive, and I wondered if he ever used it.

  I never used my watches. They were decoration mostly because I normally just used my phone when I needed to know the time.

  “I…” I began but was interrupted by a voice that I hated hearing.

  “What in the world are you doing on the back of a motorcycle?”

  I turned to see my stepmother practically hanging her upper body out of her window.

  I gritted my teeth. “What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting for your father to take a few minutes off of the track meet to come pump my gas,” she answered immediately, knowing that it would be a blow to hear that he was willing to leave the track meet that he wasn’t needed at to come pump my stepmother’s gas. Yet he was unwilling to come help me. “Now, answer my question, young lady.”

  Where did she come off acting like that? She didn’t even know me well enough to ask those questions. Never had, actually.

  “What question?” I feigned ignorance.

  “What question…” She shook her head. “Your brains must be addled. Who is that man with you, and why are you on the back of a motorcycle?”

  My eye twitched, and I heard a shuffle and a thunk as Zach finished pumping gas and hung the nozzle back into place.

  I chanced a look at him to see him staring at my stepmother like an annoying mosquito that he was just waiting to kill the moment it landed on his skin.

  Or mine, for that matter.

  “I met him just a few seconds ago. He gave me a ride.” I shrugged.

  Zach snorted, causing me to glance at him out of the corner of my eye. I barely restrained the laughter.

  Which caused me to miss my stepmother’s disgusted expression.

  “You hitchhiked?” she shrieked. “Get in this car right now.”

  I rolled my eyes. “No, thank you.”

  “You have a certain obligation to this family,” she continued as if I hadn’t just turned her down. “You have to present yourself in a certain way. No wonder your father never invites you to family dinners. You would embarrass us with your actions.” She swept a hand at me. “Hitchhiking! In that!”

  I looked down at what I was wearing.

  Jeans and a t-shirt.

  It was a cut off t-shirt, with many strategic holes, but it was still just a t-shirt.

  I didn’t look bad.

  At least, I didn’t think so.

  “Those jeans show off every single dimple, roll and bump,” she continued, digging the knife just a little bit deeper. “How embarrassing for you to be seen on the side of the road like that.”

  I felt my eyelid twitch.

  “I wouldn’t have been on the side of the road if one of you had come and gotten me,” I pointed out.

  She ignored my comment and kept going.

  “You should probably try to lose a few pounds,” my stepmother offered. “We wouldn’t want you being the only big one in the wedding photos.”

  I ground my back teeth so hard I thought I heard one crack.

  “I’ve seen her run at the track,” Zach interrupted. “She’s like lightning. I think she’s in great shape. Your photos don’t have anything to worry about.” He squinted at my stepmother. “You know, I know a doctor that can help with those crow’s feet beside your eyes. Do you want me to give you his number? He’s a really good buddy of mine. And, like you said, we want everyone looking their best in the photos.”

  My mouth fell open, as did my stepmother’s, as we processed his words.

  Did he…

  “Excuse me?” My stepmother wasn’t used to getting the smack laid down on her, so it was actually quite comical.

  For her age, Melody Archer was in great shape. She was fifty-four, blonde-haired—produced in a salon like clockwork every three and a half weeks—blue-eyed and in shape. She didn’t have any wrinkles to speak of because she not only moisturized her face every night, but she also had surgery that dealt with the fine lines in her face as well as Botox once a month.

  No, needless to say, Melody Archer did not have crow’s feet.

  But it was amusing for Zach to say that she did.

  “I’m a doctor, so I know these kinds of things.” He nodded once. “You can feel free to call my place of employment if you…”

  Melody rolled up the window and put her car into drive so sedately that it looked as if she were just out for a leisurely Sunday drive.

  As she exited the parking lot, I looked over at Zach with amusement lighting my features.

  “You ready?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  I was ready.

  “Hop back on,” he ordered.

  So I did, and he drove me the rest of the way home, then waited patiently while I climbed off.

  When I had both feet planted on the ground and was turning to him with a thank you on my lips, he surprised me.

  “Two things that I think you need to do,” Zach said quietly. “Get a dog and name that bitch Melody. Tell everyone you know what a good dog Melody is. Take her everywhere with you. Word will get around that Melody is a good dog, and everyone will tell the human Melody all about her. It’ll piss her off.”

  I started to snicker.

  “Oh, that would be funny,” I admitted, my heart feeling lighter than it had in an hour. “What’s the second thing?”

  “Try out for the Olympics,” he suggested. “Your grandfather mentioned that you’d tried to once. Start training like you mean it again. Get there without them. You certainly haven’t needed them for most of your life, so don’t act like you need them now.”

  With that, he left me standing on my front porch.

  He was halfway down the driveway when a thought occurred to me.

  A brazenness I didn’t often show started to course through me.

  “Hey, Zach?” I called loudly so he could hear me over the loud motor of his bike.

  He turned to survey me as he once again placed his feet on the ground and waited for me to speak. “Yeah?”

  “Do you want to go to a wedding with me?” I asked.

  He flashed me a grin that had my heart hammering and my hopes getting up.

  “Is that woman going to be there?” he asked.

  I nodded, my heart in my throat.

  “Then hell no, I do not want to go to a wedding with you.”

  With that parting comment, he rode off into the setting sun, not realizing what his answer did to me.

  I’d done everything that I could to get a date over the years. I was just too awkward. And there I went, putting myself out there because I’d thought I felt a connection, and he’d shot me down.

  Obviously that connection was all in my stupid head.

  I walked inside and slammed the door closed behind me.

  Shit, I couldn’t even get a date from a man that pitied me.

  What did that say about me?

  CHAPTER 6

  What I really want in a Hallmark movie is where a woman finds her one true love while also hunting a serial killer.

  -Crockett to Six

  CROCKETT

  “Hey, you okay?”

  I knew that voice.

  I’d been thinking about it for seven and a half days.

  I turned, tears still streaming down my face, and blinked at the man that occupied way too many of my thoughts.

  “Zach,” I said softly. “How are you?”

  His sexy eyes took in my face, tracing a tear as it streaked down the length of my cheeks.

  I swiped the tears away from my face and sat up from where I was laying panting, sprawled out on the track.

  I’d just had a training run that was called a ‘fartlek.’ Fartlek is actually a Swedish word that means ‘speed play.’ Unlike tempo and interval work, fartlek runs vary between moderate to hard efforts with easy efforts throughout the run.

  Essentially, you run faster for shorter periods of time followed by easy-effort running to recover.

  I hadn’t ru
n sprints or a fartlek in years, and it was currently showing on my body at that particular moment in time.

  Hence the reason I was currently lying on the track with no plans on getting up anytime soon.

  And, while I’d been lying where I was, I’d started thinking about everything that I had to do.

  “I’m… having a moment,” I admitted. “I started eating better a week ago, and with that came extreme hunger. Which then comes extreme mood swings. Which then turn into… this.”

  He grinned and dropped down onto the track next to me, bending to the side so that he could stretch out his right leg.

  I watched as the muscles in his quads bunched with his effort.

  Luckily, though, my tears were now dry.

  “How’s the running going?” he asked.

  I suppressed a groan.

  “It’s going,” I admitted. “I need more time in my day, though.”

  I then went on to explain how busy I was, told him about Murphy’s stroke a few months ago that’d led to me quitting my job, and then coming home to help with the corner store. Then I explained that my car was toast and I would need to look into getting a new one soon so that I could get around town.

  I then went off and explained how I just didn’t have time to get back to race shape. There wasn’t enough time in the day to do everything that I needed to do.

  “I run at the track every day,” he said as he listened to me all but blurt out my entire life story to him in one long, rambling stream of words. “Start there. Start running again. Get back into a routine. Then, when you’re done with that, start training. From there, get back to where you were. Do it for you, not for him. And, who the hell is to say that y’all can’t hire someone else to work the store? From what Murphy tells me… there’s plenty of money after he won the lottery.”

  Get back to where I was.

  It’d been three years since I’d put any effort whatsoever into my running.

  Sure, I ran, but running to train for something, and running just to run, were two completely different beasts.

  I felt my stomach tighten.

  I was… excited for this.

  Like, super-duper excited.

  But then I felt bad because Murphy had started this corner store because he’d been bored. And without the corner store, how would he have any entertainment throughout the day?

  Zach was right. Neither Murphy nor I was hurting for money. Murphy had won the lottery. To the extent that neither one of us would ever have to work another day in our lives. Hiring another person to work would be fine, but I highly doubted that they would want to watch Murphy. And I highly doubted Murphy would want anyone to watch him. He barely tolerated me.

  Before I could argue, though, and tell him none of that would work, he continued without missing a beat.

  “As for your car.” He switched sides from his right side to his left. “I’d buy the one car that he’s always wanted. I’d find the perfect one, paint it exactly like he always wanted to paint it, and then drive it around just to piss him off.”

  I grinned then. “I would, but I have no clue how to find cars like that.”

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “In college, my dad had a brand new Chevy Chevelle. It was one of like ten, I think. Mint condition. Cherry red with white racing stripes. He loved that car, but he sold it so that he could pay for college.” I paused. “That’s the car that he’s always wanted back but hasn’t been able to find one like it.”

  His head tilted slightly to the left.

  “1970?” he asked curiously.

  I thought about that. “I think so. But not really sure, to be honest. I’d have to ask Murphy.”

  He grinned then. “Why do you call him Murphy?”

  “Murphy is too cool to be called ‘Papap,’” I told him. “Although, I do call him Papap sometimes.”

  He put both of his thighs together, then did a rather impressive stretch forward until his chest touched both of his thighs. The man was incredibly bendy.

  “Let me see what I can do on the car,” he said softly. “For now, I’ll give you a lift home. You’re right next to me, if you can wait about twenty more minutes for me to run three really quick miles.”

  I blinked at him. “You live what?”

  “I’m right next to you.” He stood up and stretched his arms up high above his head. “I live literally across the street from you. Haven’t you ever noticed?” he asked.

  If I’d noticed, I’d be stalking him way better than I currently was.

  “No,” I told him honestly. “I’m up at the store at five in the morning to get breakfast started and make sure Murphy is moving and okay. Then I’m the only one up there until I close at some point for lunch. From there, I go home at about two in the afternoon since that’s the slowest point in the day and Murphy can handle it on his own for two hours before he closes. Then I go to the grocery store, buy fresh fruit, and go home and bake for the pies and pastries I have at the store for the next morning.”

  He looked at me curiously. “When do you have time for yourself?”

  I laughed then. “Time for myself? What’s that?”

  Instead of answering or laughing at my joke, he shook his head, then walked to the finish line at the track and started to run.

  I watched him make his first two laps and contemplated my life.

  He’d hit me with a few things today that I really needed to think about. Those were also on top of the few things he’d hit me with last week that I hadn’t stopped thinking about.

  What was it with this man and his truth bombs?

  I hadn’t faced these things in years.

  I hadn’t considered what all I’d been hiding from all these years.

  Honestly, maybe I was just too nice of a person. Maybe I was…

  “Holy hell,” a woman said from beside me. “Who is he?”

  I looked over to find a woman that was vaguely familiar looking at me with a grin on her face.

  Her eyes, though, kept straying toward the man that was running around the track.

  She was a little on the shorter side, five-foot-three or so, and her hair was in a high messy bun on top of her head. Curly ringlets of a brownish auburn fell out of the bun and tickled her shoulder.

  And her eyes were a beautiful green that reminded me a lot of Zach’s.

  Which sucked because if anything he’d shown me in the last week, it was that he was very not interested in me, so I shouldn’t be comparing anyone’s eyes to his.

  Because that would mean that I paid way too much attention to him.

  And I shouldn’t.

  Before I could answer her question, though, another woman arrived at the track.

  She had a sheet of long black hair that fell down to her waist. A very curvy waist that showed off an incredible ass that I would kill for.

  “Are you ready to walk or what, Catori?” the woman asked stiffly. “I don’t have time to do this, but I am. So let’s get this done.”

  Catori, the woman with the bun on top of her head that still hadn’t taken her eyes off of Zach, gestured to the woman. “Belle, look at that man right there. Isn’t he hot?”

  Another burn started up in my gut at them ogling him.

  I wanted to shout, ‘he’s mine!’ but knew that to be the falsehood that it was.

  Even if I wanted him to be, he would have to want to be back, and yeah… wasn’t happening.

  “What’s with that face?” Belle, the one with the great body and the black hair, said. “You really need to get your libido under control.”

  Catori laughed and gestured at the track. “Let’s go. Maybe if we get into the first lane, he’ll have to go around us and we can get a better look at his ass.”

  I winced.

  Zach made his fifth such pass just as the ladies set off in the first lane.

  Zach went around them, but not before I watched as he visibly checked out both girls’ asses.

  Shit.

  Gru
nting in effort as I stood, I gathered my things and made my way out of the track.

  Who the hell was I kidding here?

  I was nothing.

  I was ugly.

  And I was so far out of Zach’s league that it was comical.

  I didn’t bother to wait for him to walk home, either.

  Luckily the track was only about three-quarters of a mile from my place, and that meant that it was a very doable walk.

  What wasn’t doable were the thoughts going through my head as I walked home.

  They were… everywhere.

  Focusing on every single thing that was fucking with my life right now.

  The least of which was a man who I was starting to have feelings for that didn’t have the same feelings back.

  Yeah, it was time to focus on the important things.

  Starting with a few that I could at least handle right now.

  One of those would be finding someone to help me work at the store.

  Another was calling Six to beg her to help me find a date.

  Because there was no way in hell I was going to go to that wedding on my own. Not without backup.

  CHAPTER 7

  Don’t expect any new year’s resolutions from me. I plan on staying an asshole.

  -Zach to Crockett

  ZACH

  “Hello?” I answered, placing the socket wrench down onto the rail of the car in front of me and dropping my head to stretch out my neck.

  “Hey,” Sin said into my ear. “You got a minute?”

  I straightened my head and stared out at the neighborhood beyond my garage.

  “I got two,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “You have a neighbor,” he said without preamble. “Little girl and a woman. They came into my place a couple of hours ago. I didn’t have the time to help with her case, but I sent her to a buddy who I thought would help. He wouldn’t help and sent her on her way. She’s in an abusive relationship. The girl and her are abused on a regular basis. Something of which I found out only after sending her to the friend. She needs… help. I don’t know. But when I called her back to help her, to give her another number of a guy that I think would help her and her kid, she refused to talk to me.”