Best Served Fake

thirty-seven // kai's second fave after jamie

Kai worked at a garage in Springvale, roughly twenty minutes away from my house. I wasn't sure exactly what he did there. This was partly due to my complete lack of understanding of anything car-related, so the little he did say on the matter only garnered vague nods from me. Really, though, he never had much to say about work other than that it was 'fine', or mentioning it in relation to Will, whose grandfather owned it. Kai, despite being chatty as a general rule, wasn't a fan of talking about himself.

The garage was fairly standard from what I could gauge when I pulled into the driveway, reinstalled into the driver's seat of my own newly-repaired car. Cars in various states of disrepair littered the small yard, with a shipping-container style room offering shelter at the back. It was on a fairly large block, and there was about 30 cars on my count for the boys—and the qualified mechanics—to work on.

Will was bent over a beat-up car in the drive, those massive shoulders tilted forward as he fiddled with something beneath the bonnet. His dark skin gleamed with sweat, illuminated by the evening sunset, and although I was consistently hot under the collar for Kai, the immense appeal of Will Kennedy wasn't lost on me. It was the shoulders; Will was a veritable giant, and if I felt small next to Kai, Will made me look like a Polly Pocket doll.

I hadn't spent a lot of time with Will outside the group. Not because I didn't like him—I did—but he wasn't as overtly friendly as Jameson, or as forced-to-hang-out-with-me-via-blackmail as Kai. I knew he was Kai's closest friend, though, and maybe even Isabelle's too. And despite being more reserved, Will had a good-natured humour that I liked, and an exasperated, fond tolerance for the antics of all of his friends that made me smile. Plus, there was his obvious love for the Delaney siblings. Somehow, that was his most endearing quality; it was easy to like Kai and Isabelle, but Will's steady love seemed to be a rarity in their lives.

He was also hot, which was always nice to have around.

I jumped out of my car and strolled over to Will. "Hi."

He squinted up at me from his crouch, shielding his eyes with a hand and flashing me a white smile. "Hey. You here to see Kai?"

"Yeah, he said to come visit him after work. Where is he?"

Will shrugged, unfolding himself from the ground to climb to his feet, which somehow unbalanced our height even more; we were probably closer to eyelevel when he was sitting down. "Out the back somewhere. Probably taking a shit, which is what he always says when he wants to sit on his phone for a bit."

I grinned. "Lazy bastard."

Will shook his head. "Kai? Nah. Solving the problems of the world is more likely. Or staring moonily at his text chain with you and trying to come up with a reason to text you."

The thought was laughable. Kai was effortlessly smooth—flirty without trying, charming without thinking—and imagining him debating the perfect text to send was so incongruous it was funny.

I didn't say that though; how was I supposed to know what a smitten Kai Delaney looked like? Maybe when he was falling in love—for real, instead of for blackmail and revenge—he was the kind of guy who sat on toilets like an anxious gremlin debating how many x's accurately conveyed hey let's fuck and also have my babies. I couldn't imagine it, but hey, Kai's emotional state was Will's wheelhouse. Not that Kai had ever been smitten with a girl before, to my knowledge.

"He's not very good at it," I said, lightly. "He needed Jameson to pass on the message that he wanted to talk to me."

"I'm sure James would've hated that," said Will drily, shaking his head. "But it was warranted. If I had to listen to Kai brainstorming a casual hello text message for another second, I was going to run him over. Izzy was about to smash his phone. Or his face, it was never really clear."