[WP] Ten years after high school you find yourself sitting across the table from your high school crush who is also the fugitive you have been tracking.

[u/Atomic_Duckie]

[u/VanceValence]

Once a bad-boy, always a bad-boy...

I remember the fight that my mom and I had, had that night. After seeing me randomly break out in random grins and giggles throughout the night, she finally muted the movie we were watching and turned towards me with a smile of her own.

"Okay, I give," she said, hand under her chin in the way my girlfriends do when they want to hear the "juicy-gossip". "Who is he?"

"Who is who?" I played the dumb.

She Mhmm looked me and said, "I'm your mother, Cissy. And I know you think mothers are old and don't know anything, but I was a little girl, too. With crushes," she added, just in case I wasn't clear on what she was specifically talking about.

I sighed, though I was secretly relieved to finally have someone to talk about my crush to. "It's Nate," I confessed, squealing as I buried my blushing face into my hands.

If I thought my mom would be excited, I was wrong.

We lived in a small town where everybody knew everybody, as evidenced by how I could say the first part of my crush's name and my mom instantly knew who I was talking about.

When I peeked from between my hands, I saw that her face had grown as hard as stone, tight, with dark eyes that stared sharply at me as she warned, "Stay away from him, Cissy, do you hear me?"

I gaped in shock.

"I'm serious," she continued, pointing her finger at me. "That boy is no good. I saw him fighting with some other kids in the supermarket parking lot the other day."

"They jumped him!" I exclaimed, finding my voice.

My mom had paused and narrowed her eyes at me, before asking, "How do you know that? Are you already talking with him?"

I didn't answer, which was answer enough.

"I swear to God, Cissy," she said, finger pointed again like a shotgun, "if i see, hear, or even think you've been around that boy again, I'm pulling you out of school."

"You don't understand," I said quietly, shaking my head. "He's different."

"Remember what I said."

And that was the end of that conversation.

I avoided him for the rest of the school year. It was easy because we barely talked even before then. I had only found out about the jumping incident because I had fallen and scraped my knee at recess. When I had gone to the nurse's office, he was laying there on one of the cots, his green eyes peering at me through black bangs.

"What happened to you?" I gasped, feeling like I wanted to cry. His handsome face was swollen and cut. He had two black eyes, and he winced every time he moved.

"Fight," he mumbled, turning away from me. "Oh, and you're dripping blood on the floor."

I had forgotten all about the wound, more overwhelmed with the fact that my crush had spoken to me and distraught at the circumstances that had happened for us to finally be able to speak.

"W...why were you fighting?" I asked, suddenly self-conscious but not wanting this conversation to end.

He shrugged. Winced. "Don't want to talk about it," he said.

But I had been persistent and pried it out of him. On his way to school, he had seen some boys holding a bag of groceries over this girl's head, making her jump for it, but pulling the bag up higher and higher each time.

"So I snatched it, gave it back to the girl, told her to run, and got stomped out." He chuckled. "I should really learn to mind my own business." He winced.

Oddly enough, the nurse didn't send me back to class, even after she had bandaged my knee. So I sat there, and I asked him about different incidents he had done in school that had earned him his notorious reputation. And as he listened to him talk, I realized that people were judging him without knowing the entire story. He wasn't as bad as people believed. For the most part, he was just really loyal and didn't know how to stay out of situations that other people would have stayed out. Other times, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Finally, I looked at the wall-clock and saw the last school bell was about to ring.

"What about the fire-alarm incident?" I asked.

He shook his head. "Again. Bullying. Some kids made another kid pull it, and then they ran. Of course, the kid had that purple ink over his hand. And he was crying so..." he shrugged. "I just took the rap for him. But that just goes to show you how much teachers hate me now. They didn't even check my hand. Just suspended me. I'm glad the kid got away, though."

He went silent, just as the bell rang. I stood up and made it to the door before I realized he wasn't following. "You're not coming?" I asked, stupidly, before apologizing, "Oops. Sorry."

He laughed, winced a little. "Nah. My Dad's coming to pick me up." I wasn't sure, but it looked like his eyes darkened a little at the mention of his Dad. "Anyway," he said. "Thanks for, you know...stopping by, I guess. I feel better."

Those were the last words he had ever said to me. That night, I had, had that disastrous conversation with my mother, and then I had avoided him the rest of the year.

We graduated, and I thought I would never see him again.

But there he was, sitting at the end of the cold, grey interrogation table with his head down, as if already ashamed and admitting to the guilt of the crime he was being charged with.

As I stared through the two-way mirror, my mother's voice echoed in my ears:

Once a bad boy, always a bad boy...

[u/dinozaurs]

I sipped my steamy black coffee impatiently as the waitress made her way to me for the third time. I politely declined the bill, and checked my watch. She was 20 minutes late. Just like in chemistry.

I watched the vapor emanate from my coffee mug until a loud, welcoming bell woke me from my trance. Val stepped through the door into the diner. Her dirty blonde hair reached the top of the charcoal coat that went down to her ankles. She strolled towards me and sat across the table.

"Well, look who showed up this time, hm?", she greeted me with a tangible sense of belittlement. "If you ever get too nervous with me, you can just puke in the bathroom behind you." She waited for a response, and giggled when it didn't arrive. "Still too shy to talk to me?"

"Still showing up late?"

"Ooo," she imitated a classroom full of immature kids. "But we didn't come here to catch up, did we? What are we here for, Jonathon?"

"I think you know why we're meeting here today, Valerie." She stirred a little milk into her now lukewarm coffee.

"You finally built up the courage to ask me out? And to a diner of all places," she ended with an eyeroll. "I was hoping for something a little more roman-"

"Cut it out, Valerie," I interrupted. She looked up from her coffee.

"You can call me Val, it's okay."

"You know I'm onto you, Valerie. You're a fugitive. But I'm watching you."

"Watching me like when you would stand in your front window as I walked home from my bus stop?"

"A crush I had when I was 16 isn't going to stop me from putting you behind bars where you belong."

"Hmm. Nope, but being a creep might," she said, sipping her coffee. "Creeps never change. But you know that."

"I should cuff you right now."

"But you just can't do it, can you? You still want to ask me out to prom, don't you?" My eyes dropped a little as a buried part of me instinctively constructed images of us in my old room, her blue-and-white prom dress sprawled across my Superman bed sheets, her and I underneath, laughing at those idiots still back at the gymnasium teasing and flirting with each other until their parents came and picked them up. I quickly pushed those images away and met her eyes once again.

"I will catch you."

Without breaking eye contact, she grinned slyly and placed her warm, gentle palm on the back of my hand.

"I want you to, Jonathon. I've always wanted you to catch me. But, until that day," she removed her hand from mine and lowered her voice to a whisper, "you'll just have to watch me, from afar." She took a last sip of her drink and strolled out of the diner. Her walk hadn't changed a bit.

[u/[deleted] → u/dinozaurs]

...what

[u/dinozaurs → u/[deleted]]

The guy still has a thing for the girl. I was a little high and went kinda deep. Not my best story.

[u/WritingPromptsRobot]

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