I…I knew he was a bit older than me, knew I shouldn’t want to feel his body against mine, but I did.
So, I did the only thing I could: I stepped into his bedroom.
Chapter Seventeen – Archer
My hands were on a body I knew well, my mouth connected to a pair of lips I’d felt on mine countless of times now. Still, even though I knew I had to do this, I…I didn’t want to. After what happened, after I confronted Brittany about it, she’d acted like nothing at all was wrong.
She was a vile, cruel girl, and I was a pawn in her game like everyone else. I hated her, I did. I wasn’t with Brittany because I liked her, because I was thinking with my dick like some other guys did. No. The sex, the position in Midpark High…nothing was worth this.
We laid on her bed, our legs entwined. Her lithe body curled against mine, and her hands roamed up my shirt, touching my abdomen and my chest as she held me close to her. She kissed me like she always did: greedy, needy, grasping for something real she would never have because she was a manipulative bitch who only got what she wanted because she forced everyone else to bend the knee to her.
I had no idea how she grew up to be like this. She was only eighteen. She shouldn’t be able to play people like a fiddle, but she could. She held power no other person I knew had, and that’s why she had me under her foot.
Until now, I’d played the good boyfriend, even though I really had no interest in her. I tried to push Jaz away after giving into her—after letting my weakness for something new and alluring take me in—but that hadn’t been enough. Brittany had a camera in my room, apparently, because she didn’t trust me. She pretty much found out exactly the moment it happened, and chose to keep quiet for a while, letting me think I had done something secretly.
It was stupid of me. There were no secrets here, none of mine, at least.
Although, it was a Vega secret that got me under her foot to begin with.
The problem now was Jaz, and I knew it was foolish of me, because she’d never forgive me for what I did, for what almost happened to her because of me. But how could I lay here and act like nothing had happened when Brittany almost had her raped?
Twice?
How could I sit and watch the destruction of the light in Jaz’s eyes and not try to stop it?
Of course, I knew what would happen if I tried to. I knew what the fallout would be, and that was exactly why I was still here, still sucking it up.
I must not have been doing it well, though, for within a moment, Brittany pulled herself from me, sitting up as she glared. Her hands left my chest, and I didn’t even feel the loss of their warmth. I felt closed-off inside, almost numb.
But not numb enough. If I was, I wouldn’t care about what I’d stopped from happening to Jaz earlier this week. I wouldn’t think about what she’d told me over the weekend, how she’d been drugged at the party. No, I was numb, but not at the level I should be to carry on like this.
“What is the matter with you?” Brittany asked, jutting her bottom lip out to pout, as if she was some innocent girl, and I was a boyfriend who wasn’t being attentive enough. Her blonde hair fell over her shoulders in waves, her shirt a bit wrinkly from our embrace. Her boots had been kicked off; they rested near the bed with my shoes.
Those amber eyes watched me as I sat up and ran a hand through my hair. Those eyes were not the same hue as Jaz’s. Jaz’s eyes were so much warmer, like chocolate, warm and sweet and inviting. The last time those eyes had been on me, she’d looked at me with hate. All week she’d refused to even glance in my direction, preferring to ignore me in homeroom and first period.
“Don’t tell me this is because of her,” Brittany muttered, frowning. The door to her bedroom was shut; her parents were home, but they never bothered us.
I shook my head. “I just…how could you have done that to her?” Until recently, I never knew how black her soul was—as black as a soul could possibly get. “How could you have told Ryan and his friends it was okay to do that?” Before she could answer me, I added, “Did you slip something into her drink at the party?”
“What I did was try to make sure that bitch got what was coming to her,” she said. “You need to stop worrying about her so much.”
Staring at my hands, they looked like a stranger’s hands, not like mine. These hands had done so much, been complacent for so long…it was getting to the point where I wondered how I was going to live with myself, if this was going to be the rest of my life. I knew Brittany and her obsession with me wouldn’t simply stop when we graduated. She wanted to go to the same college as me—Hillcrest.
And after that…she’d want me to pop the question.
I couldn’t imagine what my life would be like with her. I couldn’t…no, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to live the rest of my life like this. I was only doing it for Mom, but it couldn’t last forever.
“I told you to forget about her,” Brittany stated, repeating herself for the thousandth time when it came to Jaz. “I told you I’d handle her.”
Getting off the bed, I shook my head again. “I don’t know if I can keep doing this.”
Brittany practically leaped off the bed, moving around it to stand before me, defiance in her gaze. “You will keep doing this, otherwise you know what I’ll have to do,” she reminded me, although she didn’t need to. I knew well enough what she’d do, and what would happen as a result.
It’s the only reason I was still here.
She then said something she hadn’t ever said before: “I won’t stop you, though. If you want to tuck that dick between your legs and run to your new girlfriend, go ahead. I doubt she’ll want to be with you when she hears the truth.”
The truth of why I was with Brittany? My eyebrows furrowed, and I must’ve looked confused, for Brittany continued.
“I’ll know for sure at my next appointment,” Brittany spoke with a shrug. “And by then I’ll have dragged your name through the mud anyways, so I guess it won’t matter—”
“What are you talking about?” My stomach dropped when she gave me a smile. It was a smile I would see in my nightmares, a smile that could tear me apart, piece by piece.
“My period is late.”
All I could do was blink. No. No, no, no. We were always careful; I made damned sure of it. I knew if she ever got pregnant, she’d lord that pregnancy and baby over me until the end of fucking time. I couldn’t…she couldn’t…
No. Just no.
“How?” I asked, feeling the need to break something. To shake her. To yell at her and force her to tell me she was lying. She had to be.
“Maybe one of the condoms broke,” she offered, shrugging, as if it was no big deal that she could possibly be pregnant.
Fuck it all to hell. I couldn’t break up with her. I couldn’t leave her. Not now…not now that she might be carrying my child. Ugh. Why was I born the unluckiest bastard alive? Why was this my life? What had I done to deserve this?
The mistake that got me into this mess wasn’t even mine.
I had to suck it up. I had to swallow down my hatred for this girl and pretend everything was fine, wipe Jaz from my mind completely.
In the end, I didn’t storm out. I didn’t leave her. After what she told me, I couldn’t. I was effectively a dog on a leash, and Brittany was my master. Made me feel all different kinds of pathetic, but it was what it was. There would be no changing it.
My fate had been sealed.
Later that night, I went home, after spending more time with Brittany. I found it was easier to be with her while closing my eyes and pretending she was someone else. Jaz. If I pretended her long blonde hair was instead black and wavy, if I imagined Jaz’s full smile, it made things a tad more bearable.
I truly was up shit creek without a paddle, and it sucked so bad.
When I got home, I found my dad in the kitchen, sipping something from a mug. He sat on a barstool over the island, his iPad leaning before him. He was reading some article, and I didn’t c
are to stop to ask how his day was, so I went right upstairs.
My dad called after me, “She’s not having a good day.”
I stopped as I listened to him, but I said nothing else as I carried on. I swung by my room, tossing my backpack in before heading further down the hall to my mom’s room. She didn’t stay with my dad anymore. The nurse’s car was still outside, so I knew she was still here, still with her.
Seemed Mom’s bad days were happening more often, now.
I paused before Mom’s door, hesitating before pushing in. I found Mom sitting on the side of her bed, her nurse readying a needle. Mom had looked better, her appearance haggard. The moment I came in, she got to her feet, nearly knocking the nurse over with the sudden movement and escaping the pointy end of the needle.
“You,” she spoke, staring at me like I was the devil himself. “I don’t know you. Get out.”
The words hit me hard, but I’d heard her say a lot worse before. I tried to give her a smile, tried to act calming. “Mom, it’s me, your son. Archer—”
Nope. She didn’t like that.
She rushed toward me, pushing me, smacking me, shouting, “Get out, get out, get out!”
Behind her, the nurse gave me a smile. “Can you—” She didn’t even have to finish the question.
I grabbed my mom, forcing her back to the bed. I was a lot stronger than her, so her struggling was for nothing.
“Bernie,” the nurse spoke loudly, clearly, causing my mom’s eyes to snap to her. “This will help you sleep. You need to rest, okay?” My mom said nothing, though she kept throwing daggers with her eyes at me, as if she didn’t trust me.
At least I was a distraction from the needle.
When the needle had been emptied inside her, I let her go, stepping back and watching as the nurse helped lay her down. By the time she was done, Mom was out of it.
I met the nurse outside in the hall. “Thank you for helping,” she told me. A middle-aged woman, she’d been hired by my family a while ago to take care of Mom, especially on her bad days. “Today’s been rough, one of her worst days in a while. When was her last scan?”
God, I tried to remember, but I couldn’t. “Uh, a few weeks ago, I think.”
“You should get her in, soon,” the nurse advised me. “I don’t think she’s doing well. If I had to guess, I’d…I’d say she’s getting worse.” She lowered her eyes, her voice coming out in a bare whisper as she added, “I don’t know how many more good days she has left in her, Archer. You and your father might think about looking into an assisted living facility for her, since I can’t be here twenty-four hours a day every day of the week.”
I knew why she was telling me this and not my dad. He hardly paid Mom a second look anymore…not like he ever did before she got sick, either. If something was going to happen with Mom, I had to be the adult and see to it, not him.
It was fine. I was used to it.
Some people might think growing up with money was the shit, but it honestly sucked more often than it didn’t. I’d give anything to be from a normal family, to have normal problems—not the constant shit storm I had to deal with on a daily basis.
I told the nurse goodnight, watching her leave down the hall before bringing my stare back to my mom’s door. Sometimes, even with all the money in the world, there still wasn’t a cure for everything.
It wasn’t fair, of course. She was a good person, a great mother. She didn’t deserve to get sick like this. Doctors weren’t even sure what was wrong with her, only that her brain was not processing things as it should. No cancer, no tumors, but obviously there was something they weren’t seeing. That, or the human body still had some mysteries left.
To her shut door, I whispered, “Goodnight, Mom. I love you.” It wasn’t dark enough outside to sleep, but that sedative should put her out for quite a while.
I tiptoed back to my room, closing my door and breathing out a sigh as I relaxed once I was alone. Life really wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Sometimes I hated it with a burning passion.
Unfortunately, this was the hand I was dealt, and I had to learn to live with it.
Chapter Eighteen – Jacob
The truth shouldn’t get me so riled up, but it did. How could I sit there and pretend as if nothing was wrong? It felt like fucking everything was wrong, and that wasn’t an exaggeration. What happened with Jaz and her fellow students was in the forefront of my mind.
I was not exaggerating when I said I wanted to kill those kids.
That alone should’ve been a warning sign enough, but of course, because of the cosmic joke that was my life, it wasn’t enough. I had to deal with an oblivious Jaz, too, not to mention the anonymous client who still wanted me to basically spy on her and report to him everything I learned.
I couldn’t tell Mr. Anonymous about what happened to Jaz earlier this week. I couldn’t. There were some lines I didn’t want to cross, some things that anonymous client of mine didn’t need to know.
I thought about telling Jaz, of course, that someone had hired me to look into her—and that I’d been reporting shit on her from the first time we met—but I didn’t know how she’d take it. With everything that had happened to her here in Midpark, she was likely to take it as another betrayal, and I didn’t want her to think that I would ever hurt her or lie to her.
Fuck. See? Things were so fucking complicated, I honestly hated it. I hated it with every fiber of my being.
Sitting next to her on the couch, telling her the truth, it had been too hard to hold myself back from her. She didn’t need me getting all handsy, not now. Not after what happened. She came here for me to teach her how to defend herself; that’s all.
That’s what I had to remember.
However, as I stood there, in my bedroom, my hands gripping the sides of my dresser hard, my mind raced in every direction it shouldn’t. That girl out there wasn’t mine; I had to remember that, had to get it through my thick skull that, while I might’ve grown to care for her, things could never become anything more between us.
They couldn’t.
Could they? Fuck, telling myself she was legal sounded like a sleazy thing to say, something the perverts used as an excuse when they jacked off to freshly-minted eighteen-year-olds. I wasn’t like that. I’d never been like that.
So why the fuck did Jaz make me feel like this? I hated being so conflicted, hated how easily I got riled up when it came to her.
If the feelings came to me this effortlessly, how was I supposed to deny them? How could I stand there and ignore them as if they didn’t exist? Fuck it all to hell.
“Knock, knock,” Jaz spoke as she stepped inside my bedroom—someplace she definitely should not be. I barely glanced up at her, my fingers tightening on the sides of the dresser. Suddenly my clothes felt too restricting. “Is Mr. Grumps okay?” As she spoke, a smile spread on her lips, lips a few shades too red and too full to not garner my attention.
I managed to glare at her, not moving a single inch. “I told you to stop calling me that.” And, I had the feeling, I’d be telling her multiple more times before it landed. I wasn’t the only one here with a thick skull, apparently.
“And,” she said, inching closer to me, still smiling that enchanting, alluring smile, “I figured by now you’d realize I’m ignoring you every time you say it.” Her thin shoulders shrugged. “You will always be Mr. Grumps.”
Hearing her say that made something inside me tick. God, I wanted to…
Hell. I knew what I wanted, but it was the one thing I shouldn’t want. Not now, not ever. The one thing I knew from the very beginning I had to keep myself from, the one thing that made me weaker than anything ever had in my entire life.
Her. I wanted her. I wanted to feel that body pressed against mine again, wanted to feel those lips against mine and devour any sounds that escaped. I wanted everything from her, and I knew I shouldn’t.
I didn’t look up; I knew Jaz had moved behind me, standing about a foot away fro
m my back. Without looking at her, I knew she stood between me and the bed, someplace she most definitely should not be. This…this would not end well. I should go. I should take her home. I should do literally anything else but remain in this room and allow this to continue.
But what did I do?
I didn’t push off the dresser and storm out of my room. No, I whirled on her, faster than I could blink. “You,” I whispered, my hands finding her face, tangling in her hair, tilting her head up to me. Her skin was soft, her hair falling over my fingers in waves. “Why do you make me feel this way?” It was a question I doubted either of us knew the answer to, and yet I asked anyway.
She had to know she drove me crazy. Of course she did. Like I’d said, she knew what she was doing. Jaz knew how to wrap us helpless men around her finger like it was nothing. I was at her mercy, now. I teetered on the edge, ready to jump off even though I knew nothing good waited for me at the bottom.
This would not end well. There was no way it could. Jaz and I…we could never last. She was eighteen, had her whole life in front of her. She’d move on, to bigger and better things, and I…well, who the hell knew where I’d be.
Frankly, this was a disaster waiting to happen, and yet, as I stared down at her, as those big, chocolatey eyes stared up at me, I found I could not look away, even knowing all that.
I leaned my forehead down, resting it against hers, feeling her warm breath on my face. My eyelids closed, and my fingers tightened their hold on her hair, tugging gently. “You make me so weak, Jaz,” I murmured, our noses touching.
This would not be like our last embrace. This was not us arguing, not us coming together in the heat of the moment.
This was us being drawn together, regardless of everything else. This was Jaz and I no longer being able to pull back when we should, the inevitable union of feelings that should not exist but did in spite of it all.
“How weak?” she questioned, her voice humming in her lungs. My body huddled around hers; I felt her lean against me, our noses grazing. Her hands found my sides, holding onto me gently, as if she was afraid to hold on any tighter, lest she break the spell she had over me and cause me to pull back.
Defiant: A High School Bully Romance (Midpark High Book 2) Page 21
