I’m suddenly reminded that that’s exactly what Jess is going to do: go through her first heat, alone, without any pack to back her up. All for her inheritance. Or, if I go by what she said earlier, so her aunt wouldn’t get half of her inheritance.
I didn’t bring it up when she was telling me, but I plan on staying with her, just in case.
The plan was never to leave her at the cabin alone. I’m a star student, so my professors were more than willing to excuse my absences as long as I keep up on the reading and the tests and homework they assigned. Luckily, most everything is available online these days, so all I had to bring was my laptop. That way, if Jess needs me to run down to the store while she stays in the cabin, I can do that for her. She won’t be locked in that cabin alone.
And since it’s my family’s cabin, there’s already a soundproof, scent-proof room waiting for her. I’ll have to make sure it’s clean as a whistle before we leave, but it’s doable.
“Is there something you want to listen to?” I offer her control of the car’s radio.
“I don’t care.” Her tone is short, and I take it to mean she doesn’t want to talk.
It’s the strangest thing, though. I do. I do want to talk. I want to keep talking to her, catch up, learn what I missed these past ten years. Hell, I want to tell her that I’m sorry, too, but I don’t think she’d take it well.
Besides, what good is an apology now? What’s done is done. There’s no rewinding time, no going back and fixing the mistakes you made when you were younger. It’s something I’ll have to keep living with.
I tried checking up on her every now and then, but she rarely posted anything online, so it was hard. Every so often I nonchalantly asked my mom if she’d heard anything about Jess through the grapevine at the country club, but more often than not, the answer was a big fat nothing.
I’d thought a lot about her, honestly, but I couldn’t tell her that. I couldn’t tell her that every time I was asked to join a pack, the word no was already on my tongue because in the back of my head, I couldn’t get the sad girl who lost her parents out of my head.
Years later, I could still picture the day she returned to school clearly. Even now, it’s as if it just happened yesterday.
She lost weight. She walked a little funny. Her eyes looked more hollow and sad than they did before. She never smiled. She gave off a vibe that scared everyone away, and since we were kids, only ten or eleven years old, no one knew what to do or what to say, so we didn’t say anything. We acted like she wasn’t even there.
Looking back now I know how cruel it was, and I hate I played a part in it.
After a while, I break the silence of the car and say, “Is your hair blue under there?”
Jess realizes she’s still wearing that baseball cap, and she goes to lift it off her head and let her hair tumble down. Most of it is still black, but its tips are lined in a deep blue hue. The splash of color is something I imagine her aunt hated—and maybe that’s why she got it done to begin with.
“A little bit,” she says, running a hand through her hair. It was long, and I’m honestly surprised the cap was able to hold it all in. Its length falls well past her shoulders. “I just needed a change. Plus I knew it’d piss off my aunt, so.”
Knew it. Seems after all this time, I still can peg her pretty well.
“I think it looks good,” I say, and the compliment is out of me before I have the chance to wonder whether or not it’s a good idea to even say it. I don’t want her to get the wrong idea. The last thing I want is for her to believe I’m only helping her for some ulterior motive.
“Thanks.” The smile she gives me is a tight one, as if she doesn’t quite believe the compliment comes from a genuine place. I suppose, if I was her, I wouldn’t believe any compliments thrown my way, either.
I know what she’s been through, and yet I still can’t imagine it. Going through what she did, then being a social outcast at school… shit. I really can’t imagine how hard it was for her, and I hate she had to go through all that alone.
Fuck. I’m such an asshole. I really am. I like to think I’m a nice guy, but… you’re really only nice if you actually act like it, and what I did ten years ago was not nice at all. Acting as if she was invisible, like she didn’t matter, like I wasn’t happy to see her back; all asshole moves.
I’m such a jerk. I wonder if, maybe, after all this is said and done, Jess will forgive me.
I hope so. For some reason, I’ve never wanted anything more in my life than I did her forgiveness.
Chapter Four – Jess
The road trip is longer than I thought it would be, mostly because we hit traffic near the next big city we drive through. There’s no way to avoid it, though, not if you stay on the highway, and even with the traffic, sticking to the highway is still our fastest route.
We drive all day, through the night, and well into the next morning before we stop at a general store so I can get everything else I’ll need, plus food to stock up the cabin’s pantries. Thank goodness I’m not alone for this; the cart is full and it takes many, many overstuffed bags to pack everything away. Asher acts like he wants to do most of the heavy-lifting, so I let him.
Hey, if he wants to act like a knight in shining armor now, let him, I guess. Less work for me.
I did run out of cash, however. Everything added up faster than I thought it would, but thankfully Asher again played the knight in shining armor and covered the rest of the purchase. Unfortunately, it had to be on his card. I only hope it won’t come back to bite us in the ass later.
Watching the scenery change is a crazy thing. My parents, when they were alive, never took us to the mountains, so I didn’t know what all to expect as we got closer and closer to the cabin. You’d think it’d be a gradual thing; that you’d travel on land that slowly became more elevated the further you went, but not here.
Here, the mountains seemingly jut out of the ground out of nowhere, such a stark contrast to the flat land surrounding the mountain range. The road, a simple two-lane road made of old asphalt, curves and winds up through said mountains. And once you cross through that first mountain and get deep in the range? It’s like the entire world changes.
