Hope | ✔

Chapter 16: Selfish

"No we aren't dating, but she's still mine."

Fabian's friend, Malakai, slapped him on the shoulder and he winced at the contact on his sore body.

"Ay man. You done messed yourself up."

Fabian glared at Malakai. "You don't think i know that. I didn't even do anything to bother that gang and they thought it would be easy to kill me. I'm literally still here."

"You're kinda hard to get rid of," Malakai commented nonchalantly.

Fabian slyly reached over and grabbed one of his crutches, swinging it at Malakai and laughing when it hit him in his side.

"Ow, sh-"

Fabian cut him off. "Uh uh. No cursing."

Malakai looked at him strangely. Fabian challenged him with a raised eyebrow.

"Oh dear God. He's gone soft!" Malakai said as he threw his hands into the air.

"No i haven't."

"Yeah. You have. What did your parents do, beat you?"

"What no! I was hit by a car!"

"Right. I forgot about that. How'd you survive that anyway?"

"You said it yourself. I'm hard to get rid of," Fabian said with a smirk.

"No really. How'd you survive a car speeding at you?"

"There was a girl walking by and she saw me get hit. Came and sat with me until the ambulance showed up," Fabian mumbled.

"No way dude. That's crazy. Do we know her?"

"Nah. I didn't know her at the time?"

"At the time? What's she look like, i might know her."

"You wouldn't know her."

Fabian was avoiding telling Malakai her name because... well he didn't really know. He was being selfish, but he didn't really have a reason to be selfish. Maybe he was just protecting her from Malakai because if he met her, he would scare her. He literally flirted around with anything that had a pulse and was of the female gender. Most of the times it was just playfully, but sometimes if he ended up fancying the girl for longer, he'd try to go a little further then flirting.

Fabian knew Jaimie-mae was the type Malakai would try to go a little further with. She was stunning and had a fairly nice figure, especially around the lower body. She was just a little smaller above her waist, but that somehow made her look a lot more appealing and innocent.

Fabian knew better than to do more than playfully flirt with her though. She was young. And small. And not really his type. His type was college girls that shamelessly flirted back with him. He didn't go for the girls that shied away from him.

"Well tell me her name. I might know her. This towns not that big."

Fabian figured he wouldn't know her because she hadn't even been living in their town for that long. She kept to herself. There was no way he'd know who she was.

"Her names Jaimie-mae."

"Jaimie-mae?" Fabian cringed slightly when he heard her name coming out of his friends mouth. For some reason he didn't want Malakai knowing any bit of her, at all. He wanted to get to know things about her himself, then he could tell his friends cool stories of the things she did with him. Like the fact that she practically brought him back to life.

About fourty minutes later, Malakai was waving his phone in Fabian's face. "This her?"

Fabian snatched the phone out of Malakai's hand and his eyebrows furrowed. His heart sunk slightly when he looked at the picture of her smiling at the camera with a brown skinned girl and a boy with dyed hair. The boy had an arm slung around her shoulders and was tall and good looking. "Yeah, how did you find her?"

"Well i know this girl named Arabella. I asked for her Instagram a while back and i remembered seeing something about a Jaimie under one of her posts. She sure is cute though. Looks a bit young to have saved your life."

He tried to brush off the comment about her being cute. "She's seventeen. She's smart."

Malakai nodded and noticed the small mood change from Fabian. "You alright bro?"

"Hm? Yeah. I'm cool."

Truth was, he wasn't really 'cool'. He had texted Jaimie-mae the day after the dinner and he still hadn't yet received a reply. He knew Jaimie-mae wasn't really a person to go and ghost someone just because. She was simply too sweet. If anything she'd let people walk all over her and not mind or maybe not even notice. That's how nice she was. She had even helped his mom with the dishes that Sunday. That's why she had disappeared into the kitchen that day.

He had to have really messed up if a girl as sweet as her was ignoring him. Or maybe she wasn't ignoring him. Maybe she was busy. Or maybe she had left her phone in the cab that day. Yeah, that's what it was, she l-

"Hey are you sure you're okay bro?"

"Yeah. I think i'm just getting sick of the house. You know anywhere we could go for fun?"

"Of course man."