November 23 #2
“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, she made 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.”
“I’ll come pick you up,” Brad put in quickly. “What kind of guy doesn’t pick a girl up for a date?”
“It’s not necess—”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
She hung up and carried on brushing her hair while Kevin sat on the bed, taking in deep breaths to calm down. He knew he had no right, absolutely no right to ask her anything, but for the sake of his own sanity, he needed to say something.
Dan: He’s ticking, Bob. He’s ticking.
“You’re going on a date tonight?” he asked.
She glanced briefly at him in the mirror before she answered. “It’s a house party.”
He knew all about house parties. He knew about the kind of hookups that happened at house parties.
She got nervous from just kissing, so he was trying to convince himself that she wasn’t ready for anything past first base.
But she was. She’d told him that she didn’t want him to stop, she just wanted him to slow down. Friends with benefits was her idea.
His head was spinning, his palms stinging with restlessness. She hadn’t spoken to him for three days and he didn’t know if he’d pushed her into a frame of mind where she would do something completely erratic.
“What time will you be back?” he asked apprehensively.
“Probably tomorrow morning.”
Dan: Morning? Did she say morning? That Brad guy could have had her five times over by morning.
Bob: One look at her and I can tell you that Brad is gonna be all over that. She’s fine as hell! And she’s wearing them wiggle, wiggle jeans, Dan. Someone’s gonna be burning up the sheets tonight.
Dan: And do you know who’s not gonna be getting any tonight?
Bob: Our boy.
Dan: Our BOY, Bob. He’s just gonna sit here all by himself, wishing it was him.
Bob: Well, we’re in the semi-finals and strategy is important at this stage of the game, so let’s watch him work through his options and see if he can convince her to stay.
Dan: Great idea. Lets’ start with option one: logic.
“Jasmin, we’re leaving tomorrow. You can’t go out drinking then get behind the wheel.”
“So we’ll leave later, or even the next day,” she replied with a nonchalant shrug.
“You don’t even know these people. You’re gonna jump into a car with a guy you don’t know, drive to a place you’ve never been to before, and—”
“Isn’t that exactly what happened with you?”
That threw him off. He actually didn’t have a counter argument, so he decided to stop beating around the bush and ask her what he really wanted to know. “Are you going to sleep with him?”
The question came out of left field and totally surprised her. “That’s really none of your business.” She read the scowl on his face and gave a tight smile. “As I said before, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to stay. Quite honestly, I don’t know why you haven’t left yet.”
“Same reason why you haven’t asked me to.”
He wanted her to acknowledge the reason.
She hadn’t asked him to leave because they had something—something volatile, something toxic, but still something.
For a second, her eyes flicked to his and he thought he might have gotten through to her, but she immediately turned away, making it clear that he hadn’t.
Bob: Well, option one just crashed and burned. Let’s move on to option two: force.
“You’re not going,” he said firmly. “It’s stupid and dangerous…You’re not going.”
She walked to the other bed, sat down and began pulling on her boots over her skinny jeans.
“Really?” she asked with an unimpressed smirk.
“And in which universe do you think you have the right to tell me what I can and can’t do?
If I want to go to a party, I can. If I want to sleep with…
whoever, I can. I don’t need your permission. ”
Dan: She’s asking for it. She’s literally begging for it. Option three: the asshole.
His jaw clenched with impatience. “Are you so lonely, so desperate, that you’d go out and sleep with the first guy you meet, some guy you barely know?”
Brain-drain twitch, but she covered it up quickly with a smile. “If I remember correctly, you did the same thing with Candy. Name ring a bell? Pretty blonde girl from Vegas.”
That statement instantly had his blood boiling. “Oh, so this is some sort of payback?”
“No. I don’t care about what happened between the two of you. I’m just pointing out that a one-night stand wouldn’t make me desperate. If you can do it, so can I. Like you said, if I wanna go butt-wild and experiment, I should.”
He knew that conversation would come back to bite him and the fact that she kept her tone polite was grinding his nerves raw.
He just wished that she would react like a normal person.
Shout, get mad, do anything that would make him feel like he wasn’t the only one going insane over this shit.
But she made it seem like she felt nothing when he was losing his fucking mind.
Bob: Moving swiftly along to option four: raging asshole.