“I brought my van. My brother was cool and gave me some beer. I put it in a cooler in the back…just in case we want to go back there and regroup or something.”

Dodger’s eyes shifted to hers, wanting to supply her with the strength he new she needed. What exactly Ashley intended to do or say at this party, he didn’t know. However, he also recognized that Ashley wanting to attend this function was a big deal. Ashley shared a lot with him, yet she didn’t talk too much about her past. He sensed it was troubling, seeing as Ash was the hugest fantasist he had ever met. This was her coping mechanism.

His uncle Trevor had been a soldier in Vietnam, still plagued by haunting memories that he tried to suppress with booze. Ashley wrote stories, acted out chapters from a book with her as the lead…these was how she dealt with the past, and Dodger loved her for it.

Silently, the two headed towards the front door.

A layer of thick black smoke left a trail from Ashley’s driveway straight to the exhaust pipe of Dodger’s van. Not exactly the coolest mode of transportation, but it worked…sometimes. Dodger glanced over at Ashley’s face, her hands clasped together tightly, her eyes staring intently out the window.

Her tight jeans hugged her thighs as if they were trying to escape. Her blue sash belt had become tangled with her seatbelt harness and he wondered if he should tell her to avoid any spills when she tried to exit the car. The last thing Ash needed was an embarrassing trip, to crush her confidence.

The light turned red and Dodger applied pressure to the breaks. He glanced back at Ashley, his eyes moving up and down her body and over her breasts that were emerging slightly from the top of her v-neck top. He could see sweat glistening in her cleavage, sparkling against the faint light from the street that poured over her body.

Ashley could feel the gaze directed at her, but her feelings from before had transitioned. She knew Dodger just wanted her to be okay, desired to protect her from all the shit and harsh realities of the world. A part of her wanted to scream for him to stop the van and turn around and head home. Where she could crawl into his lap like a kitten, and have his warm hands rub her head and along her back, as she slept soundly, while Dodger kept watch over her, deflecting away the pain that fell from the sky.

But she kept her mouth shut, teetering the fence between wanting to see Spencer and fearing that she would. The van chugged forward; a victim of poor shocks, and Ashley sat up straight, filling her chest with confidence, hoping it would squash the dull ache that never ceased when Spencer wasn’t near her.