Chapter 3 #2
After opening the cans, Jack handed Lilly hers and then picked up his spork to start to eat his. The tasteless, watery veggies were not appetizing in the least, but it was food.
“Jackie?”
He looked up from his can of green guck. “Yeah, Lilly?”
“Will you read to me tonight?”
Heat warmed his soul. “Of course.”
She looked into the backpack, careful to keep her open can of beans and wieners away from her precious gift. “What book is first?”
“It’s called The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.” He’d read the book in fourth grade reading class.
“What’s a wardrobe?”
Jack had to think for a minute. “It’s like a closet. But, like, it isn’t attached to the wall.”
Lilly looked over at the cardboard box they had in the corner where their clothes were kept.
One day last year, the small dresser that had been there had been gone.
Jack didn’t know why his dad would take their dresser, along with all of their clothes, but he had.
Jack also wasn’t stupid enough to ask him what happened to it.
He was just grateful that his stash of money hadn’t been inside it.
It did occur to Jack that his dad might have been looking for his money and had broken the dresser in his haste to find it. Maybe his dad took the dresser to hide breaking it?
Either way, they no longer had a dresser and it had taken a chunk of Jack’s money to get them both enough clothes from the thrift store to last the rest of the school year. But Jack didn’t have the cash for another dresser or the ability to get it back to their trailer.
A discarded cardboard box from outside the grocery store had become their dresser ever since. And Jack had found a new place to hide his money than the hole inside his mattress, which was where it had been at the time their dresser had disappeared.
“Do you think Jenna has a wardrobe?”
Jack nearly choked on his bite of green beans at his sister’s question. “Jenna?”
“The girl from town. I heard her tell you her name was Jenna.”
Jack’s eyes narrowed. Lilly should have been too far away to have heard that. “What else did you hear?”
“That you’re meeting her outside school on Monday to show her around. I think she likes you.”
Heat crept up his cheeks. “Why do you say that?”
“She kept looking back at us while you were getting us on your bike. She kept looking at your butt every time you bent over.”
That time when he coughed, there were no green beans involved. Could he really trust his sister’s point of view on this? What did she know about love and butts anyway?
Probably the same amount as you do, dumbass, Jack’s subconscious chided him.
Jack was well aware what sex was and that many of his classmates were doing it.
Hell, there was a pregnant girl in his high school last year.
Jack was pretty sure she was a junior or senior, but didn’t know her personally enough to say which.
At fifteen, sex was on his mind. A lot.
But his priorities were vastly different than his classmates’. While they had parents to take care of them and their siblings, freeing up their minds for things like sex, fun, and friends, Jack was the adult. He had to take care of Lilly and that superseded any carnal desires.
That didn’t mean he hadn’t taken himself in hand whenever he had an alone moment.
Hell, most mornings were awful because he’d wake with an erection but didn’t have the ability to take care of it with Lilly in the room.
He didn’t even trust his dad not to do something while Jack was occupied in the shower, so Jack took Lilly into the bathroom with him.
Now that she was getting older, he knew what others might say if they knew.
A fifteen year old boy had no business being in the bathroom with his six year old sister.
But he would take any awkwardness that occurred while sharing the bathroom space than to have her alone and vulnerable. Her safety was more important than him getting time to himself so he could masturbate in the shower.
They had a good routine down. The bathroom wasn’t large enough to give them their own corner, per se, but they were good at turning their backs on the other to give a sense of privacy.
Jack knew nothing about girls’ bodies and what their needs were.
They had not taught that to the boys in health class, so Jack had gotten a book at the library to help him.
Thankfully, they had a good number of years before Lilly hit puberty and would start her period.
They would be long gone from this town and away from their father by the time that occurred.
Jack had been taking care of Lilly for so long, including changing her diapers, that he knew how a girl’s body was different than a boy’s before his classmates.
But he hadn’t known what it meant or why they were different until health class the year before.
He was careful enough to hide his body’s biological reactions to, well, anything from Lilly.
And keeping his showers cold to save the hot water for Lilly helped.
The fact that his dick twitched in his jeans at the mention of Jenna did not help. Lilly did not need to know what an erection was and certainly not because she had seen her brother’s. Jack carefully shifted to hide the growing problem.
Bugs, think about bugs. Roadkill. Mr. Corrin getting his morning paper in an untied bathrobe. Anything except fiery orange hair, freckles, and a stunning pair of hazel eyes… Fuck!
That train of thought backfired fast.
Jack tried to clear his throat. “We can, uh, we can start reading as soon as you’re ready for bed.”
“Are you going to marry her?”
Jesus H. Christ. He needed to get Lilly off of this topic of conversation and fast. The zipper of his jeans was but so strong. Goddamn his teenage hormones for being so fucking inconvenient.
“Are you going to finish your dinner so you can go brush your teeth?” he asked her pointedly instead of answering her question.
Her eyes narrowed on him. But she continued eating, so Jack considered that to be a win. Just as he was finishing up his can, she passed him hers. She’d eaten just over half, which was really good for her.
He escorted her to the bathroom while finishing up her can of beans and wieners. The green beans alone would not have been enough for him. He was secretly grateful Lilly was so small that she couldn’t eat a full can on her own.
Eating the canned food cold sucked more for him than for Lilly.
She’d been eating cold food for most of her life, so it didn’t really make a difference for her.
Jack partly suspected that she was under the misapprehension that hot food was specifically something that schools alone offered.
After all, she wouldn’t really know any better.
But Jack did. His mom used to cook all sorts of meals, like lasagna, mac and cheese, spaghetti and meatballs, or mushroom casserole.
That had stopped around the time she got pregnant with Lilly and things had started to get worse with his dad. John Duncan would go to his grave denying Lilly’s paternity.
From the snoring he could now hear from the other end of the trailer, his dad would be out for a long time.
Hopefully, they would get a good night’s sleep because they had to be up at four in the morning to start his paper route.
Jack had his alarm clock under his pillow, so it would wake him but not the entire trailer.
When Jack had first started his paper route when he was eleven, the alarm clock his mom had bought him had been louder than Jack had anticipated.
His dad had threatened to smash the thing if he heard it go off again.
Jack couldn’t risk oversleeping; he’d had to come up with a different way to have it go off. His mattress and pillow were so thin that they muffled the alarm clock’s sound but not the vibrations. Jack was such a light sleeper, always keeping an ear out for their dad, that it always woke him up.
Back in their room, Jack slipped off his jeans.
Lilly had a nightgown Jack had made for her out of one of his old shirts and some lace he’d found in his mom’s sewing supplies.
Though they had bunk beds, Lilly rarely slept on the top bunk anymore.
After their dad’s ranting about ‘getting rid’ of her, Lilly had been terrified to sleep on her own, even though Jack was in the room with her.
Adding the cinder block to their door helped, but it hadn’t been enough. So Lilly slept in his bed with him.
She was always against the wall, so Jack was between her and the door. It worked for now because she was so small. Jack knew they wouldn’t be able to squeeze into a twin bed together for much longer, but he’d do anything to give Lilly peace of mind.
Settling herself in, Lilly clung to her lion, her eyes big with anticipation for her new story.
Jack needed to remember to hide both the lion and the books in the morning before they left.
He didn’t want his dad to find anything of value or a reminder that Lilly was still living in his trailer.
John Duncan would destroy it out of spite.
By the light of the lantern overhead, Jack opened the first book. “‘The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis.
“‘Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy…’”