All Wheel Drive by Z.A. Maxfield

Author:Z.A. Maxfield [Maxfield, Z.A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Published: 2017-07-04T04:00:00+00:00

When Diego didn’t hear anything from Healey for a week, he was frankly relieved.

Guys like Healey, men with siblings who kept in touch over minutiae—men with parents who flew halfway around the world to be with them after a college romance breaks up—weren’t his usual hookup fare.

Diego’s usual hookup fare left when he was done, and everyone was okay with that. He’d dodged a bullet, as far as he was concerned. A guy like Healey could easily get clingy.

Of course . . . Healey had left. It had been over a week, and Healey hadn’t sent so much as an emoji.

Goddamn it.

That didn’t feel very awesome.

Healey had left without being told to go. Without saying good-bye. Healey wasn’t presuming they were a couple, like he’d feared. So, that was great, right?

Why did it feel not great? Why did it feel like he’d been rejected, when the only thing that had happened was he’d been given the gift of not having to spell things out to a one-night stand?

“What am I so worried about?” he said out loud.

“At a guess, I’d say talking to yourself?” Tori, owner of Stomping Grounds and maker of the best Cuban coffee—well, probably the only Cuban coffee—in town, stared down at him. She looked mildly amused. “You should see your face. Want another?”

“I’m good.” Diego put away the phone he was fiddling with. Was he the only person over five years of age still playing Pokémon Go? “Caught a Magikarp.”

“My condolences.” Tori sat in the chair opposite his. With filming on hiatus, lethargy could turn into depression at light speed. Since his routine was to get coffee and a protein pack every weekday morning, rain or shine, Tori had become Diego’s unofficial mother figure.

“As if there aren’t enough wide-eyed idiots around here staring at their phones, not watching where they’re going, walking out in front of traffic—”

“What’s got you muttering to yourself?” When he didn’t answer, she guessed. “Guy trouble? That’s men for you. Can’t live with them, and in all but a few progressive states, you’re not allowed to shoot them unless you have a pretty good reason. Tell Mama all about it.”

“There’s no guy,” he corrected.

“Is that the problem? Because I know a whole bunch of guys who’d be awesome for—”

“No. Jeez. Not everything is about relationships or whatever.” Diego hoped to hell he didn’t look as crusty as he sounded. “I have to do some things that aren’t going to be easy, is all.”

She gave a slow nod. “Anything I can help with?”

“Unless you have an encyclopedic knowledge of billboard advertising in the last half of the twentieth century?”

She shook her head.

“I have to go through my mother’s papers and photographs.” He explained finding the picture of the altered billboard, and how he was searching through his archives for others. “I’ve been putting off looking through her things. You know how it is.”

Tori shook her head. “The only thing my mom left behind was empties. I lined every single bottle up along the fence and spent an entire day shooting at them.

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