Chapter 22
Jason
♪ Everywhere | Roosevelt
Where’s the bathroom?” Sloan asked.
“Second door down the hall,” Dad said.
“I’ll take you,” I offered, getting up from the couch. I wanted to get her alone anyway. As soon as we were out of view of the living room, I spun her and kissed her against the wall.
“Jason, your parents are going to catch us,” she whispered through a smile, looking back the way we’d come.
“I don’t care,” I breathed against her mouth. “Kiss me.”
They loved her. I’d known before I’d brought her that they would. She made me feel proud to know her, like having a woman like her care about me was its own sort of achievement. When she and Mom went to the living room after dinner, Dad had told me she was remarkable and David had asked me where the hell I found her.
When I pulled away, we were both out of breath.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the painting?” I asked.
God, how could she stop creating her own art when she had so much talent? She made me want to unravel her, take her by a corner and undo her.
“I wanted to see if you’d figure it out. Besides, you didn’t tell me you were Jaxon Waters, so now we’re even,” she said, biting her lip and glancing at my mouth. Then she looked back up. “Hey, what’s a meat raffle?” she whispered.
I chuckled. “It’s a raffle where you win meat as prizes.”
“Oh, I wondered why your parents ‘scored meat at a bar.’ That makes sense now.”
I loved seeing her experiencing my world. I wanted to show her everything. But it was more than that. I wanted to share everything with her. Like I didn’t want there to be anything that she wasn’t a part of. I wouldn’t have come this weekend if she hadn’t come with me. I would have stayed in California to be with her.
Distance from her was starting to feel like the tension on a bungee cord. The farther away I got, the stronger the urge to come back to her. And the cord felt like it was getting shorter. Like my threshold for not being with her was lowering.
What would I do if I couldn’t see her when I was on tour? It would kill me. And how would I even explain to her why she couldn’t visit? I messed around with some unstable, violent woman that I’m being forced to tour with? She might hurt you and I can’t make you safe? Here’s a song she wrote about me having sex with her, sitting in the Top 10? God, the whole fucking thing made me cringe. I was waiting to see if Ernie could get Lola off the ticket before I sat down to discuss the situation with Sloan. I wasn’t coming at her with this until I had some sort of game plan.
“You better go,” she whispered. “They’re going to think something is going on between us.”
I grinned. “Isn’t there?”
She squeezed herself sideways and out from under me and continued on to the bathroom as I watched her walk down the hall. She stopped in the doorway and made a shooing motion at me before she went in, smiling and shaking her head.
I stared after her, long after she’d shut the door, and I wondered offhandedly if this was what Dad had felt like when he met Mom…
And somehow I knew that it was.