Losing Hope

grocery store earlier.”
    My mother glances out the window at her, then looks back at me and cocks her head. “And you already brought her to our house? Moving a little quickly, don’t you think?”
    I hold up the water bottle. “She just happened to be running by and now she’s out of water.” I walk toward the door and turn back to my mother and wink. “Lucky for me, we just happen to have water.”
    She laughs. The smile on my mother’s face is nice because they’ve been so few and far between. “Well, good luck, Casanova,” she calls after me.
    I run the water back out to Sky and she immediately takes another drink. I attempt to find a way to rectify her first impression of me.
    “So . . . earlier?” I say hesitantly. “At the store? If I made you uneasy, I’m sorry.”
    She looks me straight in the eyes. “You didn’t make me uneasy.”
    She’s lying. I absolutely made her uneasy. Terrified her, even. But she’s looking at me now with such confidence .
    She’s confusing. Really confusing.
    I watch her for a minute, trying my best to read her, but I have no clue. If I was to hit on her right now, I don’t know if she’d punch me or kiss me. At this point, I’m pretty sure I’d be more than okay with either.
    “I wasn’t trying to hit on you, either,” I say, wanting to get some sort of reaction from her. “I just thought you were someone else.”
    “It’s fine,” she says softly. Her smile is tight-lipped and the disappointment in her voice is clear. It makes me smile, knowing that disappointed her a little bit.
    “Not that I wouldn’t hit on you,” I clarify. “I just wasn’t doing it at that particular moment.”
    She smiles. It’s the first time I actually get a genuine smile from her and it feels like I just won a triathlon.
    “Want me to run with you?” I ask, pointing toward her path home.
    “No, it’s fine.”
    I nod, but don’t like her answer. “Well, I was going that way anyway. I run twice a day and I’ve still got a couple . . .”
    I take a step closer to her when I notice the fresh, prominent bruise under her eye. I grab her chin and tilt her head back to get a better look at it. My previous thoughts are sidetracked and I’m suddenly overwhelmed with a need to kick the ass of whoever touched her.
    “Who did this to you? Your eye wasn’t like this earlier.”
    She backs away from my grasp. “It was an accident. Never interrupt a teenage girl’s nap.” She tries to laugh it off, but I know better. I’ve seen enough unexplained bruises on Les in the past to know that girls can hide this kind of shit better than anyone wants to admit.
    I run my thumb over her bruise, calming the anger coursing through me. “You would tell someone, right? If someone did this to you?”
    She just stares up at me. No response. No, “ Yes, of course I would tell .” Not even a, “ Maybe .” Her lack of acknowledgment takes me right back to these situations with Les. She never admitted to Grayson physically hurting her, but the bruises I saw on her arm the week before I made him break up with her almost ended in murder. If I find out he’s the one who did this to Sky, he’ll no longer have a hand left to lay on her.
    “I’m running with you,” I say. I place my hands firmly on her shoulders and turn her around without giving her the opportunity to object.
    She doesn’t even try to object, though. She begins running, so I fall into a steady stride with her. I’m fuming the entire run back to the house. Pissed that I never got to the bottom of what happened with Les and pissed that Sky might be dealing with the same shit.
    We don’t speak the entire run back to her house until she turns and waves good-bye at the edge of her driveway. “I guess I’ll see you later?” she says, walking backward toward her house.
    “Absolutely,” I say, knowing full well I’ll be seeing her again. Especially now that I know where she lives.
    She smiles and turns toward her house and it isn’t until she’s halfway up her driveway that I realize I don’t even have a way to contact her. She doesn’t have a Facebook, so I can’t contact her that way. I don’t know her phone number. I can’t really just show up at her house unannounced.
    I don’t want her to walk away until I know for sure I’ll talk to her again.
    I immediately twist the lid off my water bottle and pour the contents of it onto the grass. I put the lid back on it.
    “Sky, wait,” I yell. She pauses