Chapter 28 #4
“Mila’s freaking out!” Robbie fires off words so fast his friend doesn’t even get a chance to respond. “And who do you think she wants to kill when things don’t go her way, Jasper? Certainly not you!”
“Tell her I’ll be right there. I had some issues with…” Jasper pauses, thinking of what to say. “With my suit.”
He must have turned his back to pretend he’s looking for something in the room, because Robbie lets out a mocking roar.
“The issue with your suit is that you were attacked by a wild raccoon that tore your clothes off, threw them on the floor, and scratched your all over?”
Shit! Shit, shit, shit!
“Not necessarily in that order,” he buys time.
“Come up with a better excuse when you explain to Mila, because I’ve been trying to save your ass by saying you must have been dead not to come down on time! And I have to say, she seemed pretty pleased with the idea.”
The silence afterward doesn’t even last a full second.
“Now fix this mess and come down before the bride starts suspecting something!” Suspect what exactly? “You too, Julie!”
Oh.
I freeze. Freeze as if I’ve been caught in the middle of a crime scene. To be honest, I kind of have.
How the hell did he find out?
Jasper tries to say something, but only a sound escapes his mouth before Robbie cuts him off, “Yeah, I don’t give a fuck!”
Robbie doesn’t give a fuck. The guy who nearly drove Jasper insane just to find out who was in his room after the bachelor and bachelorette party. Now he knows, and he doesn’t care. Yep. That says a lot.
I pull the comforter from my head impatiently. And Robbie doesn’t even seem remotely surprised to see me. He just gives me a long, hard stare that makes my stomach flip completely. Something he surely learned from Mila.
Jasper spreads out his hands, showing innocence.
“I didn’t tell him!” he tells me.
“It was really hard to find out after you two spent all day away, and I had to call the cake shop to figure out what the hell was going on! Then you disappear, don’t answer your damn phone, the whole room smells like sex, and Julie isn’t anywhere in the house, not even in her room, which, by the way, was left with the freaking door open…
” Robbie says all of this with the same fast, irritated and kind of bored tone.
“Again, I don’t give a fuck! Just don’t let Mila find out! ”
Then he turns around and stomps down the hall toward the stairs, leaving us alone, unsure how to react.
Jasper runs a hand through his messy hair, slightly dazed, and closes the door.
“When was the last time you saw him this mad?” I ask, from my spot under the comforter, still too afraid to face the real world out there.
“Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, 2021. Hamilton had the world championship taken from him and lost to Max Verstappen.”
“What?” I exclaim in shock.
He’s comparing a Formula 1 race to the madness that just unfolded in front of us?
Jasper shrugs.
“It was the end of an era,” he justifies, collar half-flattened, buttons misaligned… He’s lucky the buttons stayed on after the strength I used to open them. “To be honest, it’s not really about what he thinks of us. It’s what Mila’s going to do when she finds out.”
When? He must be insane!
“If she finds out,” I correct.
“If she finds out, Julie? After what just happened here?” Jasper asks, twirling a finger around the room in a way I can’t quite interpret.
What exactly happened? Robbie? Sex? Us?
“Okay,” I reluctantly agree. “But only after the wedding.”
“Of course only after the wedding. My obituary deserves a more glorious cause of death than blunt trauma inflicted by some deranged blonde.”
He then grabs the jacket from the floor to finish getting dressed. I sigh, gathering the strength to get up while groping through the messy comforter to find my dress.
And my panties. Damn it, where the hell are my panties?
Jasper stretches his arm toward me, holding a small piece of cloth, all bunched up like a flag of victory. Or shame.
“Here,” he says, with a crooked, almost sweet, almost embarrassed smile.
I try to grab the panties from his hand without touching him too much, as if any closeness would reignite the fire between us just because Jasper Hassmann is giving me a cute little smile.
“I’ll go down and try to stall the start of the ceremony while you get ready,” Jasper says, finishing adjusting the jacket on his shoulders, trying to fix the impossible wrinkles, then moving toward his shoes.
He walks toward me as I stand, only in my panties, flipping my dress back to the right side. My hair bun is all messy, my lipstick is smeared and the rest of the makeup is pretty ruined according to the mirror.
I’m going to need him to stall for a very long time.
“When you go down, grab a glass that’s almost empty so people think you’ve been there a while,” he instructs, as if I were one of his criminal clients trying to distract a jury.
I want to protest, say I’m not a client and I have my dignity, but Jasper just leans in and plants a quick kiss on my lips.
Then he goes past me to grab his wallet and phone, before turning and following the same path Robbie took: out of the room and down the stairs.