Junk Miles (5 page)

I didn’t watch him pull out of our driveway. I ran back in, and I knew I looked pink and flushed and bright-eyed. I knew that Mom felt validated about whisking me off to Paris. I couldn’t stop the love for him from brimming out of me, and it was so intense it was dangerous. I knew that, and she knew it.

Chapter Three

I forced myself to sit at the table and sip cocoa and chatter happily. Thorsten pretended to cry about Mom and me leaving him for a week and a half, but I knew he would be happy to walk around in his underwear and smoke his pipe on the porch. Mom was very giggly and Thorsten was pretty silly himself. I was fairly sure that they were at least toasted enough to turn in early, and I wound up being right. They wobbled off to bed after they kissed and hugged me goodnight, and I sat on the couch and looked at our bright, pretty Christmas tree for a while. Then I took the DVDs Jake bought for me and headed to my room.

I peeled off my stockings and dress and put on my pajama pants and top. They were cute. I made sure, since Jake would be over soon. I flipped through the movies until I found the one I wanted, even though I didn’t really want it.

It was my absolute favorite,
Sense and Sensibility,
the one with Kate Winslet as Marianne. I put it in and started watching. And, even though I didn’t want to, I felt a wave of sadness when Willoughby rode up and saved Marianne, holding her in his arms with such outright chivalry. The scene is really romantic, but it’s also tragic because Willoughby isn’t going to be Marianne’s true love. He’s going to spurn her in favor of a rich heiress so that he can keep his lifestyle. And he winds up leaving Marianne crushed. I know this story by heart. I’ve thought about it a thousand times. Because someone got it in my head and now I can’t get it back out.

That someone was Saxon Maclean. Earlier in the year I thought I might fall in love (or lust) with Saxon. Then I thought I would hate him forever. Then he told me something about Jake that changed everything, and since then, I haven’t been able to get Saxon out of my head.

On my birthday he left a book on my windowsill. It was
Sense and Sensibility
, and before I had a chance to read it and make my own judgments about it, I read his inscription to me. Which basically said that I was Marianne and he was Willoughby, that our love was true, but ultimately wouldn’t work. That Austen was smart for sticking me with Colonel Brandon (Jake? Not really a great fit.), and that I should be smart enough to stick with my fated role.

He had fallen off of the radar just before my birthday. For a while, he didn’t even show up at school. We were supposed to spend the day together as part of a government assignment, but I wound up going with another girl who won third place in our class competition. He was gone for almost three weeks, then he was back and no one knew where he’d gone or why. He hardly looked my way, didn’t talk to me, and closed his Facebook account. He left me the book on my birthday and other than that, it was just a look once in a while that let me know he was working really hard at keeping his distance.

The problem was that I couldn’t keep myself from thinking about him. He had almost driven a permanent wedge between me and Jake, but then backed off. He took the heat when Jake could have been mad at me, and then he told me the thing that shook me to my core; he and Jake had the same father, a fact Jake was still in the dark about. Saxon also told me that he didn’t want Jake to know, didn’t want to disappoint him as a blood brother in addition to disappointing him as a friend. He told me that if Jake wasn’t with me, he’d fight for me. And he’d vanished.

I never told Jake. Beyond the whole problem of Saxon liking me, Jake and Saxon had grown up close, and Saxon had exposed Jake to a lot of vices. When Jake finally had enough of that crazy lifestyle, he cut Saxon completely out of his life, and he hadn’t dealt with him again until I came into the picture. It would make sense for me to stay as far away from Saxon as I could.

There was just one problem.

I could never quite wriggle out of Saxon’s grasp, no matter how hard I tried. And something in me didn’t want to. There was something about him that drew me in, whether I liked it or not. I wanted to talk to him more, specifically about the whole Jake thing, but he just avoided me or flat-out ignored me. It sucked, but there was nothing I could do about it.

I cried a little at the scene where Marianne sees Willoughby at the ball and he brushes her off. It wasn’t that I wanted Saxon to want me or fight for me; it was just that if he felt that way and was open about it, we couldn’t even be friends. Jake hated him so much it wasn’t even an option to bring it up to him. It was a lost cause.

Before I knew it, my phone rang. I slid my window up and helped him in. He smiled and put a finger to his lips.

Jake had snuck in before, but he didn’t like to make a habit of it. Especially since he met my parents. He knew they didn’t really approve of him, and doing anything to make that sense stronger didn’t work for him at all.

But there was the undeniable attraction between us that always managed to skew his judgment and force him to bend his rules. Which worked for me.

I had never been much of a rebel, but Mom’s new tactics were teaching me something I don’t think she expected; I was learning that I had to do what I needed to do without worrying about who I was hurting. I had to be a little selfish.

I knew Mom would have freaked out if she knew that was how I interpreted her speech.

Jake shed everything down to his boxers and slid the neat pile under my bed. He wiggled in between the covers and snuggled up to me. His clothes and skin were still icy cold from running in the night air, across the fields and through the woods. He didn’t park close because he was afraid someone would recognize the truck. I put my hands on his body, ran them up and down his back and along the muscles of his shoulders and arms. He pulled a long piece of my hair and brought it to his nose.

“
Your hair smells like cinnamon.” He breathed it in and hummed with contentment low in his throat.

“
It’s my holiday shampoo,” I whispered.

He laughed quietly. “Holiday shampoo. You’re a weird girl.”

“
Just because you don’t celebrate at all doesn’t mean that I never want to.” I poked him in the ribs under the blankets.

“
I’m sorry.” He brushed his fingertips over my face. “Next year I’ll get candy cane deodorant and mistletoe aftershave.”

“
I think mistletoe is poisonous.” I giggled.

“
I’m willing to sacrifice to get into the holiday spirit. I want to be a hardcore Christmaser like you.” He kissed me softly. “Maybe you can snag me one of the pictures Thorsten took of you today.”

“
It was a great dress, wasn’t it?” I sighed.

“
I guess.” He kissed me again. “I just think you looked amazing. I don’t know if you realize how pretty you are.”

“
Oh, I do.” I put my hands on either side of his face. “I totally use it against you. Bat an eyelash, get you to carry my lunch tray. Toss my hair, you run over to my house and jump in my window.”

He chuckled. “Yeah, I’m just your little monkey on a string.”

“
You’ve got that right,” I said.

And then we were kissing again, and then the kisses got deeper and Jake’s hands were all over me. I relaxed back into the mattress and closed my eyes in the dark. I loved the cool, scratchy feel of his skin on mine. He touched me where I was softest and where I was most sensitive, and I loved it. It was like he had an instinct about how to make me feel incredible. I touched back, and soon the world had narrowed in exactly the way I loved it to. It was just me and Jake in my bed, all roving hands and kisses.

And then, in the middle of it all, I heard someone in the kitchen.

Jake snatched back from me like I’d burned him. I righted my pajamas and pushed at him.

“
Under the bed,” I whispered.

He was off the bed and scurried under in a few silent seconds. I could hear him breathing, and I was positive it was the loudest sound in the world, but I couldn’t tell him to stop.

My heart hammered, and I tried to relax my own breathing, but, in the midst of pure, palpitating panic, I couldn’t remember how people breathed when they slept. Trying to breath too slow made me need to gulp bigger breaths. I suddenly had an itch on my nose that I didn’t want to scratch, but I realized I must scratch my nose in my sleep sometimes. I felt like the seconds stretched out forever, as I lay on my bed, breathing erratically and trying not to scratch what had become the most unbearably itchy nostril in the world.

I imagined getting caught. I imagined my mother’s extreme disappointment. I imagined what it would be like if she made me dump Jake. How the house would light up on this otherwise peaceful night and be full of arguments and accusations, disappointment and crushed trust. My stomach clenched, and I felt sweat break out under my armpits. I bit the inside of my lip and willed this whole thing to be over.

Minutes of shuffling later, and my door cracked open. I relaxed my muscles and kept my eyes closed.

My mother’s bare feet padded across the room, and stopped inches away from where Jake lay under my bed. I couldn’t hear a sound from him, but I was nervous he was holding his breath. What if he let it out in one long rush and my mother heard?

The mattress creaked under her weight as she sat on the side of it. It was pure, agonizing torture to keep my eyes closed and not sit up and just confess to end all of the nervous anxiety of the moment. I felt Mom’s hand smoothing my hair, then she leaned over and kissed my forehead.

She stayed less than a minute, then stood up and headed back out of my room, closing the door behind her quietly.

Jake stayed under the bed for a long time. Finally I had to call him out.

“
Jake, are you still there?” I felt guilty. I had convinced him to come over. This would probably be the last time.

He spoke softly from under my bed. “I’m here, Bren.”

“
Sorry.”

“
It’s not your fault.” His voice was flat.

“
I shouldn’t have convinced you to come.” I chewed on my lip nervously. Jake didn’t say anything. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“
I’m thinking that I’m so glad we weren’t sound asleep.” He pulled out from under the bed. He’d managed to get his clothes on, and he knelt on the side, not daring, I was sure, to climb back in next to me.

“
You’re leaving now, aren’t you?” My voice had that wobble I despised.

“
You can’t really want me to stay. What if Mom is having indigestion? She could be back every hour. Let me go. You get a good night’s sleep, and work on getting out for a few hours tomorrow. I’ll call out from Zinga’s so I’m ready if you need me.”

Jake never, ever called out from work. I knew he was offering me an olive branch so I didn’t flake out. And I knew it was completely ridiculous of me to even contemplate flaking out. He was right, he was reasonable, I was being selfish.

Maybe Mom had underestimated my capacity for selfishness.

“
Okay, go.” But I wasn’t ready for him to leave, and I wasn’t happy he was going.

He pulled me close and kissed me, a long, thorough kiss that had only the barest hint of his desperation to be gone.

After a few more minutes of my pulling him to me and his pulling away, he vanished back into the goose-bump inducing black. I watched him run across the fields and back to his truck, somewhere in the dark, cold night, from my window. Now the bed would feel even larger and emptier. The night stretched longer and lonelier than it ever had before. I couldn’t help the tears that fell. The frigid air outside made me feel better, and soon I was cold and shivering. I got back under the covers and dreamed about Jake and Saxon, racing around the school track, me in a snow globe watching them, pounding on the thick, clear glass. I woke up with a start in the early dawn, then fell back into a restless sleep until long after sunrise.

Mom knocked lightly on my door. I was already awake, but not up. My first thought was that she knew what I had done last night, and she was coming to give me a long, long lecture. I felt panic sweep through me.

“
Sweetheart? Did you get a chance to finish packing?” She waited outside my door, looking like part of her wanted to barge right in while another part of her thought staying out was a better idea.

It occurred to me that Mom was just unsure how much space and privacy to give me. “Come in, Mom.” I patted the bed, just like she would do for me. “I finished packing yesterday.”

“
What did you pack for a jacket?” she quizzed.

“
My blue wool trench coat.”

“
Good. And for nights out?”

“
I have the red silk from last night, with stockings and my black mohair sweater.” I stretched my arms over my head. “What coat are you bringing?”

“
I thought my new plaid. The one with the orange in it.”

“
Ooh, that one is so pretty.” I had definitely inherited my love of gorgeous clothes from my mother. “I love the lining. It’s too bad no one ever gets to see it.”

“
You’re right. It does have that gorgeous Japanese floral and bird thing going on. Well, I’ll be sure to fold it inside out whenever I hold it.”

“
And I’ll appreciate it every time I see it.” There was nothing like an amazing, hidden lining. “So, what’s on the itinerary for Paris?”