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She shifts her weight from one foot to the other, her hip jutting out. I take in her slight frame. She’s not too short or too tall. The body I appreciated in the dark Friday night on the water tower is curvier than I first noticed. The jeans she’s wearing today sit high on her waist, accentuating her hips. Her fiery hair is hanging loose in wild waves.
“You two know each other?” Bea asks, looking back and forth between us.
“Oh yeah,” I say, never taking my eyes off Aubrey. “Aubrey and I are old friends.”
“No, we’re not,” Aubrey says, breaking her silence.
Bea must notice the contrast between my grin and Aubrey’s glare.
“Emmett, please don’t scare off my new employee. You know it’s extremely hard to find anyone in this town that doesn’t already have a job or isn’t living off a trust fund,” Bea says, poking me in the chest with a stiff finger.
“Ouch,” I say, clutching my chest and pretending to be hurt. “So, what are we doing?”
I nod toward the moped sitting between them.
“I’m teaching Aubrey how to drive Shelby. She’ll be handling our weekday lunch deliveries.”
Of course, Bea named the moped. I shouldn’t be surprised.
Bea’s pocket rings, and she fishes out her phone, holding up a finger as she walks away from us.
“So, you’ve never driven a moped?” I say to Aubrey.
“No.”
There she goes again with her one-word answers.
“Are you ever going to grace me with a conversation that’s more than you responding one word at a time?”
“Are you ever going to stop showing up out of nowhere?”
She lifts her chin up towards me a hair. At least that was more than one word.
“Hey now. I’m pretty sure you’re the one who keeps showing up in my path. I was here first, was I not?”
Aubrey breathes out heavily and looks over to Bea, who’s walking back toward us, a strained look on her face.
“Aubrey, I am so sorry, but I have a problem with the bread distributor I have to go handle back at the bakery. We’ll have to reschedule our lesson,” Bea says.
“I can teach her how to drive the moped,” I tell Bea. “You know I know how.”
Shelby isn’t the first moped Bea’s owned. In high school when everyone else got cars for their sixteenth birthday Bea begged her parents for a cherry red Vespa. She still drives it today. I may have taken it for a joy ride around the high school once without fully getting permission.
“Don’t think I’ve forgotten about your grand theft, Emmett,” Bea says to me, but she’s laughing.
The donuts I did in the quad while blasting Alice Cooper's “School's Out” as loud as the small speakers would go was one of the better pranks I pulled in highschool. Mom and Dad didn’t think so, but I got like three new girls' numbers that day. I call that a win.
Bea’s looking down at the moped, chewing on her cheek thin, clearly king my offer over. She’s weighing the risk, and Aubrey has a horrified look on her face.
“We can reschedule, it’s okay,” Aubrey says.
“I really need you to be making deliveries to the campus next week, and the faster we can get you comfortable on this thing–”
“Go,” I tell Bea, “I’ve got it handled.”
“You’re sure you’re okay, your doctors–”
“It’s fine,” I say, my tone a little gruff.
