She’d been so caught up in the conversation that she hadn’t realized they were passing Kevin’s table and the look on his face was one she hadn’t seen before. Not grumpy, but definitely not happy.
“You know this guy?” Tony asked.
“Yeah, we’re…” She had to put proper thought into describing what they were. “We’re traveling together.”
“Hi.” Tony removed his arm from around her shoulder and extended it to Kevin. “I’m Tony.”
“Kevin,” he replied, shaking his hand. “You guys going somewhere?”
“Yeah,” Tony replied on her behalf. “A Rodeo. You wanna join us?”
He didn’t answer and Tony must have picked up on the tension between them because he looked from her to Kevin then back to her again.
“Should I give you two a minute to talk?”
Kevin opened his mouth to respond but she beat him to it. “It’s not necessary,” she replied with a smile. “Kevin doesn’t like to talk…and he’s already said whatever he needed to say.”
She said nothing more and headed out the door with Tony. The drive to the Amarillo Civic Centre was a short one. Going to her first rodeo wasn’t what she’d expected, but it was definitely an experience she would never forget. Oddly enough, it was an indoor event and the center was crowded, filled with people wearing Stetsons and waving American flags. Some of the muscled cowboys she saw made her consider moving to Texas permanently. The excitement that filled the air was contagious and Jasmin couldn’t stop smiling. They seated themselves on the blue plastic chairs about five rows from the front and shewatched in anticipation as they rode horses across the dirt and chased bulls with lassos. It was amazing to watch.
The supply of junk food never stopped and April even convinced her to try her first corndog. Sometime during the afternoon, Tony found himself another dream girl and was trying, with little luck, to charm her pants off. Jasmin spent most of the afternoon talking to Brad. He was a shy guy, and she may have been stereotyping again, but she didn’t expect someone who looked like him to be so reserved. There were a few stilted moments because he didn’t get her sense of humor, but he was still fun to talk to. He was a gentleman, offering her his jacket when the temperature began to drop. He was also very mild-mannered and it did make her wonder how he and Tony got along, because their personalities were on complete opposite sides of the spectrum.
After the rodeo, Tony was still trying with dream girl two and while Megan and April were in the restroom, Brad pulled her to a quiet corner.
“So I wanted to ask you something,” he began nervously. “Um…Tony’s parents are out of town…and he’s having a party tonight.” He rubbed one hand against the other as if his palms were sweaty. “I was…wondering if…you wanted to come…with me.”
This was an odd predicament. She liked him, but not inthatway and she didn’t want him to get the wrong impression if she said yes. So her first instinct was to say no, but the thought of sitting alone with Kevin for the rest of night in awkward silence was enough to change her mind. Besides, he couldn’t really get the wrong impression; she’d told him earlier that she would be leaving Amarillo the next day.
“Sure,” she replied. “Why not?”
*****
Three days. It had been going on like this for three days and Kevin was reaching his breaking point. Apart from the argument they’d had the night before last, she barely said one word. She was polite and pleasant. Even during their argument the other night, she hadn’t raised her voice. And even though her words were jagged, her tone was always that of pleasant indifference, completely devoid of any emotion. She hadn’t said one mean thing to him so far.
It was like they were strangers now. She spoke only when spoken to. She wasn’t being Jasmin. She wasn’t rambling. She wasn’t annoying the crap out of him. She wasn’t divulging information that was way too personal to be shared and the silence was killing him. He hadn’t known her for very long but in the weeks that had passed, this was what Jasmin had become to him:
When kettles were first invented, there was nothing inside it to stop the electric current to the heating element when the water reached its boiling point. So if left unattended, it would just boil and boil until eventually it bubbled over, causing a hot mess. The destruction didn’t end there. Sometimes the kettle blew a fuse. Sometimes it caused a fire. After all the mishaps, a man named John Taylor came up with the brilliant idea of a bimetallic thermostat. When the water reaches boiling point, the thermostat snaps open, pushes a lever to trip the circuit, and the kettle safely shuts off.
That was Jazz. His thermostat. The little switch that stopped the boil inside him before it bubbled over. When she spoke, it was impossible to think of anything other than the melodic sound of her muddled accent. He didn’t think about Perry. He didn’t think about the night he lost him. It made him forget, even if it was only for a little while. All the chaos, all the confusion,shemade him forget. Her bubbly laugh and constant blabbering was the switch that shut all that off. She wasn’t the element.She didn’t cause the boil; she just stopped it before it got out of control.
Sometimes, though, she forgot what she was. She tried to be something more. Friends with benefits, she’d suggested. Sex with no attachments. The way he felt about her made him incapable of giving her one without the other. Like the dick he was, he lashed out to remind her—and himself—that she was just a thermostat.
In true Jasmin style, she was supposed to have absorbed it, drained it until she felt nothing, and moved along. One perky smile and things were supposed to go back to normal. She wasn’t supposed to stop speaking to him and now he was afraid that he might have broken the thermostat. Without it he felt like he might blow a fuse, like destruction was inevitable.
He was tired of this. The tension between them seemed to be getting worse by the day and he was tired of the fake pleasantries. The fruits of his labor. He’d pushed and now he had to sit back and accept the ramifications of his actions. It wasn’t easy. He’d sat at the Little Texan, watching two guys openly flirt with her. He’d never been the jealous type and now he was stewing in it. She’d left with them, leaving him alone to wonder what she was doing. Flirting. Touching. Kissing.
When he saw Tony’s arm around her, he almost lost it. It drove him crazy all afternoon and just when he thought the torture was over, she came in, shrugged off a jacket that wasn’t hers and walked straight into the bathroom without saying one word to him.
He was going to blow a fuse, because he wanted answers when he had no right to ask any questions. The second she came out of the bathroom, he was on edge. She was dressed to go out which meant that he was going to spend the rest of the night driving himself crazy with more questions.
His eyes stayed on her as she walked to the mirror on the other side of the small room and he watched as she began applying her makeup. Deep red on her plump lips. Thick black liner accentuating the lightness of her eyes. It wasn’t the conservative sexy he’d seen in Vegas. This was outright sexy, daring, the type of look that would draw all eyes to her. And the black halter top and blue skinny jeans she wore meant that those eyes weren’t just going to be drawn to her face.
She noticed him watching her, but said nothing as she put on her earrings—Indian-style jewelry she’d bought in Gallup, small silver hoops with a dangling red feather. Her phone rang and she put it on speaker so she could still talk as she brushed her hair.
“Hi, Brad,” she said.
“Hi. Are you almost ready?”
“Yeah. I’ll be there soon. I don’t know where it is, so I’ll just put it into the GPS.”
