Page 5 of Into The Green

"Seriously?" I asked, rolling my eyes. "There's a dress code?"

"I'll grab something from Jade's room," he told me then moved off to do just that, not giving me a chance to inform him that Jade was a bit curvier than me. Especially in the chest area. Not that it mattered. No one cared what I looked like. I just needed the right hippie dippy clothes to get into whatever hippie dippy place she was and figure out if she was alright.

I moved into my room, peeling off my drenched sweatshirt and kicking out of my shoes. I heard footsteps and turned to find Jasper standing there with a sage green cotton sundress I had seen Jade in a few times. It was tight of bodice and dipped into a deep V between the breasts then loosened a bit around the waist and flowed down to knee-length.

"It's fifty degrees out," I said with a snort as I grabbed a towel and used it to squeeze some of the water out of my hair.

"So wear a jacket," he said, tossing it at me, making me drop the towel to make a grab for it. I held it up as he just kept staring at me and raised a brow that had him rolling his eyes and stepping out of my room.

I crossed over, kicked the door closed, and quickly stripped out of the rest of my wet and cold clothes, shivering slightly as I slipped into the thin, soft material of the sundress. I swear the second I got the straps situated on my shoulders, the door flew back open, making my heart shoot up into my throat, as Jasper moved back into the room. His eyes bored into mine for a long second before he started advancing toward me, making me take steps back until the foot of my bed prevented any further retreat. His hand raised, slipping unexpectedly onto my shoulder. I felt myself shiver and, judging by the small chuckle he let out, he noticed. His fingers slipped to the side and snagged my bra strap, pulling it up slightly. "This has to come off."

I jerked backward slightly, swatting hard at his hand and almost falling onto my bed as I tried to retreat further. Who the hell was he? Who came into your room, insisted you change into a sundress, and then told you that you needed to take your bra off?

A psychopath.

Or a rapist, that's who.

I needed to get the hell away from him.

Jasper raised a brow as he watched me, taking several steps back. "Don't worry," he said, a strangely condescending smile toying with his lips, "I have no interest in taking advantage of you." And the way he said it, it made it sound like I was disgusting and that it might be catching. "You just can't get in with that bra on."

"I'm sorry, are we going to some nineteen-sixties feminist meeting or something? Everyone wears bras everywhere."

"It's the material," he said, his voice starting to sound agitated. "It's synthetic."

Alright, I knew Jade was a little weird about synthetic material, and I had literally never seen her wear a bra, but where the hell would we be going that synthetic fibers were banned?

"This is seriously an issue?"

"Yep. Take it off or keep your ass here and hope the guys who did all that damage," he said, gesturing around the apartment, "don't come back. That's your choice," he said, turning and going back into the hall.

And, well, I wasn't getting left behind. Partly because I needed to see Jade and partly because I didn't like being alone in our apartment in our shitty neighborhood on a normal night, let alone when it had been torn apart for God-knew what reason.

I reached behind me and unclasped, taking off the still-damp bra and tossing it to the ground, covering my breasts with my hands for a minute until my nipples stopped pointing. I grabbed my cell off my bed and headed back into the living area to see Jasper standing there with a wool jacket held open toward me as if he expected me to follow orders.

His eyes roamed down me slowly, and I fought the irrational urge to wrap my arms around myself and hide. "Good," he said with a slight nod. "You don't need a bra anyway."

I felt heat flood my cheeks at the comment, anger starting to bubble in my belly. While true, my rack wasn't exactly impressive, it wasn't completely flat either. And, well, I had to admit, my pride was still a bit bruised from all the shit with Corbin and having another guy point out my flaws really wasn't doing much to help my self-esteem.

I ripped the jacket from his hand and turned from him to slip into it, I turned back, looking down at my cell to see if I had any missed calls.

"You can leave that here," he said, nodding at my cell. "Can't get in with that either. Here," he said, kicking a pair of Jade's moccasins toward me.

"Moccasins?"

"Christ, woman, just fucking cooperate. We are losing time while you fight me on every goddamn thing." With that, he opened the door and went into the hall.

I slipped into the moccasins because, really, I was already in a borrowed sundress in the tail end of fall and a woolen jacket that made my skin itch, there was no going back. But I did slip my cell into the inside pocket of the jacket along with some cash. True, I might have been willing to blindly follow the jackass Jasper to whatever the hell The Green was, I was not going to do so without the means to call for help or pay for a cab if things went south.

Jasper was silent as we went down the four flights of stairs, not bothering to hold the front door open for me. I stepped out, expecting the same torrential downpour I had just walked in from. But the seemingly endless rain had stopped. The ground was covered in glistening puddles and the air was cold and wet, but I was silently thankful that I wasn't going to have to freeze and reek of wet sheep because apparently wherever The Green was, it was in walking distance.

About forty minutes later, the cold wind biting into my mostly-bare legs, my arms hugging the warmth of the jacket into my freezing body, we hit a fence.

Literally.

A fence.

It was at least ten feet tall and lined in barbed wire atop. It didn't seem to be protecting anything in particular. The area behind it was a field for a while until it met the woods. That was it. But still, it was private property if the signs warning us to keep out were anything to go by.