My instinct is to fight back — to defend myself, and maybe throw a few insults in his direction, too, to pay him back for how small he’s just made me feel. That’s what I’d normally do. When I open my mouth to speak, though, I find all the fight has gone out of me.
It’s actually quite liberating, realizing I don’t have to fight back all the time. That I can just do what I’m doing now, which is to shrug my shoulders and admit that he’s right.
“No, of course it isn’t,” I say, my voice sounding a little less steady than it did in my head. “No more than you want to live your life for your father, anyway. Because that’s what you’re doing too, isn’t it? I guess we’re both the same in that respect. Neither one of us is living the life we want, and neither one of us can do anything about it.”
Jett steps back as if he’s been slapped.
“You don’t know anything about me and my father,” he says shortly. “You don’t know anything about this world and how it works.”
“No, I don’t.” I nod tearfully. “And that’s why I can’t help you with this. I’m not the right person to do it. I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. I just keep getting it wrong and making things worse. You should have picked someone else. You should have picked one of those actresses or models you usually date. At least that would’ve been more believable than you dating a complete fuck-up like me.”
I sniff loudly, trying to hold back the tears that are threatening to come. I amnota pretty crier. It’s one of the reasons I never do it.
“I don’t think you’re a fuck-up, Lexie.”
Jett steps back towards me.
“I am, though,” I insist, digging my nails into the palms of my hands. “Trust me, you don’t even know the half of it. If I went to Scotland with you, I wouldn’t exactly be welcomed back with open arms. I’d just make things worse. That’s why you should pick someone else to do this. I don’t think ‘Fake Girlfriend” is going to make it onto my resume, somehow.”
“But I don’t want to pick someone else,” Jett says simply. “I pickyou, Lexie. I trustyou. And I want to go to Scotland with you. You. No one else.”
I am not going to cry.
I am not going to cry.
“I meant what I said, by the way,” he goes on when I don’t respond, smiling that stomach-flipping smile of his again. “I can help you. With your mom, I mean. We can get her whatever medical treatment she needs. Or I can just, you know, be there for you when you see her. Because I get the feeling that’s not going to be easy for you, and I’m good with little old ladies. They like me. What can I say?”
Okay, I ampossiblygoing to cry. Just alittlebit.
“Mum’s not a little old lady,” I tell him, sniffing to hide the emotion in my voice. “Or not like any you’ve ever met. She’ll probably try to hit on you, actually.”
Jett’s grin widens.
“Even better,” he chuckles. “She’ll be putty in my hands, then. Um, just joking. I’ll behave myself, I promise. I’m… I’m not actually like that, you know. I’m not how they make me look in the tabloids. That’s not really me.”
He rubs his chin, suddenly bashful. I have a powerful urge to put my arms around him and hug him; to kiss his beautiful face and tell him it’s okay — that I believe him.
I’m just nottotallysure I do, is the only problem.
“So whatareyou really like, then?” I ask instead. “If you’re not the hell-raising playboy everyone thinks you are, who are you?”
Jett looks up in surprise.
“That’s kind of a deep question for 11 o’clock in the morning, don’t you think?”
“You’re right,” I agree solemnly. “It’s more of a 3 a.m. kind of question. Remind me to ask it again later.”
He grins, and the tension between us is gone, as if it never existed.
“Seriously, though,” he says, reaching out and taking my hands in his. “We’ll do this together. You look after me, I’ll look after you. Do we have a deal?”
I should say no to this.
Iwantto say no to this. It would be the best thing to do. The sensible thing. The thing with the least chance of me ending up with my heart broken — by either Mum, or Jett, or both.
Instead, though, I do what I always do in situations like this. The wrong thing. The dangerous thing. The quite possiblyinsanething.
I say yes.
