All Pepped Up (Pepper Jones) (23 page)

I cross my arms and glare at her. I won’t be one of her victims any more.

She spins around and walks toward her car. Before she reaches it, Jace’s Jeep turns onto Shadow Lane. She pauses mid-stride.

He pulls into the driveway and hops out. He walks straight
toward me, ignoring Madeline completely. Before I can utter a word, I’m in his arms in a tight embrace, and his lips descend on mine. My head is spinning when he releases me. He searches my eyes for a moment before finally turning to Madeline.

“Why are you here?” he asks coldly.

“You know why I’m here, Jace,” she says sweetly. “You told me to meet you. It’s probably time to stop pretending with Pepper. I know you feel guilty since you’ve been friends a long time, but leading her on like this is becoming sort of cruel, don’t you think?”

She is just too much.
Didn’t she just witness that display of affection?

Jace shakes his head in disbelief and turns to me with a questioning look.

“I was waiting for you to get home and she showed up. She said you texted her to tell her to meet you, but she wouldn’t show me the message,” I quickly summarize the conversation.

“Let’s see your
phone,” Jace demands.

“
Stop being an asshole, Jace,” she responds.

Jace stalks over to her. “Stop playing games
, Madeline, and I will.”

“This is ridiculous!” she stammers.

“It got ridiculous when you took it this far to try to get my girlfriend to break up with me. When I wouldn’t break up with her over those photos, you decided to send that video. I don’t know why you had that video in the first place, but your game is starting to get pretty sick.”

Madeline takes a step back. “I didn’t send the video.”

Jace puts his hand out. “Just hand over your phone.” His tone leaves no room for argument and after a long minute, she reaches into her purse and places it in his hand.

He touches the screen a few
times before pulling up what he’s looking for. Jace’s jaw clenches. “That little shit,” he murmurs.

He walks back to me with the
phone and hands it to me. “It was Ethan Lawrence.”

I look at the screen. Sure enough, there’s a message from Ethan telling Madeline that the team just got to the
school parking lot, and Jace is going straight home.

“Who’s Ethan?” I ask. Not that
it matters.

“The only freshman on the team. I’ll
give him a break this time. He probably didn’t know he was playing with fire.”

Jace tosses her the
phone and she fumbles it, dropping it on the sidewalk.

He takes my hand and tugs me inside, shutting the door
on Madeline Brescoll and leaving her behind us.

I wrap my arms around Jace’s neck. “I missed you,” I tell him. And I don’t just mean over this weekend, but throughout the week. Ever since the video was sent.

“I know.” Jace’s face lights up. “You’re like this little fireball of confidence. It’s a sexy look on you.”

I lean my head back and press my hips further into his. “I had some revelations this weekend.”

“I noticed.” Jace’s eyes darken and his hands move down lower on my back, resting at the top of my jeans.

“Mmmhmm. I don’t just have a newfound confidence in dealing with
Mad-Evil Brescoll, but I also rediscovered my competitive spirit.”

He lifts me up with a grin and I wrap my legs around his waist as he carries me down the stairs to his bedroom.

He asks me about my race while peeling off my jeans. I quickly become too distracted to focus.

“It sounds like you deserve a leg massage after a race like that. Maybe a butt massage too.” He hooks his fing
ers in my panties and tugs them down to join the pile with my jeans. Then he kisses my hip and gets to know each and every one of my muscles from the waist down.

***

Later that night, Jace makes grilled cheese sandwiches while I watch him from the kitchen counter.

“Did you have any idea that Mad-Evil was so crazy?” I ask him.

Jace takes my cheeks in his hands and brushes his nose with mine. “Mad-Evil, huh? Cute.” He slices my sandwich in half and hands it to me. “If I’d known she was so obsessed, I would have handled it differently. And I definitely wouldn’t have touched her in the first place.”

“Do you think
she sent that video?” I ask before taking a bite.

He leans against the counter next to me and crosses his arms.

“I don’t know.”

We don’t talk about how it took me a week to decide I believed him, or what made me come around. Maybe the cheesy advice from Annie did the trick, I don’t know. I do know that I really didn’t want to face a world without Jace. And if he cheated on me, I’m not sure I’d be able to forgive him.

“What happened to the kitchen stools that used to be here?” I wonder.

“We’re getting new ones.”

“You could have kept the old ones until then. I liked those chairs. You could spin around on them.”

“I kind of destroyed them in a moment of frustration,” Jace admits.

I raise my eyebrows in a question.

He blows out a sigh and looks at the ceiling. “I was pretty angry when you left the house.” He turns to face me. “Not at you. I get why you did. But then when Wes went running after you… it took a lot of self-control not to stop you. I guess I went a little crazy.”

I imagine Jim witnessing Jace’s outburst. “Your dad didn’t stop you.”

“He tried for a minute and then I guess
he figured I needed to let it all out. Better the furniture than a person, right?”

The doorbell rings, and I jump at the noise. “If that’s Mad-
Evil,” I start to say. But we hear Wes’s voice when he opens the door.

“Hey
, lovebirds! You aren’t naked, are you?” he calls out.

“We’re in the kitchen,” Jace responds. “Clothed!” he adds.

I roll my eyes.

“
I’ve got some news,” he announces before hopping up on the other end of the counter. “Still haven’t replaced the stools?” he asks Jace.

Jace smacks him lightly on the back of the head. “Fuck off.”

“What’s your news?” I bring them back on track.

“Wolfe, the sick fuck, sent the video,” he says coolly, like he didn’t just deliver a pretty major revelation. “Can you make me a grilled cheese too?”

“How’d you figure that out?” Jace asks as he slices up more cheddar cheese.

“I thought of who your enemies were, and he’s the only one
screwed up enough to do something like that.” He pauses before adding, “Though I guess some girls out there might be obsessed enough.” He shakes his head at that disturbing thought. “Anyway, took a bunch of guys with me to Wolfe’s place last night. He was there. High with some chick. We got ahold of his phone, but there wasn’t a video. So we looked on his laptop and sure enough, it was saved in his files. It was taken last September, according to the computer file, by the way.” He says this last bit like it’s insignificant information, even though we all know it’s anything but. I’d already decided to trust Jace, but
man
does it feel good to have confirmation.

“Maybe he had the video but didn’t send it?” I wonder. Yeah, I guess Annie was right. I’m a thinker.

“Did you ever get ahold of the girl whose phone it was sent from?” Jace asks.

“Wait, you found out whose cell phone it was?” I ask.

“Yeah, we had a buddy trace it,” Wes tells me. “We’d never heard of the girl who owned the phone.”

“Okay
, James Bond, continue,” I say, gesturing with my hand. “Did the girl know Wolfe?”

“At first she said no. But when we told her when the video was sent, she said some guy hit on her at a bar that night, asked for her phone number to call her later, and took an obscenely long time entering his own number into her phone.
He said his name was Will, but when she looked for his number in her phone later, it wasn’t there.”

“And
‘Will’ had a shaved head and forehead scar just like Wolfe, I take it?” Jace asks.

“Yup.”

“So now we need to handle Wolfe,” Jace says darkly.

“Already handled,” Wes tells him. He points to the grilled cheese on the skillet. “Is that ready?”

Jace picks it up and hands it to him on a spatula.

“What do you mean you already handled it?” Jace sounds irritated.

“Relax, man. The main priority isn’t retaliation, but getting the fucker out of our lives, right?” Wes asks, hands up in surrender.

“We could have both,” Jace answers. His jaw is clenched tight and I know he’s already thinking of his next move.

“Hold it. The guy’s crazy. I don’t want to fuck with him and have him haunting me. Better to have something on him so he’ll stay away. Recording that shit without your consent is a felony. Plus there’s all kinds of civil shit you could go after him for.”

Jace mulls this over. “I’d disagree that he shouldn’t get away without retaliation. But he knows about Pepper now. And I don’t want to risk him coming after her.”

“Does Mad-Evil know it was Wolfe?” I ask.

Wes
throws his head back in laughter. “You mean Brescoll? No, she doesn’t know. Let’s keep it that way.”

“Yeah, she’s as crazy as Wolfe. Who knows what she’d do? I just want this whole thing to be over with.”

Jace puts his hands on my waist and pulls my legs around his hips. “It will be, Pep. No more fucking drama, okay?”

I
smile and repeat his words. “No more fucking drama.”

He laughs and leans in to
speak softly in my ear, “I never thought you’d have to go through all this because you’re my girlfriend, Pep. But you’ve handled it like a badass and I’m so proud of you.”

His hot breath on my skin and the sincerity of his words make me squirm closer to him, wishing we were alone.

“Guys? Can you keep your hands off each other for two minutes?” Wes asks in mock anger. There’s no mistaking the happiness on his face, though, when we turn to face him. I wonder if my friendship with Wes would have ended again if Jace and I broke up.

“Man, Pep, it’s a good thing you didn’t drag that out any longer. Jace was driving me nuts. He’s like a girl with his emotions when it comes to you.” Wes shoves the rest of his grilled cheese into his mouth while keeping an eye on Jace in anticipation of another smack on the back of his head. But Jace doesn’t seem inclined to pull away from me.

“Did you just dis girls?” I ask him in a threatening tone.

“Noooo… You’re just taking it that way,” Wes talks through a mouthful of food.

“Girls destroy furniture when they get upset?” Jace asks.

“Not this girl,” I point to myself. “I run.”

“That you do,” Wes says. I think we’re all reflecting on the snowstorm incident.

“You know,” Jace comments. “I tried the running thing last week. Definitely didn’t make me feel better.”

“What about when you found me on the trail? That didn’t help cheer you up?”

“A little better, but that was you, not the running. And I could tell you were still all bummed out and hurt so that didn’t make me feel great.”

“Yeah,” I say on a sigh.

“Yeah,” he repeats.

But that’s all behind us now.

After standing up to Madeline, it feels like nothing can come between Jace
and me. Until that point, I was happy enough that we’d taken our friendship to the next level, but I think I struggled with how long it would last. I guess it was the “it’s too good to be true” thing. There was always a little nagging doubt in my head, wondering if Jace would get tired of being in a relationship with me, or frustrated with monogamy. After all, despite his physical experience, I’m still his first girlfriend.

My doubts are gone now. And the more I reflect on it, the more I realize it wasn’t so much Jace’s past that fueled my lack of faith
in us, but my own insecurities.

On the track befor
e the last race of the two-day State meet, I shake out my arms and legs. It’s a new thing I just started doing before races. It makes me feel like I’m shaking off the bad energy, any lingering insecurities. Yeah, I guess I have those on the track, too.

The leg and arm shake seemed to do the trick before the 4 x 800 last night. It was my first time running on the UC track. The college opened their facilities for the high school State Championship.

We placed third in the 4 x 800 – much better than we’d hoped. First place in the DMR is an ambitious goal, but we’re fired up after the win at Districts two weeks ago, and for my part, I’m willing to lay it all out there.

Jenny and Zoe have switched
relay legs. Jenny will be leading us out in the 1200, and Zoe’s racing the 800. Jenny’s faster in both events, and we can use that more to our advantage if she runs a longer leg. It will probably only gain us a second or two, but that’s usually what it comes down to.