Chapter Text
Gina glances around at the empty skatepark and the sign saying it closed at 8pm. “Are we allowed to be here?”
Ricky follows her gaze and laughs. “Don’t worry. No one ever comes by.” He drops his skateboard by his feet and steps on. He doesn’t go far though. He just needs something to do besides stand there and gawk at her.
“Do you do this a lot?” Ricky gives her a questioning look. “Bring girls to the skatepark alone at night?” There’s a teasing glint in her eyes that lets him know she’s not prying or judging.
The only girl Ricky has ever really dated is Nini and he’d tried bringing her when they first got together but she just wasn’t into it. “Only Big Red but I don’t think that counts.”
Gina laughs. “Definitely not.” Ricky does a small trick on his board to expel some nervous energy. “How long did that take to learn?”
Ricky does it again and shrugs. “Couple weeks.” He glances away from her as he answers.
Gina studies him for a moment. “So a couple months?”
“Something like that,” Ricky admits as he feels his cheeks flush. He watches as she makes her way over to the stairs at the entrance. She sits down right where she did that first night. “Were you really babysitting?”
Gina’s eyebrows furrow. “What?”
“When you convinced me to stay in the play. You said you were babysitting a neighbor’s kid.”
“Oh, that.” Gina lets out a quiet laugh. “Um, no, not babysitting. I figured you might show when I saw you leave school with your skateboard.”
“Observant,” Ricky remarks. Another thing to add to the ever-growing list of things he was learning about her.
Gina pulls her jacket around her a little tighter. She doesn’t know what she was expecting when Ricky asked her to meet him outside her house earlier but it definitely wasn’t this. She’s just lucky that her mom was gone for the week.
“Are you going to show me any tricks then? Since we’re here.”
Ricky raises his eyebrows. “Right now?” He really wasn’t expecting Gina to be into the skatepark. He’d impulsively asked her to hang out and immediately realized inviting her to his house wasn’t a good idea. He could just imagine all the questions his dad would have. Questions he didn’t have the answers to.
“Yeah. We’re here. Impress me.” Gina says with a playful smile.
He finds himself matching her grin before he takes off towards one of the ramps. It’s kind of nice to just relax and enjoy the park. It doesn’t hurt that Gina cheers for him every time he does anything remotely impressive.
Eventually, he hops off and walks over to join her on the stairs. He sits maybe a bit closer than he should but shrugs it off. It’s not like they were touching.
“You’re amazing.” Gina gushes.
He lets out a small laugh. “I think you’ve just never hung out with a skater before.”
Gina bumps her shoulder against his, waiting until he meets her gaze. “I think you underestimate yourself.”
“Maybe.” He quietly admits. Being with Gina felt nice, easy. She really believed in him and always seemed to know the right thing to say. She also made him really nervous if his pounding heart was anything to go by.
“Will you teach me sometime?” She asks, breaking him out of his thoughts.
“To skateboard?” He found it hard to believe that she was actually interested in learning. She was probably just being polite.
“Yeah. I’ve never tried it before.” Gina glances down at the skateboard by his feet. “Seems kind of terrifying, but in a good way, you know?”
Ricky finds himself staring at her in disbelief. He very much tries to avoid new things, especially ones that scare him. Somewhere in the last year, he’d adopted the motto 'if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.' “You want to try something that scares you?”
Gina shrugs her shoulders and breaks eye contact. “I’m used to new and scary. It’s comforting?” Gina’s nose scrunches up as she says the last part and it’s probably the cutest thing he’s ever seen her do. “I don’t think that made sense.” She laughs.
“I get it.” And even though he hates change, he thinks he does understand what she means. Moving around all the time for her mom’s job meant that she didn’t get to hold onto things. Change was her only constant. “I’d love to teach you sometime.” He offers before he even really thinks it through.
Gina smiles at him. “Yeah?”
He nods. “I’m sure you’ll have it mastered in no time. You’re good at everything.”
Gina shakes her head. “You overestimate me.”
“You underestimate yourself.” He parrots back to her. He knows they’d only been hanging out for a couple weeks but he already knows she was way more talented than she gave herself credit for.
Gina glances around as she hears a phone vibrate. “Sorry,” Ricky apologizes as he pulls his phone out of his jacket pocket. He swipes it open as he reads the new text. “It’s from my dad. Wants to know when I’ll be home.”
Gina pulls out her own phone to check the time and gasps. It was almost midnight. They’d been here for 3 hours. “We should go. It’s late.” Gina looks around her as she stands up making sure she didn’t leave anything behind.
Ricky places a hand on her arm to get her attention. “Hey, thanks for coming with me.”
Gina blushes. “Thanks for inviting me.” They don’t break eye contact right away and he knows they’re bordering on the line of it meaning something more. It’s not like he locked eyes with Big Red for extended periods of time. Then he registers the heat radiating from where he grabbed her arm. With a cough, he drops his gaze and pulls his hand back.
“Come on. I’ll, uh, drive you home.”
His dad has a million questions when he finally gets home past midnight. He’s not mad per se cause Ricky doesn’t really have a set curfew but he also usually doesn’t stay out past midnight.
“Where were you?”
“At the skatepark.” Ricky drops his keys by the door and kicks his sneakers off.
“With Big Red?”
Ricky hesitates. It would be so easy to say he was. He wouldn’t have to explain anything. But he can’t lie to his dad. It was them against the world now. “I was with Gina.”
His dad’s brow furrows. “Gina?”
Despite Ricky spending pretty much all his free time with her at school and staying late after rehearsal just to talk to her a little bit longer he hadn’t really told his dad yet. “From the play.”
“Oh.” Ricky watches as his dad tries to put the pieces together. He’s never met her before, not really.
“Maybe you saw her at the school board meeting for Miss Jenn.” Still nothing. “Curly hair up in a bun, blue sweater, amazing dancer.” He sees the second that the light bulb goes off.
“Oh, yeah.” His dad pauses. “She’s pretty.”
Ricky sighs as he walks past his dad into the kitchen. This was exactly what he was hoping to avoid. He was confused enough about how Gina made him feel, he definitely didn’t want to talk about it with his dad. “I guess so.”
“Are you two-”
“No.” Ricky grabs an apple from the counter. He wasn’t really hungry but anything to keep his hands busy. “We’re friends.”
“That you hang out with until midnight on a school night.”
He can hear the implications but he really really doesn’t want to get into it. “I’m sorry I came home so late. We lost track of time.”
His dad sighs as he gives up. “Next time you can invite her over here if it’s going to be so late. I’d feel better if you were home.”
Ricky nods but he knows he won’t do it. Not anytime soon anyway. Right now, his relationship with Gina was kind of like this special thing only for them and as long as he kept her to himself, nothing could taint it.
“I’m serious. I’d like to meet her.” He can see the resolve in his dad’s eyes but he also knows there’s nothing he can do about it.
“I’m going to go to bed.” He can hear his dad let out a big sigh of defeat behind him as he walks up the stairs. He feels a momentary rush of guilt but pushes it down. He needs to figure it out for himself first.