"A boy," Shinji snorts over the phone, clearly doubting his friend on the other end of the receiver.
"Yep," Kensei sighs into the phone, squinting into the rearview mirror as he took a sharp left turn.
"He with you now?"
At the mentioning of the boy, Kensei glances over at the youngster, who is currently frowning at his beloved's truck's radio, which keeps tuning in and out. Kensei can't get himself to leave the boy alone, and figures that he might as well say something.
"Yeah."
Shinji's quiet and skeptical. Kensei huffs out a sigh, looking in his side mirror and then out the rearview again before peering down the dark road.
"Shinji."
"I hope to hell you know what you're doin', Kensei." Which is as much permission or blessing as Kensei's gonna get. Heh, Shinji probably figures on the scale of crazy, Kensei is at least sliding down to about an eight.
"Would you knock that off?" Kensei demands, gruffer than he meant to be, but this is his baby truck and he does not like seeing it's radio being used so…roughly.
"What?" Shinji sounds a little surprised, and Kensei says with a soft huff on annoyance as he watch the kid merely blink several times at him,
"Shinji, I gotta go. I'll call you when we reach my place."
The teenager blinks up at him again as Kensei shuts the heat off abruptly and ends the phone call.
God…he really was getting bothered by the kid's continuous blinking. A blink is too long in his opinion. With his eyes closed, through the film of his eyelids, the kid probably starts feeling all dreamy. With his eyes open, everything is in clear focus.
"It's hot outside."
The teen tilts his head, black hair falling to one side. The radio spits out unrecognizable sounds.
"We don't need heat," Kensei clarifies with a light growl, clearly in a bad mood. He's completely toasty warm, but that's beside the point.
"Kid. Make the radio work. Aren't you teenagers good at that kind of thing?"
He turns and looks out the window, but "Bad Blood" starts blasting from the speakers, making the older of the two cringe. Pop music these days really was getting on his nerves. Couldn't they create songs these days that actually stood for something, like all lives matter? Instead of teaching that you should twerk 24/7 and dump the first boy that even looks at you the wrong way?
Kensei sighs involuntarily, then glances to the side, towards the shotgun seat. Sure enough, the kid still is staring in apparent fascination out the window at the rolling hills flashing by.
Did he make a mistake in taking the hitchhiker?
The only answer was the surprisingly comforting purring of the truck's engine.