Sunbound

☀ Into You Like a Hurricane

C H A P T E R 11: Into You Like a Hurricane

☀ ☀ ☀

Scout had been sitting at the reception desk of Santan Valley Auto Repair for an hour, staring at Skylar through the window of the door that separated the office and the garage. She had a bird's-eye view of him, the way the muscles of his back strained beneath his thin, cotton T-shirt as he tightened the lugnuts of Georgia Morgan's Chrysler Concorde, the way he wiped the sweat collecting on his face with his tattooed forearm, and the way he bit his lip precisely three times every five minutes when he was concentrating especially hard. She had been staring at him so intently that she missed two phone calls. She hoped they weren't important.

Georgia had wandered into the office by then. She stood in front of the reception desk for exactly four minutes before Scout noticed her presence.

"Honey," Georgia began, and it was times like these, when she was about to give motherly advice, that she took on a slightly southern accent, "if ya' keep starin' at him like that, he's gonna notice."

Scout pouted, resting her forehead against the desk. "Why do I find him so goddamn fascinating and mysterious and... and..."

"Attractive?" Georgia smiled.

Scout groaned so long that her response came out as, "Yeaaaaah."

It had been a week since the Mandy debacle with Mitch the Bitch, and staring at Skylar from the reception desk was how Scout had been spending those days. When she observed him, she had these thoughts. Thoughts of how boys like Skylar, despite her unsubstantiated certainty that there was no one else in the world quite like Skylar Glass, should come with warning labels plastered across their foreheads like the choking hazards on children's toys because she felt vaguely like she was choking whenever he looked her way or spoke a word that resembled her name. She hated the feeling about as much as she hated the depression that ensued after Antonio. She could not decide which was worse.

"You like him 'cause he's somethin' you've never experienced before, sweetheart," Georgia said almost out of the blue. "It happens all the time. Before I settled down and had Brody and Mandy, I had me a lost boy. He was like Skylar in some ways, and you never get to keep a boy like that for too long. It always ends the same. Unfailingly."

"What happened to him?" Scout asked. "Your boy."

Georgia had never looked more forlorn. She was always sunshine and wild roses in the middle of June, but in that moment her face reminded Scout of the melancholy essence of the moon.

"He took off one day and I never saw him again," she said lowly. "Cliche, I know. Sometimes, I believe he took the better part of me with him."

Scout was not sure how to respond to that. She found herself toying with her hands and her hair, biting her bottom lip like Skylar always did. She did not like the comparison of her situation to Georgia's. It made her budding fondness for Skylar a lot more poignant that she would have liked it to be. She would have much rather kept it tucked away in the corner of her mind, like an isle or a glacier in the middle of the profound enormity of an ocean.