I don’t know who Emerson is, but damn… poor girl. Jax and I “dated” for three months, and I’m still surprised I stuck around that long. Jax is wild and just too much to handle. He has a nice side, but even that got on my nerves. He could never make a decision to save his life. Every time we sat in his Camaro trying to choose where we should eat, we’d go back and forth, telling the other to just pick something. Meanwhile, all I could think about was that I bet Jace would’ve just taken charge and we’d already be eating by now.
“I don’t need to be here when Emerson comes, Jaxon. Just point me toward Jace.”
“Jace is fucking busy!” he yells. “He’s out there making something out of himself. Shouldn’t you be in Texas taking care of your child and screwing physics teachers?” I know he’s upset, and maybe in his mind, he has a right to be. But something else has to be going on in his life because Jax was never mean. Even when everything went sour between us, he had never been intentionally cruel the way he’s being now.
“You don’t know a damn thing about my life,” I state in a hard tone and stand to make my way toward his door. I may be able to let cruel words roll off my back, but in the last few years, I’ve also acknowledged that I don’t have to listen to them. And Jaxon brought up the one thing I wasn’t going to talk about. Lane is the only person on this planet who knows what really happened. Lane is the only person who ever cared to ask. No one asked. Not my mother, not my father, not Jaxon--no one cared enough to even ask.
As I make my way out of Jax’s bedroom, I find myself face-to-face with the one person that haunts my dreams. I want to hug him and I want to hit him. I hate that I still think about him. I mean, we met, we had coffee once, and we kissed twice. Why after three years do I still feel a connection with him? Have I just built him up in my head? Maybe it’s because he was the first person, outside of Mrs. Thomas and Nico, to show me real kindness. Or maybe it’s the fact that every time I saw him after that fateful day, he looked at me with such longing I swear I could feel it in my bones.
“Audrey…” he whispers in shock. He gives me that look, and I can immediately tell he still feels it. Maybe it’s purely just an attraction, but the electricity buzzing within me proves there is still something between us.
Behind me, I hear Jaxon curse under his breath. “Ignore her, Jace. Get back in here, Audrey,” he says, pulling me back into his room. I almost cry at being so close to Jace, and once again not being able to do anything about it.
This is icy territory that I’m still not sure how to approach. I could just blurt out the truth to Jaxon. I want to, God, do I want to. I want to tell him everything. I want to tell him how I’ve only wanted Jace since the moment I met him. In a way, I know Jaxon won’t care that I had only been with him to waste time. He already knew that.
The morning he brought me back home for breakfast after Cole’s party, he asked me to be his girlfriend. Right away, I refused. But then he explained that he thought I was a cool chick and we could have some fun together. He also wanted to get his mom and brother off his back, since apparently he’d been acting wild lately. He claimed that if he had a steady girlfriend, maybe they would lay off him and not worry so much. Stupidly, I actually considered his crazy idea.#p#分页标题#e#
When I later realized that Jace was a lost cause, I explained to Jax that I cared about someone I couldn’t have, and that the only way I would “date” him was if he knew that it wouldn’t be going anywhere. I also wanted to get away from my house more often. He completely agreed, saying he really only needed a buffer to keep his mom at bay. I didn’t have normal parents, so I had no idea what he was talking about.
We crafted this strange sort of relationship and friendship between us. I won’t lie, we had a good time together. But there was always something missing for both of us. If I could go back in time, I wouldn’t have agreed to it, but I was young and stupid and just trying to find an escape from my home life.
For the next three years, I compared every guy I came across to Jace, and they always came up short. That’s when Lane decided I needed to try and do something about it. I hadn’t seen Jaxon in years and I hoped the fact that we had never been in love would help to sway Jace’s opinion on the matter. Maybe Jace just needed to see that I never really meant anything to his brother and that it had always been him for me.
Nevertheless, when Jaxon pulled me away from Jace and back into his room, I realized it wasn’t my story to tell. This is his twin brother we’re talking about here. If Jace didn’t want him to know, I couldn’t hurt him even more by telling Jaxon. I spent the entire week trying to get Jace alone, but he slipped in and out of the apartment like a ghost and I couldn’t get him to listen for even a second. Halfway through the week, he stopped coming back to the apartment altogether.