Chapter 13 #2
Three tries later, I still had the wrong answer. I chucked my pencil at the notebook. “Fuck this shit.”
“Sober enough to attempt algebra today?” Jade stood in the doorway of the dining room, holding a steaming bowl.
My jaw tensed at her judgmental comment. Maybe she didn’t want to get shitfaced on the weekend, but given my current situation, I sure as hell had. “Today’s Monday. We’re in college. People drink on the weekends.” Especially when someone had their ex living in their damn house…
“Some people.”
I placed my head in my hand and picked up my pencil, trying to keep my attention on that stupid book instead of her in those damn shorts. “I need to focus.”
“You’re doing it wrong.”
No shit. I put the eraser to the paper and rubbed out the entire last equation. Jade placed her bowl of ramen on the table and leaned over my shoulder. “PEMDAS.” She placed a finger on my textbook. “Parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction.”
My expression must have conveyed my confusion, because she dropped into the chair beside me, slid my notebook in front of her, and took my pencil from my hand.
“It’s the order you use when doing the equation.
Like this. Order of operations…” She quickly scratched out several lines, explaining each step, and I tried like hell not to inhale the flowery scent of her body spray.
“You weren’t doing the parentheses first.” She passed the work back to me, her neat, bubbly handwriting an all too familiar reminder of those damn origami notes.
“I’m surprised you didn’t just get me to do this for you again. ”
I stared at the numbers on the page, anxiety winding me up.
If I couldn’t comprehend this crap, how the hell was I supposed to hang on for the rest of the year?
“Yeah, well, I can’t get you to take tests for me.
” I took the pencil from her hand and tapped it over the page.
Maybe it was the slight hangover from earlier, that kiss…
but something had the gravity of my situation sinking in, hard and fast. If I didn’t pull up this grade, the dream I’d had since I was a little kid, the dream I’d promised my dad I wouldn’t let slip away—the one Jade had always believed I could achieve—was as good as gone.
Fuck, between math and Jade, I felt like I was drowning. “Not that it fucking matters,” I mumbled. “I’m already suspended. Just putting off the inevitable.”
“For two weeks. You’re the best player they have.”
“That doesn’t mean shit.”
“So, reading between your ever-so-informative lines and your blatant distaste for algebra, you’re failing class, and your two-week suspension might be longer if you don’t pass?”
Laid out like that, it was even more depressing. “Yep.”
“Right.” She sighed, falling into silence for a few seconds before she tapped her finger next to the equation. “So, in any equation, you always do all the arithmetic in parentheses first.” She leaned in a little closer.
God, that body spray was going to make it hard to focus… My attention drifted from the pencil to her lips, but I quickly averted it.
“Then you do the multiplication…”
I tried to listen to her explanation, but my gaze kept gravitating to her lips, while my mind kept drifting back to that kiss, to her denying that she had blocked me.
“Try the next problem.” She passed the notebook back to me, and I wrote out the equation.
Halfway through scribbling that Chinese out, I stopped and looked at her.
I shouldn’t have given a shit if she thought I’d kissed her because of Brent.
But I did. Everything inside of me was screaming to keep my mouth shut, but for some reason, I couldn’t.
“I didn’t know Brent was standing there when I kissed you. ”
She stared at the paper, her silence making me want to shove the words right back down my throat. After way too long a pause, she let out a breath. “I’m surprised you remember.”
“I wouldn’t forget kissing you.” Those words came out before I’d thought them through.
She fell silent again.
I’d already made myself look like a dick, which was why I just let it go. “Why did you block me, Jade?”
“I told you. I didn’t.”
Bullshit. I grabbed my phone from the table, found her contact, sent Hi, then waited before I slid the phone in front of her. “Not delivered…”
She stared down at the screen, then swiped her finger over it, scrolling through the pathetic messages I had sent. Ones I wasn’t sure I wanted her to see now.
Her brows furrowed, confusion settling over her face. “I don’t—I don’t understand.”
A flicker of hope tried to rise. Hope that maybe she really hadn’t tried to cut me out.
She pulled her phone from her pocket, tapped the screen, then placed the device in front of me. “Look, it’s not blocked.”
I stared down at my contact. She was right. It wasn’t blocked. Her finger swiped the screen, pulling up the message thread.
I’m so sorry about your dad. I’m here if you need me. I miss you.
A sickening feeling sank in my stomach. I’d spent all that time angry and hurt, thinking I hadn’t mattered to her. Had that message gone through, things may have been different between us. I sat back in the chair when I read over the response:
Sorry. Wrong number.
“I didn’t send that,” I said, still staring at the message. None of it made sense.
Jade sighed beside me. “I figured you just wanted nothing to do with me.”
The fucking irony in that statement. Shaking my head, I pulled up the contact information. The number listed as mine was off by one digit. I slid the phone back across the table to her. “That’s not my number, Jade.”
“What? Of course it is.” She scrolled through the years’ worth of messages. “It is…”
I went to the settings on my phone and pulled up my number, showing it to her.
Jade leaned back in the chair, her frown deepening. “But…what? How?”
If she hadn’t wanted to talk to me, why would she have changed my number when she could have blocked me?
Confusion wrinkled her brow as she stared at the device.
“I promise. I didn’t change your number.
” Her voice was a pitiful whisper. “I thought—” Her phone rang.
“Shit. That’s my mom. I have to get this.
” She pushed up from the chair, putting the phone to her ear on her way out of the room.
Stairs creaked. A door shut. Dog’s paws tapped over the floor, stopping beside my chair, but I kept staring at the undelivered messages on my phone. All that fucking time. If even one message had gone through, she could have still been mine…
Nothing will have a man on his feet and reaching for a baseball bat faster than being woken up by his dog’s alarmed, stranger-danger bark.
A loud bang came from the backyard, and Dog skittered around the corner, yapping his head off.
Another thud came from outside. I stumbled through the dark house, finding Dog bristled up by the door.
There had been a string of break-ins a few streets over, and adrenaline fired through my veins at the thought of taking a swing at some stupid crackhead trying to steal from us.
It would be cathartic, to say the least.
I cracked the door to the distant wail of cop sirens.
Dog wedged himself through the small opening and shot out, disappearing down the steps and into the dark yard with a feral growl.
I crept down the rickety steps, bat in hand, and stopped when I noticed the trellis that should have been attached to the side of the house, lying across the top of the hedges.
The bushes rustled, and Dog darted into them with a string of barks. I raised the bat, ready to knock the head off someone.
“Squishy, shush!”
I dropped the bat to my side at the sound of Jade’s hushed voice.
How—and when—in the hell had she left? My attention drifted back to the broken trellis that had led to my bedroom window, and my jealous mind came up with one reason, and one reason only, why she would sneak out like a grounded teenager. Fucking Brent!
She crawled out from the foliage, dressed in all black and wearing a ski mask. The same outfit Monroe wore when she was up to a bunch of bullshit. “I can explain.” She stumbled to her feet, and her gaze drifted from the bat in my hand to my face. “I?—”
The whine of sirens grew closer. Her eyes went wide, and she took off for the back door like her ass was on fire. Dog, of course, chased right after her.
God only knew what kind of dumb crap she’d gotten into… When I got inside the house, Jade was pacing the small kitchen.
I went straight to her and lifted the ski mask, revealing her flushed face. “Let me guess—” I thumbed toward the single-pane window over the sink. “That siren has something to do with you and your—” I made an air quote—“work attire.”
She resumed pacing in front of the counter. “Shit. This is so bad.”
“What did you do, Jade?”
She stopped, dragging both hands through her messy hair. “I didn’t know the house had an alarm and?—”
“The house ?” What in the hell had gotten into her? “You broke into a house? Jade, what the fuck?”
Her fear-filled gaze met mine before she covered her face with her hands. “Oh, my God.” The pitiful breath that stuttered past her lips killed me. It was the kind of hopeless, desperate breath someone took right before they completely broke. “I’m so fucked.”
Fucked may have been an understatement. Breaking and entering carried a hefty sentence.
She could kiss school goodbye. Possibly her future.
Not many people would be willing to hire a nurse with a criminal record.
Not that I needed to tell her that. I had never thought I would need to, either.
Jade was the “good girl,” and as much as I didn’t want to care, I couldn’t help but worry about her apparent one-eighty.
“Look.” I gently removed her hands from her face.
“It’s pitch black outside. You had on a ski mask.
There’s no way they can identify you.” Hopefully, there weren’t cameras to go with that alarm system.
Or a streetlight that would have allowed someone to see her because one thing was certain, any man who got the smallest glimpse of her silhouette would be able to pick her out of a lineup. “But, Jesus Christ, Jade…a house ?”
Back in Dayton, the guys and I had robbed countless houses. But that was us—all of us—with a driver and a lookout. This was Jade. She wasn’t a criminal. She was above that shit.
“What about my car?” Her voice cracked on a sob. “I left it there.”
She’d driven her car to a house she’d planned to rob ? She may not have been a criminal, but she had to have known better than that.
“Jade…” Sirens blared outside the house.
“I know. I know! But how else was I going to carry stuff?”
Red and blue lights flashed through the kitchen window. Tires screeched to a halt. Jade’s tear-filled eyes widened. “Oh, my God. I’m going to go to jail.”
Those cops weren’t outside of my house by chance, but like hell, I was going to just let her get cuffed without some kind of fight.
“Just…” I grabbed her by the shoulders and shoved her toward the doorway.
“Go upstairs, take off those clothes, get in the bed, and don’t come out of that room. Understood?”
She gave a curt nod before bolting down the hall, Dog right behind her. I had no idea how in the absolute hell I was going to get her out of that shitshow, but I had to think fast.