Amanda looked in the mirror with horror. Her glasses were slim and stylish, but no matter what she did, Mandy knew immediately that the person looking back at her in the mirror was a nerd, pure and simple. She was in her final year of school, and was a poster child for the new generation. Her grades were fine, her looks were good, but put a pair of glasses on her, and she went from smart and popular to nerdy and ugly.
She looked at her mother again, and pleaded uselessly for contacts. The optometrist shook her head mercilessly. Her mother looked at her again. Mandy tilted her head to either side, then moved her hair away from her face. It was no use. The glasses, no matter how fashionable they were, were an instant nerd label. She felt a tear begin to form and hurriedly stood up, thanked the lady looking unsympathetically at her, and rushed out of the shop.
Back at home, Mandy say in front of the mirror listlessly, staring at the nerd reflected back at her. It wasn't that Mandy was a vain young woman. The other girls and guys at school were cruel, harsh, and unforgiving. She had been eighteen for three months before she'd gotten her licence. The girls had barely gotten over that. Now, she'd had an accident, and suffered a severe blow to the back of her head, thus she needed the glasses until her vision healed.
Her mum called out to tell her that tea was ready, and Mandy felt sick in the guts. She just couldn't deal with anyone she knew right then. She zipped up her top over her bra and grabbed her runners and her cd player, and bounded down the stairs. She shook her head to her mum's quick shout, and called back that she was going for a run. "Well don't lock the back door, dear, your father and I are going out!"
As she swung open the back gate, Mandy noticed a figure in the distance of another runner. She couldn't see who it was, even with her glasses. She began to jog fairly briskly along the river, trying not to think about the faces of the people at school tomorrow when they saw her and her glasses. Her curly hair bounced on her shoulders as she jogged, her mind a blur, and her watch suddenly beeped, showing an hour had gone by. A bridge was coming up, and Mandy ducked across it quickly, meaning to double back towards her house.
As she stepped off the wooden boards and onto the dirt track, she heard the thud of feet across the wood, and looked back. The runner had caught up with her, and she saw with a start that it was Luke, one of the quiet kids in her English Lit class. His body was covered in a layer of sweat, and his shirt was tucked into the back of his shorts. He ran in bare feet, and sunglasses, and she could clearly see the massive tribal tattoo he'd gotten for his own eighteenth about a month ago. His skin looked different under the blacks and reds of the tattoo.
Mandy quickly turned back around before he realized she was staring. He was about a foot taller than her, and lived one street over, somewhere down the back, near the fence line. He was a quiet guy, and had a short goatee. The rumour mill at school said he had a temper problem, and was on medication, but that was probably just to cover the fact he was so quiet. He normally spent his lunches in the library, reading the fantasy novels.
Mandy sped up a bit, so that Luke wouldn't get in front of her and see who she was, or worse, see what was on her face. She heard a grunt behind her and ducked a look back over her shoulder, and saw his grinning face as he sped up to match her speed. Mandy broke into a run, and again he kept pace with her. She began to speed up to a dangerous sprint, and chanced a look over her shoulder.
Luke's rock hard torso was only a couple of feet away, and she turned her head back to concentrate on her path, even as he called out her name. Her eyes locked on the tree root in front of her a split second before her ankle found it, and she tumbled into the dust with a cry of pain. Luke leapt over her body with a startled oath and fell as well, smashing into a tree and splitting off several small branches.
As the dust settled, Luke pushed back up off the ground and got up. "Are you ok, Amanda?" Mandy glared at him over the painful swelling of her ankle. He stepped closer to her and she hit his thigh as hard as she could.
"You asshole! Look what you did!" Luke's clear green eyes turned to jade agates as he stood over her and crossed his arms. He hadn't deserved that, and they both knew it. "Well, if you hadn't chased me like some horny little schoolboy, I wouldn't have fallen!" A small part of her mind felt smug satisfaction at that particular point, until she realized that his scent was very strong among the tea-trees bordering the stream. It wasn't body odour, and wasn't a bad smell, just something very disarming and manly.
Luke sniffed and looked down at her ankle, and his expression softened. "We'll need to get some ice on that. I'll take you home." She stared at him.
"Um, no, strangely I don't think Australia's Most Wanted needs a picture of me and you on it in the same time-slot as Sixty-Minutes." He frowned and ignored her, and his fingers gently peeled down her sock and slipped off her running shoe. His large hand spread out over her ankle, and Mandy swallowed and cleared her throat.
He smoothed the skin around her ankle and foot, feeling the muscles. Mandy felt a blush spreading up her neck, and shut her mouth with a clip. Luke looked up at the fence line on the other side of the creek. There was another bridge a little further up, thirty metres or so, and he nodded as though making up his mind.
"Your foot's got a twisted muscle that's popped out of place. It'll be painful, but with some massage, your boyfriend should be able to put it back in. In for the sake of the argument you seem to want, that show was cancelled ages ago, and despite the moral lessons which you sorely need to focus of, talking like an extra from Clueless isn't going to garner you any points. Now how far is it to your place?" She stared at him in impotent fury.
"Whatever. Not far, I can make it, without your help." Luke shrugged and coldly stood there while he waited for her to try to stand. When she put her foot down, without even putting any weight on it, a lance of pain shot up her foot and calf. Mandy's face paled, and Luke looked away, frowned, then held out his hand.
"Come on. I won't tell anyone I was even near you." Mandy scoffed, then tried her best haughty expression, only to pale again as her foot began to throb. She could see the huge bulge on the top of her foot, and lifted her head, stoically refusing to look at it. She took another step and cried out as her foot gave way underneath her. Luke snarled and grabbed her bodily, lifting her in his arms as though he hadn't just sprinted fifty feet at full speed after running for four hours or so.
Mandy flinched when he picked her up, more from his snarl than any real fear. For some reason, she knew that he was snarling that she'd put herself through needless pain than because of any real anger. Mandy stiffly pointed upstream, and Luke began to walk wordlessly. As they neared the bridge, she pointed across the stream again, and murmured softly. "The one with the blue post tops." Luke nodded and moved up the slight embankment to the other path, and set her down gingerly.
Mandy gave another cry of pain and sagged against Luke's chiselled frame helplessly. She whimpered as she unlocked the gate, then tried to give him a wan smile. He stopped for a moment and stared at her. "You gonna be okay?" Mandy swallowed her pride and minutely shook her head.
