Chapter 40 #2
James shook his head, sneering, then stretched out on his bed with his arms spread.
I’d admired my mom’s half busts more than once where the muscles audaciously jutted out, contrasted by delicate features as if to represent innate elegance.
But I didn’t see any of that in James—no art, no perfect brushstrokes, just disarming humanity.
Something more. It was something that couldn’t be depicted in a painting.
I started feeling indiscreet, so I stopped studying him.
“Are you fucking done?”
“I’m gonna check on your brother. Talk to you later,” I announced.
“White? You’ll hand in the homework we have to do together?”
“Yeah, tomorrow morning. I already finished it. Just so we wouldn’t have to do it together.”
His eyes couldn’t even hide a thank-you, let alone a sense of guilt.
“I think Jasper wants to spend time with you,” I said, pressing on.
James hid his eyes in the hollow of his arm, preventing me from seeing his reaction. I did see him swallow though. “I need to sleep. Get out.”
“Take a shower and come downstairs, please,” I ordered.
“Do you think you can order me around, White?”
“It’s just a suggestion,” I corrected him. “Do you think you can keep going with this bad-boy act? Give it a rest. Your brother needs you.” I left his room before taking a projectile to my face.
>> <<
“Is the popcorn good?”
Jasper nodded, giving me a hint of a smile. I dug my hand in the still-warm bowl.
We fought over the rest of the popcorn over Netflix.
“You sure you’re not still hungry?” I asked over the now empty bowl. Jasper motioned that he wasn’t. I checked the time on my phone. It was eight and I needed to get back home.
James still hadn’t come down.
“I gotta go. When’s your dad coming back?”
I saw him shrug and keep watching TV, oblivious to my question.
“Do you prefer that I stay or . . .”
Up until now his answers were hard to interpret, but this time his answer was clear. He wanted me to stay. He made it clear by putting his head softly on my shoulder.
“Fine. But just a half hour more.”
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that Jasper needed love.
And his brother couldn’t even take care of himself.
“You’re still here?”
Speak of the devil, and he shall appear.
James finally emerged in a gray hoodie and gray pants.
“Jasper just went to sleep. I was afraid I’d wake him.”
An intense scent of sugar and vanilla filled my nostrils. It was a refreshing fragrance, as if James’s body was still covered in shower gel.
“Okay.”
James came closer with a surly expression on his face.
For a moment I didn’t know what he was going to do, but when he leaned down to Jasper and lifted him up off me, I felt relieved. He carried his brother up to his room. I followed him silently. In Jasper’s room, James laid him down gently on his bed before I tucked him in so he wouldn’t get cold.
“Did he eat?” asked James inquisitively
“No. I mean, we shared some popcorn. To tell you the truth, I ate almost all of it, and—”
James cut me off with a hostile tone. “Don’t dodge the question. Tell me why the fuck you do it.”
I looked up to meet his eyes, which were still big and bright. “What are you talking about?”
“Why are you nice to my brother?”
My mom made me wasn’t a valid excuse anymore.
“Jasper’s adorable,” I admitted.
James let out a heavy sigh before sitting on the twin bed next to his brother’s. “Yeah, right, my dad’s desperate.”
His admission caught me by surprise.
“What do you mean?” I murmured.
I saw his shoulders wilt.
“He just started middle school. Nobody knows him but everyone’s already making fun of him.”
“That’s terrible. Why?”
His fiddled with the sleeves of his hoodie. “For how he is, the way he talks, for . . . everything. So he isolates himself even more.”
I could’ve sworn I heard the clang of James’s heart shattering into a million pieces on the floor.
“He’s a sensitive kid. I can’t imagine what he’s going through.
” I sat next to him, maybe because talking about Jasper made me forget everything, even the fact that I’d just sat next to the guy I hated more than anyone on the face of the earth.
“Jordan doesn’t know what to do.” He stared into space and kept talking. “He’s tried everything. Primary care doctors, specialists, targeted therapy . . .”
“Is there any margin of improvement?”
We whispered, glancing apprehensively at Jasper, who was sound asleep.
“There would be, but my brother’s also stubborn.”
James bit the inside of his cheek.
“The bullying doesn’t help. It started out as isolated incidents.
He stopped talking in class or in situations where he was around people he didn’t know.
But then after a period of time, he stopped talking.
” I recognized a slight tremble in James’s voice.
“Jasper’s smart. He has his own sense of humor, his own personality, and if the others could just get to really know him instead of treating him like a freak . . .”
I tried to say something, but I felt like an idiot faced with James’s pain, despite him suffering in a way that I knew very, very well.
What could I say in these cases? I was usually on the receiving end of comforting words; I didn’t know how to give them to others.
An I’m sorry wasn’t enough, and I knew it. Nobody liked pity.
“June, I don’t want Jasper to end up like me.”
I was speechless, and shivers went down my arms.
“You don’t like not being able to defend him, do you?”
James bowed his head and tilted it with a subtle look. “Does my dad pay you?”
“What? What are you talking about? No.”
“So why do you do it? Is your mom really that convincing?” he asked skeptically.
“Yeah, she can be pretty convincing, but I keep doing it because I like to.”
“Why do you want to help me, White?” Again with that stupid question
“I’m not doing it for you. It’s just—”
“What? Spit it out,” he demanded, pressuring me with his glare.
Did he really wanna know? And did I really have to tell him?
“Nothing, maybe I see a bit of myself in you. I had a brother too.” I immediately hid both hands in my hoodie sleeves, as if it was enough to hide the excruciating pain that I’d felt when I’d said that out loud.
“What the fuck are you saying, that’s not true,” he spat, pulling a vape pen out of his tracksuit.
“Yeah it is.”
James frowned, staring at me skeptically.
“I didn’t know that. Younger than you?”
“No, older. He died of leukemia when he was sixteen. I was around Jasper’s age. Then my parents separated.”
I saw him take the vape pen out of his lips.
“Fuck, White.” A note of distressing sadness lingered in his raspy voice, and I found myself unable to swallow. I’d just told him something so personal, for no reason.
“It sucks,” was all I managed to say.
“Life definitely sucks, but maybe there’s no need to remind you of that. You learned that all on your own.”
“Thank you so much for your tact and diplomacy.” I groaned. “But people heal from pain.”
“Bullshit.”
I felt his eyes on me, but I couldn’t turn around.
“Did you really heal from it?”
My throat burned. I wasn’t really healed, but I definitely couldn’t tell him how I hid any negative emotion and substituted it with physical pain.
“Yeah, I mean, I don’t know.”
“Yeah.”
I limited myself to listening to him breathe as the night fell outside the window.
“What happened to you?” I breathed.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, have you always been like this?”
“So what, princess?”
His tone was spiteful. I’d known that our little truce would only last for the blink of an eye.
“So.”
Hotheaded, arrogant, full of himself, presumptuous, rude. The list of adjectives went on.
“I was born this way. Have you met Jordan? Being an asshole is in our DNA.”
His statement made me laugh, but when I turned around, James didn’t seem like he was joking. “I don’t believe you.”
“Oh, well, if you met my mom, you’d be convinced quickly, White.”
“James, your mom . . .”
One minute we were talking peacefully, the next minute, the unexpected happened. He roughly grabbed my elbow.
“Ow!”
“Try not to do that.”
“What?”
“Don’t pry into my life. What I do is none of your concern,” he commanded.
“Are you really that scared of what I might find out?” My provocation had the potential to irritate him even more because he pushed me on the bed, this time more vehemently, forcing me to lie down under him.
“I don’t give a flying fuck. If I find out that you’re still poking around, you’ll pay for it, do you understand that?” he threatened, overpowering me. I’d just confided in him, and he responded by threatening me like this? I was so stupid.
“I don’t give a fuck about you, Hunter. Don’t flatter yourself.” I exhaled with self-confidence that shattered every time he was anywhere near me.
His lips breathed onto mine, leaving me little room to think of something smart to say. I had to close my eyes.
I asked myself why I behaved that way. I liked Will, not him. Will was sensitive, kind, and being around him made me feel calm. Sure, there were some moments of inconsistency that made me doubt his interest in me, but I didn’t like James at all, and being near him agitated me.
“Your ways with the ladies leave little to be desired, Hunter,” I whispered, with a jolt of courage. I tried to push him off with all my strength, but my hands were powerless against his rock-hard chest.
“It’s not like me to threaten girls because they don’t ask me all these questions like you do. They keep quiet.”
“That would never happen with me,” I murmured at the exact same time that he was getting even closer to my face. We noticed that we stopped arguing. We looked at each other for a few seconds.
“What the fuck got into your head?” he exclaimed, irritated, jumping up. I sat up and turned my head away from him so he wouldn’t see my flushed cheeks.
“What are you talking about?”
“Shouldn’t you be at Will’s?” His voice was gruff and raspy like sandpaper, somber like the night.
I saw him run his fingers through his hair as if that could alleviate the tension.
“No, I should get home.”
I got up robotically, and he did the same. I turned around instinctively once I got to the door.
“You’re lucky to have him. Jasper, I mean.”
James put his hands in his tracksuit pants pockets and nodded.
“Yeah.”
“And maybe he’s lucky to have you,” I added.
“Did Snow White have to come on the scene to tell me that?” He smiled.
I shook my head, but I felt every muscle in my face heat up. “I’m heading out. Bye.”
“June.”
I barely turned, and my head went spinning. It was a potent, almost all-encompassing sensation. His eyes could swallow me up. They were so dense and deep that they seemed like I could fall into them.
“I know I can be an asshole.”
Maybe for the sake of everyone it’s better that you keep going. “Thank you,” I concluded under my breath.
The sense of emptiness that was gripping my chest quickly filled the rest of it. They were unknown, confusing emotions. But then I recognized one. Happiness.