Chapter 1 #2
I’d known then, far earlier than then, that I wasn’t built for life in a small town.
No picket fence for me. Which was exactly what I grew up with.
No trauma behind closed doors, no abusive alcoholic to give me wounds that would explain my desperate desire to get out of there and away from suburban family life.
Nothing to understand why, unlike my sister and mother, I wasn’t enchanted by love stories or fairy tales.
I was much more interested in the villain of the story.
Even then, I hadn’t wanted some cookie cutter Prince Charming.
No way would he know how to give multiple orgasms.
Jafar from Aladdin , for example? You bet he was kinky.
Not that it was exactly kink that I was interested in. Especially at sixteen, just discovering my sexuality with fumbling boys. I wanted something … more. Something a little bit dangerous.
Which was Jasper Hayes, even at sixteen. He came into the school with black-painted fingernails, ripped jeans, muscles and busted knuckles. And a black eye.
The rumor mill had circled about him, as it did in small towns. He was a troubled kid from a terrible family situation and had been taken in by the McPhersons, a well-respected couple who had lost their own son five years prior.
All of the tragedy surrounding him only made him more attractive to teenage girls who were very much into the bad boy.
Although I considered myself above a lot of the stereotypical teenage rites of passage—like romanticizing losing one’s virginity and expecting it to be romantic when it’s really just painful, awkward and messy, or thinking I was going to marry my first boyfriend—I could not say that I wasn’t charmed by Jasper.
I totally was.
I just hid it better than my classmates.
He was not interested in the girls who dropped books in front of him and bent over to pick them up, offering tours of the school, tutoring opportunities. He wasn’t exactly rude, but he was standoffish enough in a vaguely threatening way that most girls lacked the confidence to approach him.
Nor did he seem to find friends of the male variety.
Not because of the clique system nor the toxic masculinity of the jungle-like behavior of teenage boys to take down their competitor—although I’m sure there was some of that.
He had the same response to any boy who tried to talk to him about football, music or who offered him a joint.
I knew this because I watched carefully.
I had developed a deep crush, but I was also smart enough to recognize that Jasper Hayes was dangerous.
“You know, you smoke those to look cool, but really they’re just going to give you yellow teeth, premature aging and most likely lung cancer,” I informed him when we came upon each other at the back of the school one afternoon.
I’d left my home economics class on principle, knowing I didn’t need to learn about sewing or baking in order to become a well-rounded person.
My plan was to go home and read the books I’d bought on the stock market—much more valuable than learning to make the perfect pie crust—and manage to eat some food before Rowan and Kip came home and emptied all of our cupboards.
Jasper’s presence diverted my plans.
A black converse rested against the wall as a plume of smoke wafted from his mouth.
“And really, you just look like the overtrodden cliché of the ‘bad boy’,” I continued.
“It works, for the simpler minded, but it is beneath you since I see Tolstoy in your bag.” I nodded to the beaten-up, leather satchel that he’d tossed on the ground beside him.
“Which is actually used and read if the dog-eared pages are anything to go by, which would have all the literary bookworms aghast at dog-earing, but it’s all about the anarchy isn’t it? ” I arched a brow in challenge.
His eyes never left me as I spoke. Not once. Not to glance away to take stock of our surroundings or communicate that he was bored. What was more, his eyes stayed on my face, never traveling to the lower regions of my body which had matured to a womanly shape boys in school made a point to leer at.
Well, they made a point to leer at it secretly ever since my brother and Kip threatened to beat the shit out of anyone looking at me. Which pissed me off to no end since I didn’t need a couple of wannabe alphas trying to defend my honor.
Jasper didn’t leer. Not once. Though maybe I wanted him to.
But there was something all the more probing when someone looked at you right in the eye and didn’t stop. It felt like something adults did, not high schoolers.
I kept the eye contact, even though I felt uncomfortable, uncertain for the first time in a long time.
He didn’t answer straight away, just took a long, purposeful drag of his cigarette.
“You want to get out of here?” His voice was deeper than I expected. Raspy. Like a folk singer.
Immensely attractive.
Even though he was uttering a line I’d heard from many boys before and had vaguely disgusted me. But when Jasper said it, there wasn’t the desperate, sexual undertone that was present in the past.
I wanted to ask where. Because this was a boy who promised a bit of danger, and leaving with him could be risky.
Asking why would make me a coward, though. Predictable. The last thing I wanted anyone, let alone this boy, was to think I was predictable.
“Sure,” I shrugged.
He stubbed out his cigarette, then he looked me up and down. Not leering but appraising. “You’re going to have to change.”
I put my hand on my hip, cocking my head. “You don’t like what I’m wearing?”
My skirt was definitely too short for dress code, though the teachers had given up on enforcing it with me.
My leather boots had a heel that caused my feet absolute agony.
I liked it. Made me feel grown up. It was a goal to train myself to either withstand the pain or to not feel it at all for when I wore $600 shoes in New York one day.
Plans... I had a lot of them for my life, down to the wardrobe, the area code. And it was nowhere near here, where you were expected to go to the local college, or better yet, learn a trade, marry your high school sweetheart, pop out a couple of babies.
That future repulsed me.
Mine contained noise, glamour, excitement, danger, achievement, riches. Power.
“I like what you’re wearing,” Though Jasper’s tone was flat, a prickle of desire shocked my skin at the statement. “Which I imagine is the point.” My excitement was swallowed by his indifference, as if I was transparent. Predictable.
My hackles instantly went up. “I don’t dress for the male gaze,” I snapped, reproducing what I’d yelled at my father the many times we’d gone toe to toe about my wardrobe and my abhorrence for any man’s opinion on it. Even if that man was my father. Especially if that man was my father.
My father had a lot of ideas about what his little girl would be. My ideas differed.
“Yeah, I’m sure your bookshelves are full of Laura Mulvey, Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler,” Jasper drawled, listing off the names of the authors who were in fact on my cluttered bookshelves.
“But you do dress for the male gaze. Because it gives you power.” His eyes refused to lower from mine. A taunt.
I was struck speechless. Not just by his knowledge of feminist theorists the other boys in our school would’ve been ignorant of but by his perception.
My smart retort was lost somewhere in shock. I was equipped to go head-on with those boys, with my father, precisely because they didn’t know who Laura Mulvey was. It irked me that I wasn’t equipped to handle someone less predictable than the other boys or my blue collar, protective father.
“If you want to come with me, you’ll have to get changed into something more comfortable. Or don’t.” Jasper hiked up a shoulder like he really didn’t care either way.
I considered his offer with a watchful gaze. What was the cooler option? Changing in order to be ‘comfortable’ for whatever he had in mind or maintaining my autonomy and not letting him tell me what to do? Though the latter could shoot me in the foot.
“We’ll stop at my place on the way to wherever we’re going,” I decided, unsure if I’d made the right choice, if I even had the power in this exchange.
Jasper nodded, no kind of victory or smugness on his face. It seemed he truly didn’t care. His indifference was intoxicating.
He walked toward the parking lot he wasn’t bothered whether if I followed him or not. Which meant I went running after him.
Because I wasn’t the girl who ran from the wolf in the fairy tale, I followed him.
“You haven’t taken me all the way out here to murder me, have you?” I joked. “Because you could’ve done that at my place. Still no witnesses.”
Jasper had waited downstairs while I changed, my mother out somewhere. I didn’t trouble myself with her comings and goings, and she’d long given up on asking me whether I should be in class or not. I got straight As, attendance be damned.
Again, my father was another story.
When I came back downstairs in sweats, he’d been looking at the photos cluttering our mantel like some kind of anthropologist looking at foreign artifacts.
I remembered his history. Foster care. Yeah, the McPherson’s were nice, but I suspected the damage of not having a family during his formative years had been done.
As much as mine irritated the ever-loving shit out of me, I was lucky. That I knew. Well, in theory I knew that. But I couldn’t rid myself of the belief that I was the black sheep of my nuclear family, put in it by accident.
I’d mulled that over during the drive, considering I’d made the decision from a na?ve point of view, not truly knowing how fucked-up this boy was.