Misbehaving(51)

“Have a good night, Jess,” he said, the smile back in his voice.

“Yeah, you too,” I replied.

After we hung up, I stared at the phone for a long time. I shouldn’t have told him he could call again. Would that mess with my head completely? Could I move on if he was calling me and reminding me how I felt? No. That would be impossible. The wound would never heal. I had to tell him the next time he called. This wasn’t going to work.

JASON

Jax was sitting in the limo with a bottle of water, watching a football game when I climbed inside.

“Where’s Sadie?” I asked when I realized we were alone.

“Meeting us there. She’s picking up Star at the airport. I would have sent you to pick her up, but Star said you’re acting weird lately when she calls. So I figured it might be best if we talked before this thing tonight.”

Jax had agreed to do an event at Harvard tonight. It was for charity, and because I attended here he had agreed to it. He just had to sing a few songs and then sign some things for them to auction off. Star was also performing with him. After their appearance, we were going to head out to dinner.

Star was the female counterpart to Jax in the music industry. She was also a longtime friend of Jax’s, since they both started young and had been thrown together so much. Once Jax and Sadie went public, they stopped getting thrown together. Star and Sadie had had a rocky beginning, but they were friends now. And when Star needed a last-minute date and didn’t want anything that would cause problems for her, she called me.

“Bad week,” I replied, reaching for a water.

“Why?” he asked, studying me.

“Went to Sea Breeze last weekend,” I told him.

“Yeah, I know.”

Of course he knew. I had stayed at his place. He was still watching me.

“I saw her,” I said through clenched teeth as the image of what she had been doing flashed in my head.

“Ah, so the town’s bad girl still gets to you,” Jax said, grinning.

I hated it when he referred to her as a bad girl. He didn’t know her. He had never met her. He only knew the stories. She was so much more than that. “Don’t,” I warned him, and he stopped grinning.

“Wait . . . are you really hung up on her?”

I opened the water and took a drink. I wasn’t talking to him about this. He wasn’t any help. He had made it work with Sadie, so none of my excuses would stand with him. His life was different. Our parents weren’t trying to control him since he held their purse strings.

“You like her . . . a whole damn lot, from the looks of it.”

I glared at him. “Yes. I like her. But I fucked it up. She’s with some alternative-looking dude in a local band. He had his hands all over her.” Just remembering the way Krit had kept his arm around her shoulders like she was a possession pissed me off.

“Is this a mutual thing, or did you get in too deep with a girl who likes to play the field? From what I’ve heard, she’s a flirt.”

I slammed my water down. “What you’ve heard? You’ve only heard shit about her. You’ve never met her. You don’t know that she’s fun and when she gets embarrassed she blushes. You don’t know that she can design and make her own fucking clothes. That she pays her tuition at a local junior college and won’t get a chance to go any further because she can’t afford it. Her momma is a stripper, and the boy she grew up loving hit her and broke her heart and knocked up another woman. Yet when his drunk ass needs something, he comes to her and she sets him straight. You don’t know shit. So don’t act like you do.”

I was breathing hard when I finished, and I jerked my head around and stared out the window. I had said too much.

“Holy shit,” Jax finally said under his breath.

“What?” I snapped, still angry.

Jax shook his head. “Nothing,” he said.

I wanted to demand he explain himself, but I was afraid he’d piss me off and I’d hit him. Not a good idea since he was about to go onstage.

“I called her tonight,” I told him. I needed to say it. I needed to admit it.

“Did she answer?”

“Yeah, she did. We talked. She said I could call again.”

“Which member of Jackdown is she dating?” he asked.

I looked at him, confused. “How did you know it was Jackdown?”

Jax smirked. “I found Sea Breeze first.”

Oh. Yeah. And Sadie would know about Jackdown.

“Lead singer,” I replied, trying to block out the guy’s face.

“Krit? Really? That’s Trisha’s brother. Huh . . . ,” he said, surprised.

“What do you mean, ‘huh’?”