Shifting Gears: The Complete Series (Sports Bad Boy Romance) (24 page)

It runs for a few seconds
before Jax and I come around that last corner. In the background, someone’s
saying, “It’s going to be close,” and in quick response, the shot pans over to
the finish line.

Jax knocks the phone out
of Kate’s mom’s hand, but not before both he and I see my car cross the line
first.

I move to block Jax
completely from getting to Kate’s mom, but he doesn’t make a move. For what
seems like almost a minute, he just stands there gritting his teeth.

Jax nudges his nearest
goon and while the latter is pushing his way through the crowd, Jax continues
to stand there, staring me down.

I don’t move. For a
decent amount of time, I don’t even blink.

The lackey comes back
through the crowd after a minute. He’s carrying a duffel bag.

Jax snatches the bag out
of the man’s hands and I’m not sure if I’m about to get paid or shot.

“You have three days to
leave town,” he says. “After that, I see your face again, I’m going to put in a
skylight in it.”

He more pushes me with
the bag than hands it to me and he turns around, gets back in his Zonda, and
leaves.

“Weren’t you supposed to
get his car if you won?” Kate asks.

“I don’t know about you,”
I tell her, “but I don’t really feel like going after him about that.”

I turn around to face
Kate’s mother.

“So, you won yourself a
little bit of money, have you?” she asks.

“Looks that way,” I tell
her. “Why did you come? You and I never really had the best rapport.”

Kate’s mom motions toward
her daughter. “This one wouldn’t leave me alone until I agreed to give the man
she loves a second chance,” she says.

“That’s great,” I say, “but
why tonight, though? Why the race?”

“Uh, Eli?” Kate jumps in.

I look around and nobody
except for Jax and his people have even moved from their place. Now all I have
to do is make it through the crowd of over twenty people, each and every one of
whom knows exactly what’s in the bag in my arms.

I mutter, “Maybe we
should talk about this later.”

Epilogue

Kate

It’s been two years since
Eli won his quarter-million, but it hardly feels like any time has passed at
all.

I’d managed to convince
my mom to come down to the race after we got into a phone argument over whether
or not racing was a matter of skill or stupidity. We argued about almost
anything back then.

It wasn’t until I called
my dad and talked him into badgering her about how great Eli is that she
finally relented.

That particular honeymoon
didn’t last too long, though.

It wasn’t Eli’s fault.
Really, it wasn’t. I was the one who first approached him about racing.

I don’t know if my dad
told her or what, but after we had to leave town, Eli gave up racing to start
working on an engineering degree, while I took his place on the road. I don’t
mean to brag, but it turns out I’m pretty good.

For the first year or so,
Eli let me take his Chevelle, but once I had enough money, I gave up the muscle
for my dream car: a dark purple Porsche 911 Turbo S. Eli helped me pick out the
mods.

It’s not that I didn’t
appreciate the Chevelle, but after racing it around the people of our new
hometown of Carlsberg for a few months, I got sick of all the extra weight.
Also, it’s kind of nice racing something I don’t have to hide in a junkyard.

Right now, I’m pulling up
to the stoplight, holding up my pink slip up so the guy in the Koenigsegg Agera
RS next to me will hold up his.

I love it when people
bring their untouched supercars out of the garage. They never expect a modded
car to come out and wipe the floor with them.

Usually, I would never
even consider putting my pristine purple Porsche on the block, but this race is
going to be special. I’m going to give Eli that Agera as a present for our
wedding next month.

He finally wore me down.

The $250,000 Eli got off
of Jax has been great, but the fact Eli didn’t exactly win it legally means we
can never spend too much of it at any given time. Still, it has come in handy
for buying aftermarket parts for Pandora—yeah, I named my car.

Pandora’s rarely the
fastest car in the race, but between my natural love of going really, really
fast and Eli’s patient instruction, it’s a rare event that I don’t come in
first.

The Agera revs its engine
as the light for the cross street turns yellow, and I grip the wheel, my eyes
on the light a quarter mile down the road: our finish line.

It may seem like a bad
idea to pit a 911 against an Agera, especially when slips are on the line, but
I’ve got a good feeling about today.

Our light turns green and
we take off.

The Agera gets a slightly
better start off the line, but I creep up beside it before very long.

I make up some more time
on the gear change, and I start to pull ahead.

Leaving town was probably
harder on Mick than it was on Eli or me, but he’s more than made up for it with
his frequent and usually unannounced visits. When the “I dos” are done, we’re
going to have to start talking boundaries.

What I’ve found most
interesting over the last couple of years is that Desi and I have slowly become
something almost akin to friends. We hardly ever see each other, but when we do
it’s actually a lot of fun.

The one thing I wish I
hadn’t agreed to in this race was the no nitrous rule. I’m still edging him
out, but the line’s coming up pretty quick and the Agera’s right on top of me.

Paz and I had already
started drifting apart by the time I left the hospital, so when Eli and I left
the city, that was more or less the end for us. There have been a few scattered
phone calls, but our conversations never last very long.

We pass the halfway point
in the quarter mile drag and the Agera is holding position, its front bumper
only a matter of inches farther back than mine.

“Come on, Pandora,” I
urge the roaring monster beneath me as I try to push the gas pedal through the
floor.

I know Eli’s somewhere
down there at the finish, just waiting for me to bring this thing home, but the
Agera keeps inching up on me until we’re dead even.

The wedding’s going to be
a pretty small affair, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I may have
overcome my general shyness, but the thought of standing up in front of a
hundred people I haven’t seen in years and likely won’t see again makes me
throw up a little in my mouth.

My dad offered to go
online and be ordained a minister so he could do the honors of marrying us, but
I’d rather have him walk me down the aisle. Also, my dad has a tendency to cry
at weddings…profusely.

I just manage to retake
the lead when I have to shift gears. I don’t lose much, but it’s enough for the
Agera to pull out in front again.

This is bad. Oh, this is
so very, very bad.

The Agera crosses the
line, beating me by what can’t be more than a tenth of a car length, but that’s
not going to matter. I lost.

I can’t believe I lost.

“Oh, Pandora,” I say as I
take my foot off the gas and run my fingers over the steering wheel.

I love this car. I love
this car so much, in fact, that I put my foot back on the gas a second. Sadly,
as I just learned the hard way, the Agera can obviously catch me, so I give it
up and take my foot off of the throttle.

By the time I get back to
the finish line, I’m just trying to focus on keeping my eyes dry. But as I get
out and Eli rushes over, throwing his arms around me, I can’t help it anymore.

It’s embarrassing, I
know, but I’ve dreamed of owning a Porsche since I was a little girl. I’ve only
had it for a year and now after some stupid quarter mile drag race, it’s gone.

Those thoughts help quite
a bit as the other driver pulls up and gets out of his car to find me sobbing
in my fiancé’s arms.

“Kate,” Eli says quietly,
“he’s waiting for you.”

I sniff loudly and wipe
my eyes, saying, “Here are the keys. The pink slip’s on the seat.”

As soon as the word
“seat” has left my lips, I break down into another fit of sobbing. This
continues until the guy tells me to “forget about it,” gets back in his
Koenigsegg, and drives off into the night.

I can’t keep a straight
face for a second longer.

Sometimes you win,
sometimes you lose, but if you’ve developed the ability to cry at will, you’ve
got an edge in just about every situation.

Looking up at Eli, I wipe
my eyes, saying, “Thank God, I was worried I was actually going to lose it that
time.”

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BEAUTIFUL
TRAGEDY

By
Alycia Taylor

Copyright
2016. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER
ONE

Molly

I stepped into the crowded auditorium and
looked around. There were way too many people here. Looking for Megan and Jake
would be like searching for two fish in the ocean. The place was wall-to-wall
college kids. There must be three hundred people stuffed into this room
designed for about half that many. I had to wonder what the fire marshal would
think of this.

I did a cursory glance, because I had told
Megan I would meet them here. What I really wanted to do was turn around and go
out the same door I came in. I’m not prone to claustrophobia, and I’m not an
introvert, but there are two things which I am absolutely not interested in.
One is a room full of loud music and loud people, and the other is having a
boyfriend. Yet here I am. One of the perils of friendship, I’d have to assume,
was that you found yourself doing things that didn’t please you, in order to
please your friends. It wasn’t quite peer pressure but along the same lines.
The irony in that was that they thought by forcing you to do these things you
didn’t like to do, they were somehow enriching your life. It was a vicious
cycle, but Megan had been my best friend since kindergarten, so I would find a
place against the wall and endure it for a while. Then afterwards I would meet
the man that Megan had dubbed, “The hottest guy on campus”. Megan would be
pleased, and I could go home with my conscience unscathed.

 
I
found a space big enough to back myself into and stood between a tall white boy
with unfortunate skin and body odor, and a girl that I could only assume must
suffer from dwarfism. Although she was quite a bit better looking than Danny
DeVito standing next to her, she definitely must have made him feel lofty.

I had only started classes here at the
university a few weeks before. Megan and I had always planned to go together,
but circumstance wasn’t on my side when she started over the summer. She went
on without me with my promise to soon follow. Luckily, one of the girls in the
freshman dorm over the summer had gotten a bad case of something venereal (that
was the going rumor anyways) and she’d had to go home before the fall semester
began. Luckily for us, I mean. For her…not so much. Anyway, it freed up a bed
in the dorm and Megan’s roommate agreed to take it so I could have hers and
room with Megan. I thanked the other girl profusely, and because I was so
grateful to her I also suggested she steam clean the mattress…just in case.

While Megan had been attending the
university without me, she’d met Jake. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think Jake is
a good looking guy, but when Megan first called and told me about him, I was
picturing Brad Pitt in Troy. Instead, I’d have to go with Michael C. Hall from
Dexter. He was still a good looking guy…but the son of a Goddess? Unlikely. He
had reddish blonde hair and an athletic body and his personality more than made
up for not having Brad Pitt’s face. He was good to my best friend, and Megan
pronounced to me before I ever met him that he was her “soul mate”. Even if I
hadn’t liked him, who was I to come between two souls that were meant to be?

Megan was anxious for me to make new
friends here, but mostly she was anxious to set me up with this guy, Brock. She
thought it would be great fun if we dated guys who were not only best friends
but also roommates. I did tell her that I didn’t want a boyfriend, but when
that hadn’t worked after three or four tries, I’d gone after his name.

I mean, who names their kid Brock anyways?
Okay, I’m judging again. After all…who is a girl with a name like Molly to
judge? But Brock? Really? It made him sound like one of those fake wrestlers in
the WWE if you asked me, and I told Megan so. She had only laughed at me and
said that I wouldn’t care what his name was once I met him. She said I would
forget my own name when he looked at me with those bright blue eyes. So I had
to aim lower…I went for the music.

“He’s a musician,” I had told her.

“So?” she said.

“So? So he’s probably either a dark and
depressed type, or an ego-maniac. Either way, no thank you.”

“You’re just making up excuses,” she had
accused me. I would have been offended, had she been wrong. Of course I was
making excuses. I didn’t want a boyfriend.

Megan said that his voice was beautiful
and he could play a guitar better than some of the classic rock guys that I
liked to listen to. I told her that would have to remain to be seen, but the
one thing I was sure of was that I would not be going out with this Brock. Then
she got down and dirty about it and said, “Please just meet him, Moll’s. I know
you’ll love him. Just say hello…for me.”

It was a dirty ploy and I shouldn’t have
let her get away with it. But here I am, I had agreed to meet him today…and to
be polite, but that’s it. I’ve told Megan more than a dozen times that a
boyfriend, one month into my freshman year and less than two months after a
long stint in the hospital, would complicate my life way too much. I like
things in my life to remain constant I guess. I drink my coffee black, take my
pills at the same time every day, and I call my grandmother on the same day
every week. Megan says that sometimes she thinks I was born thirty-five. I
don’t think so. I don’t think you have to be older to just not be good with
change.

Besides all that change stuff too, I was
finally free. I love my grandma, and she rocks for taking me in when I was just
a kid and my mom bailed on me, but she’s a hoverer (if that’s a word?).
 
I finally feel like at long last I can
breathe. I don’t have my sweet granny looking at me like I might crumble into
ash at any moment, or doctors poking and prodding me, or nurses waking me up
every hour…I’m finally free. I don’t want to muck that up by getting involved
with some…musician.

The volume of the first band was loud, but
the screeching of the guitar at this very moment might well be the reason I’ll
never hear my own future children say my name. It had to be ten or maybe twenty
decibels above an eardrum-friendly level. Being so far back from the stage, I
can’t really make out the guy’s face whose playing it. He was also singing, and
his voice may have been really nice, if the guitar wasn’t aching to drown it
out.