Page 4 of Rent a Bad Boy

That’s when I see her.

She’s small. Way too small to be out here getting shoved around by three hundred sweaty strangers, all elbows and shoulder pads. She’s wearing a hoodie that’s way too big, and she’s got her hands cupped around her mouth, calling something I can’t hear over the noise, looking dead at me from behind a pair of thick glasses like she knows me.

I don’t know her. I would remember her. Frizzy brown hair that won’t stay slicked into a ponytail. Those glasses that take up half her face and make her eyes look huge.

She lifts a hand and does this awkward little wave. Half confident, half like she regrets it the second she does it. She ducks sideways through the crowd, coming toward me, and I’m about to ask what the hell she wants when a guy in a jersey slams into her from behind. He wasn’t even looking. He was just caught up in the chaos of celebrating a win he watched from the stands. That’s what people do. They celebrate as if they had something to do with it.

The hit makes her stumble forward hard enough that her glasses go flying off her face. They hit the turf somewhere near my left foot.

Nobody stops. That’s the part that gets me. Nobody looks down. The crowd keeps surging forward like a tide that doesn’t know there’s a person drowning in it. She’s on her hands and knees now, patting blindly at the ground in front of her, squinting hard enough that I can see the strain of it from six feet away. Some idiot in a backwards ball cap steps right on glasses. I hear the crunch even over all the noise.

Then somebody’s boot clips her shoulder, and she goes down the rest of the way, face-first onto the grass while dozens of people keep moving toward her.

That’s what gets me moving. I don’t think about it. I just go.

It takes two steps and one arm to get between her and the next idiot about to plow straight over her without noticing she exists. It’s easy to haul her tiny body up by the back of her hoodie because she basically weighs nothing. I plant her against my side, where nobody’s getting near her unless they want to find out what happens to people who hit me wrong.

“You good?” I ask. It comes out rougher than I meant it to, because my voice doesn’t really do soft.

She blinks up at me, squinting hard. It’s obvious she can barely see. She’s got this round, freckled face. Her hair is wilder than it already was. There are two deep dimples carved into her cheeks, even though she’s not smiling. More like she’s bracing for impact. But she’s cute, even if she’s totally the opposite of what I usually go for.

“My glasses,” she says. Her voice cracks a little. “Somebody crushed my glasses.”

I look down. What’s left of them is in two pieces. One lens is cracked clean through, mangled into the grass. “Yeah. They did.”

“Oh, no.” She says it quietly, more to herself than to me. Like this is the worst possible outcome of an already bad night.

“Did you drive here?” I ask, ignoring everybody around us, focusing only on her. She looks so lost. Totally out of place and alone, no friends with her.

Her head bobs and her cheeks go red, and I’m pretty sure her eyes are filling with tears now. “I did. Obviously, I can’t drive home like this.” She squints harder, like that’s going to fix anything, then gives up and stares at the general blur of my chest. “I can’t see past about a foot in front of my face without them.”

Which means somebody needs to get her home before she walks straight into traffic. I don’t volunteer for things. Ever. It’s not really what I do—playing the hero—mostly because nobody’s ever once played that role for me.

For some reason, my mouth is already moving before I think it through. “I’ll drive you.”

“You don’t have to⁠—”

“I didn’t say I had to.” I steer her away from the worst of the crowd with a hand at her shoulder. People part in front of me the way they always do. I’m not sure if it’s out of respect or fear. I guess it doesn’t really matter either way. “I said I would.”

And what does she do? I’m trying to be nice, which is something I never am, but she plants her feet. For somebody so small, she is tough to move. “I can’t leave yet.”

“What are you waiting for? You want to get trampled for real?”

“I’m looking for somebody.” She turns her head and scans the field like there’s any chance she’ll spot a single face. “His name is Everett Stone.”

It stops me cold.

She’s standing two feet away from him. Talking to him. About him.

And she has absolutely no idea. Without those glasses, I’m nothing but a wide, dark shape that smells like turf and sweat. In other words, the same as every other guy who played out here tonight.

I should tell her. I don’t, not yet, mostly because I want to hear what she says next without her getting weird about who’s listening. “What do you want with him?”

“I need somebody like him.” She says it fast, like she’s been rehearsing it the whole game. “Somebody big. Intimidating. Somebody who looks like he wouldn’t think twice about breaking another guy’s jaw, because apparently, he’s already done that. I know it sounds insane, but I need a specific set of skills here, and he seems to have them.”

I almost laugh. I don’t, though, because she’s dead serious, standing there in a hoodie three sizes too big and squinting up at a blur that happens to be the exact guy she’s describing, telling him to his face that she needs his particular brand of violence for a job.

“Why do you need him?”