Believe in Us (Jett #2)

by Amy Sparling

  She laughs and pats my arm. “Not that I’m telling you to do the same thing. Ya’ll take your time and do what’s best for your relationship.”

  My shoulders lift. “I don’t think I’d be a good mom, so you don’t have to worry about that.”

  “What? Of course you would!” She pulls out the hair tie in her messy bun and redoes her hair. “You can’t think like that because I want grandchildren, you hear me?” She gives me this pretend serious look. “I want to be a hot young grandmother, but like I said, no rushing into it.” She winks and I can’t help but grin.

  I’m barely getting used to the fact that I’m in love with my soul mate. I can’t exactly think about having a family with jet. I mean, he’s a junior in high school. So yeah—not happening. Still, maybe in the future . . .

  “Damn, girl,” Bayleigh says. “I can see it in your eyes. You two are the real deal. You’re just as crazy about my son as he is about you, huh?”

  Heat rushes to my cheeks and I’d almost rather dive off the back of these bleachers than answer her question. This is awkward, after all.

  “Yeah,” I say, breathless. “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Well, I can’t imagine a better girl for my kid. Just keep him in line, okay?”

  “Sure thing,” I say, grinning as Jett pulls off the track and rides over to us. “I’ll take care of him.”

  *

  After lunch, I lay on my stomach on Jett’s bed, flipping channels on the TV. He’s in the shower after a morning of motocross practice and I can’t wait for him to get out. Bayleigh and I made grilled chicken and a huge salad for lunch, and we bonded even more while in the kitchen.

  I’ve always liked Jett’s mom but after today, it feels like we’ve grown closer together. Like we’re family. I don’t know . . . maybe I’m just imagining it. But whatever it is, it feels good. After all, having a guy’s parents on your side is always a good thing.

  Jett emerges fully dressed and I’m a little sad I don’t get to see him walking around in nothing but a towel around his waist.

  “Lazy weekends are the best,” Jett says, stretching out his arms and diving onto the bed next to me. “We should go see a movie or something tonight.”

  “Sure,” I say, leaning over on my elbow so I can kiss him.

  “Nuh-uh,” Jett says when I roll back over onto my stomach. “I don’t want just one kiss.”

  Warmth fills my stomach when I see him gazing at me, his eyes full of desire. I roll over to my back and put a finger to my lips. “Hmm . . . then what do you want to do?”

  Jett is never one to miss an opportunity of being close to me. He seizes the moment now, rolling on top of me, holding up his weight on his elbows. “I want to do this,” he says, dropping his lips to my neck. The stubble on his chin tickles, his breath on my neck sending chills down my shoulder.

  I slide my hands under his shirt and up his back, feeling the taunt muscles under my fingertips. I lift my head and kiss him slowly, our tongues exploring each other. “Why aren’t you closer?” I whisper, whining because he’s holding himself too far above me. I want to feel his body against mine.

  “I just like to torture you,” he whispers, kissing me harder.

  I grumble and wrap my arms around his neck, trying to pull him closer. He gets this cocky grin and straightens his elbows, keeping himself a foot above me on the bed.

  “You need to be closer,” I say, kissing his collarbone.

  “Oh, but it’s so much fun to mess with you,” Jett’s raspy voice sends tingles down to my toes.

  That’s it. I wrap my arms around his neck until my fingertips touch my elbows, and then I swing my legs around his stomach. I’m like a sloth on a tree branch as I pull myself up to him, holding on tight until I’m happily snuggled against him.

  He laughs and bends at the elbows, slowly lowering us until my back hits the bed. I keep my legs wrapped around his stomach, feet hooked at the ankles.

  “That’s hot,” he whispers, letting more of his body weight press against me.

  My hips grind into his, and his breath hitches.

  Then his freaking phone rings.

  “Ignore it,” he whispers, his hand sliding down my side while he kisses me passionately, his body feeling so damn good against mine.

  But three phone calls later and our make out is kinda ruined. He breaks away from our kiss, and leans over on his elbow. “I wonder who that is,” he mutters, casting a scornful look toward his phone on the nightstand.

  I slide my finders down his chest, feeling the ripples of his muscles until I get down to the waistband of his jeans. “You should probably go check that,” I whisper against his lips.

  He kisses me one more time, teasing me with his tongue, and then he leaps off the bed, leaving me cold and aching with desire.

  “Ugh, it’s D’andre,” he says, holding up his phone. “Wonder what he wants . . .” His face glows from the phone screen and I roll over on my stomach, watching him.

  His eyes squint together while he reads a message. “Oh shit,” he mutters, running a hand through his hair. “No, no, no.”

  My brows pull together. “What is it?”

  He looks up at me and shakes his head. “I’m fucked.”

  Chapter 26

  My eyes blur as I stare at D’andre’s text for the tenth time. Why the hell is this happening to me? I try to be a good person. I’ve turned over a new leaf, settled down. I don’t steal or kick puppies. But I guess the sins of my past refuse to let themselves disappear, refuse to let me truly start over.

  “Babe?” Keanna says, pushing up to a sitting position on my bed. “Is someone dead?”

  “My career, probably.” I throw my phone onto the bed and sit, sinking my head into my hands. Keanna reaches for my phone, probably to read D’andre’s text.

  “I don’t understand what this means,” she says a few seconds later. The bedspread shifts around as she climbs over and sits down next to me. “What is Girlfriend Beware?”

  My fingers curl into my hair. I sit up and then exhale sharply, wishing all of my anger would go out with my breath. It doesn’t.

  “Girlfriend Beware is this stupid website that some seniors set up a couple of years ago. I was a freshman at the time and it became a big deal when a bunch of senior guys got called out on it. Basically, it’s a blog where girls send in stories about guys who are cheaters or liars. It’s spread out all over the county now, not just in our school.”

  D’andre’s text wasn’t very long, but I know what it means. He’d simply texted: Shit man, you’re on girlfriend beware.

  “Okay first of all, that’s really stupid and secondly,” Keanna says, pushing off my bed. She walks over to my desk and opens my laptop. “Let’s see what they posted, hmm?”

  I run my hand down my face. “No way, I don’t even want to know.”

  But when she opens the browser and searches for the website, I can’t help but go over there and peek over her shoulder.

  The website is rudimentary, set up on some free blog hosting site. The only user who ever makes the posts is someone called TruthSeeker, but on the side of the website it has a link for girls to send in their stories to be posted.

  And right there on the homepage, is a photo of me, probably stolen from someone’s Facebook page. I’m holding a beer and smiling, but not at the camera. It’s at one of the lake parties, a couple years ago, judging by the length of my hair.

  “Jett Adams makes this week’s list of guys to stay far away from,” Keanna reads aloud. “Actually, make that guy of the year. Ladies, you don’t want to go near this handsome bastard.”

  “Ugh, I don’t want to hear anymore,” I say, turning around and walking to my window. I stare outside, watching a bird fly between the powerlines.

  “It’s not too bad, Jett.” Keanna scrolls through the page, speed-reading it all. I’m cringing inside, but I’ve already decided that if we’re going to be together, we’ll eventually know everything about each other. There’s no
thing on that website that I should keep from her anyway, so it doesn’t matter if she reads it, despite how much I hate the idea.

  Keanna clicks off the website and closes my laptop. “It’s really not that bad, babe.” She joins me in front of my window and wraps her arms around my waist.

  “It is bad.” I sigh and slide my hand around her back. “This is bad for my career.”

  She peers up at me. “How?”

  “It’s still two years before I can go pro, but the motocross world is very much a family sport. Racing teams won’t want me on their team if I have drama surrounding me. I’ve seen it happen to guys before. If a racer cheats on his wife, he’s out. Hell, it’s what happened to my dad. He got in a fight with some guy and they kicked him off the team.”

  Her chest inflates. “Hmm . . .” Then she spins around, twisting out of my arms and heading straight toward my computer again.

  “What are you doing? I don’t like that look,” I say, following her.

  “No worries. I have an idea.”

  I watch curiously as she navigates back to the webpage and scrolls down to the bottom. There’s some contact information and she searches it on some other website. Soon, she’s on a domain hosting page and it says the owner of the website is Jennifer Upton, a name I vaguely recognize from my freshman year of high school.

  “If this works, you owe me a backrub,” she says, winking.

  “All you have to do is ask,” I tell her, folding my arms across my chest while she types the number into her phone, after first loading an app that claims it’ll make her number private on their caller ID.

  “What exactly are you going to say?” I ask.

  She gives me a devilish grin. “It’s ringing,” she whispers. She waits a beat and then, in a super professional voice she says, “Hello, I am looking for Jennifer Upton. Excellent, this is Julie from District Attorney John Fuller’s office.”

  I lift any eyebrow. I’m pretty sure she just made up that name—it’s not like we go around talking about DA’s all the time. Keanna’s lips curl into a smile. “It has come to our attention that a slanderous post involving our client, Jett Adams, has been posted to your website called Girlfriend Beware. I am giving you twelve hours to remove the content from your site or we will be proceeding with a warrant for your arrest, pending serious defamation charges.”

  I put a fist over my mouth, trying not to laugh. Keanna nods, her eyes focused not on me, but on the task at hand. “I see. Okay well, it’s very much appreciated. I’ll alert the DA and verify that the content is removed and all charges will be dropped. If it’s not, however, I’m afraid there are no second chances. Okay. Mmhmm, thanks. Have a great day.”

  She ends the call and her professional smile turns into a smirk. “Bitch believed the whole thing. It sounded like she was crying and she promised to remove the post and never mention your name again.”

  My jaw hits the floor. “You were just bullshitting all of that legal jargon, right?”

  She nods, an evil smile playing on her lips. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure DA’s don’t handle stuff like that,” she says, shrugging. “Luckily, I was betting on the fact that a girl who started a website like this in high school would now be just as stupid as she was back then.”

  Keanna pretends to brush something off her shoulder. “Your problem is solved, my dear.”

  “I love you,” I say. I throw my arms around her and lift her off her feet, swinging her around and around. She giggles and holds on tightly, burying her face into my neck.

  When I set her back on the floor, she leans her head back and kisses me. I brush her wild hair back into place. “You are the greatest girlfriend in the world.”

  Her eyes sparkle. “I know, I know.” She snorts and shakes her head. “I can’t believe that worked.”

  Chapter 27

  I hold it in pretty well. I smile and laugh and revel in my victory of pretending to be the District Attorney’s assistant and saving the day. Jett doesn’t even suspect that anything is wrong, and that’s how I know I’m really pulling this off.

  Normally he can read me like a freaking book, but tonight he just hangs out, being all romantic and fun and he doesn’t even mention once that something might be wrong with me. Maybe he was just too preoccupied with the horror of finding that shit posted online about him. Or maybe I’m just becoming a really good liar.

  I hold his hand all the way back to my house, where we kiss at the back door and I tell him I love and he says he loves me, too. It’s a normal goodbye for us. As soon as he starts walking back home, I go inside, close the door behind me, and let the tears fall.

  “Keanna!” Becca’s voice makes me jump, and I realize with humiliation that I’m not the only person in the kitchen, despite the fact that most of the lights are off. Only a glow from a light underneath the cabinets is on, but I see Becca sitting at the breakfast table, holding a package of Girl Scout cookies. She stands and rushes over to me. “What’s wrong, honey?”

  I wipe away my tears and change the subject. “Are you eating cookies in the dark?”

  She shrugs and glances back at the table, where her half-eaten package of Thin Mints waits. “I guess, yeah. But it’s not what it seems. I was just too lazy to bring them back to bed with me.”

  “Can I have some?” I ask.

  “Of course, but you’re going to tell me why you’re crying.”

  Becca joins me at the table and we share the cookies in the near dark of the kitchen. I’m pretty sure she’ll never drop the subject, so there’s no point in trying to escape her inquiring gaze. Plus, the tears keep threatening to spill out of my eyes again, so I guess I should talk about it.

  “Just some drama happened with Jett today,” I begin, biting into another cookie. “Some girl posted a story about him on a website, saying he can’t be trusted and then she went on to insult me because I’m his girlfriend.”

  That’s the part I hadn’t told Jett about. Since he didn’t want to read the post himself, I’d only skimmed it out loud, but I read the whole thing to myself. They called me a rat face, and desperate. And anorexic. Whatever the hell that means, since I eat all the time.

  Becca listens intently while I tell her all of this, summarizing all the points of the post for her even though I’d left them out for Jett. He would have just gotten mad and made things worse by trying to stick up for me. Luckily, I can stick up for myself, at least in public. Internally, I feel like shit.

  “The post is gone now,” Becca says, handing me another cookie. “So you don’t need to worry about it anymore. I bet not many people even saw it.”

  I shake my head. “That’s not the problem, really. I just—every single time I start thinking I might be worth it, that I might actually deserve happiness and a good relationship—crap like this happens and it slams me back into the real world where I don’t deserve anything good.”

  “Honey, that is not true.” Becca’s eyes light up with that fiery mother look. It’s a similar look that Jett would have had if I’d told him what the article said about me. Protective. “The girls who post stuff like that online are the ones who don’t deserve happiness. And trust me, they won’t ever find it. They’ll bounce from guy to guy, get divorced a million times, and never be happy. They’re petty, jealous, and stupid. You are so much better than that. You can’t let them get to you.”

  I smile, and it’s actually genuine. “Thanks, Mom.”

  The words just kind of come out of me. Becca’s smile lights up the whole darkened room. “I like the sound of that,” she says, sitting straighter. She grabs another cookie. “We should have these talks more often.”

  I laugh. “Once that baby is here, you’ll be getting called mom all the time.”

  “And I’ll love it!”

  When the cookies are gone, I’m feeling a little better from the mother-daughter chat. It still sucks deep down, and I know it’ll be hard for me to handle all of this pathetic drama from other girls at school. I still have to endure the occ
asional rude words or stuck up glare in the hallways.

  “You know, you could look into homeschooling,” Becca says. “Hell, you and Jett could both do it. He used to beg to be homeschooled so he could focus more on motocross and now that he’s close to going pro, it might be a good option for him. That way you two could be happy together and not worry about those idiots in the school.”

  “Isn’t that just running away from the problem?” I ask while I trace the chevron patterns on the placemats.

  She shrugs. “Probably. But it could also be argued that you’re choosing a healthier way to live your life and be happy without letting the negativity of others get you down.”

  I give her a pointed look. “That sounds like something on one of your paintings.”

  She grins. “That doesn’t make it any less true. But think about it, okay? High school is overrated and you two could totally homeschool yourselves if you want. They do it all online now.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I say. And then because she’s the greatest adopted mom in the world, I get up and give her a quick hug before heading to my room.

  After a shower, where I let the hot water wash away my tears and the stresses of the day, I crawl in bed and call Jett.

  “Hey, beautiful,” he says. The sounds of the Xbox roar in the background. “Hold on a sec.” I hear him shut off the TV. “What’s up?”

  I try to sound neutral as I tell him all about Becca’s suggestion of us becoming homeschooled. Truth is, I’m not even sure how I feel about it. Part of me thinks it’d be awesome to sleep in late and teach myself, maybe even graduate early. The other part of me says the only reason I even went to school without getting a GED was to appease Jett, so we could have this fun high school experience together. So quitting it all would be kind of stupid, right?