Flutter (29 page)

“I never slept with him!” I insisted and sat up on my
knees.

“No, I’m just telling you what I was thinking.” He
shook his head. “And you know what I realized? I’d forgive you of
anything!” What he was saying sounded good, but he didn’t feel
good. He was completely agonized, and I had done this to him.

“I’m not giving you permission, but
you could do anything, and I would just forgive you. I
couldn’t
not
.”
Jack stared off at nothing, thinking. “I don’t know if you know
what that’s like. Even if what you do kills me, I would…” With
bated breath, I watched him.

“You could kill me, Alice,” he looked at me
seriously. “That’s how much you mean to me. As foolish and
masochistic as that makes me, you are so much to me that even if it
destroys me to be with you, I’ll be with you!

“And I don’t care why you kissed him or what you did.
I don’t even really wanna know. But I am begging you to please
never do anything like this again. Because I love you so much, and
I am trusting you with far too much, but I don’t know how to be any
different! You just… you can’t do this to me anymore, okay?
Please?”

“I promise! I’ll never do anything!” I got up off the
bed and ran over to him, unable to contain myself anymore. Putting
my hands on his cheeks, I looked into his wounded blue eyes. “I am
so sorry. I never wanted this, and I’ll never, ever do it again. I
promise you. I love you so much, Jack.”

“You better,” he whispered.

Finally, he kissed me. I had thought that I had truly
lost him, and there was this panicked insistence to the kiss. I
wrapped my arms around his neck and held him to me. His mouth was
warm and wonderful, and I knew nothing in the world tasted better
than he did.

My thirst peaked at that, and my heart pounded
hungrily in my chest, but I denied it. I just wanted to be with
him, physical and present, in the moment.

“Run away with me.” He rested his forehead against
mine and knotted his fingers in the thickness of my hair.

“What?” I asked, thinking I’d misheard him.

“Run away with me,” he repeated and moved back a
little so he could look me in the eyes. “I don’t wanna stay here
anymore. Everyone lied to me. Peter is still going after you, and
Mae tried to kill me. There’s no reason for me to stay. Let’s run
away together.”

“What about Milo?” My mind scrambled. There was
something exciting about the idea of just running off with him, but
I couldn’t just pick up and leave like that. “And Jane?”

“Jane?” His brow furrowed. “What about Jane?”

“She’s here, in Peter’s room.” I had forgotten that
Jack hadn’t been around. “Milo saw her on Halloween, and she was
doing really terrible. So we’re helping her out, I guess.”

“Peter’s room?” Jack looked appalled.

“Yeah, he’s sleeping in the den. Everyone is playing
musical beds,” I waved it away.

“This house is too small for this many people,” Jack
pointed out. “And that’s just another reason why we should move
out.”

Running away might be too extravagant for me. I
didn’t have a job, and Jack worked with Ezra and Peter. I didn’t
want to leave Milo, but I didn’t think that Jack couldn’t support
the four of us, since I’d probably have to include Bobby in the
equation. Maybe he could, but if we were running away from Peter
and Ezra, I wasn’t sure if that meant he’d quit his job too.

Not to mention I was still having issues with
bloodlust, ones that could prove potentially fatal to everyone.

“What are you thinking?” he pushed a strand of hair
off my forehead.

“I don’t care if we leave Peter, but I don’t think
I’m ready to leave everyone else,” I said finally.

“I can’t live with Peter anymore, and I don’t think
you should either,” Jack said. “And I don’t really want to be
around Mae.”

I chewed my lip and looked up at him. He’d just come
back, and I really didn’t want to lose him again, but I wasn’t
ready to sacrifice everything else just to be with him.

“Okay,” he said. “How about this? I keep working with
Ezra, and we start looking for a place of our own in the Cities,
with room enough for Milo and Bobby to stay with us as often as
they want. We’ll still be close to everybody, and Milo can go back
and forth if he wants, but me and you will finally have some
privacy.”

“Okay,” I nodded, but the idea made me nervous.

After seeing what Milo did to Bobby and Jonathan did
to Jane, I wasn’t so keen on the idea of privacy with Jack. Yes, I
really, really, really wanted to do things with him, but I loved
him too much to kill him.

“I have barely slept in three days,” Jack yawned.
“And it’s not even noon yet. What do you say we get some
sleep?”

“Sounds good,” I smiled and gave him a kiss on the
lips.

He pulled off his tee shirt and shorts, opting to
sleep in his boxers, which was fine by me. Few people in the world
looked as amazing in their underwear as Jack did. I crawled into
bed, and he climbed in after me. He lay on his back so I could curl
up in his arms, resting my head on his chest.

“I missed you so much,” he said, running his fingers
through my hair.

“Me too.” I squeezed him tightly, then thought of
something. “Where did you sleep for the past three days?”

“Hotel,” Jack chuckled a little. “I just got a room
at a hotel downtown, and I didn’t leave until an hour ago. I
couldn’t take being away from you anymore, so I came home.”

“You should’ve came home the first day.”

“I know, but I had some thinking to do,” he sighed.
“And it worked out okay. I mean, I’m here with you now, aren’t
I?”

“That you are.” I kissed his chest, then lay my head
back down.

Jack must not have been kidding about not getting any
sleep, because within seconds, he was sound asleep. I stayed awake
longer than him, thinking about all the things he said, and trying
to come up with a solution.

I promised him that I would never hurt him again and
living with Peter might be too great a temptation for me. I
couldn’t explain it, but that made it all the more dangerous. If
Jack thought it was best to leave, it might actually be. And even
if it wasn’t, it was what he wanted, and after everything I’ve put
him through, didn’t I owe him that much?

Nobody seemed that surprised to see Jack when we got
up. Unlike me, they had all known he was coming back. Jane greeted
Jack with a shocking amount of indifference, and that’s the same
way Jack treated Mae. Mae rushed over to apologize, and he all but
pushed her back. Her face crumbled afterwards, but I couldn’t
really encourage him to forgive her. He had to do it in his own
time.

Peter had stepped out for the evening, but nobody
really knew where. I suspected that he had known Jack was around
and disappeared before things got ugly.

Jack took Ezra back to the den so they could
“discuss” things in a very mysterious fashion. It was probably
business talk and about moving out, but apparently, Jack didn’t
want everybody else to know of his intentions yet.

Mae got over being snubbed by Jack because she had
Jane to distract her. In the dining room, she had thrown down a
giant towel on the floor and set up an impromptu hair salon. Mae
always cut everyone’s hair.

Jane sat in a chair with foil and
dye in her hair, and she languidly flipped through an issue
of
Cosmo
. While
waiting for Jane’s hair to set, Mae cut Milo’s hair. For the first
time in weeks, Mae seemed to brighten up. A discussion about
lip-gloss had done what the rest of us couldn’t.

“Would you like a haircut too, love?” Mae smiled up
at me over the top of Milo’s head. Her own hair was clean and
pulled back neatly. Jane made some comment about shoes, and Mae
laughed, her eyes sparkling. “What do you say, Alice?”

“Um… no, I’m good,” I said.

“Girls’ shoes are so much better than boys’ shoes,”
Milo lamented. He lifted his head to steal a glance at Jane’s
magazine, but Mae gently pushed his head back down so she could
trim his hair.

“At least you don’t have to wear heals,” Jane said.
“I mean, they may look fantastic, but they kill to walk in. They’re
like little feet torture chambers.” Mae laughed again, the second
time in two minutes.

Taking in the scene in front of me, it finally
occurred to me what was happening. Mae had a daughter, and a
granddaughter, and a sick great-granddaughter, but all she ever
took care of were boys. Peter and Ezra needed nothing from her at
all.

When I came around, she had been so thrilled because
she thought she’d finally have a girl to pal around with, but I
spent most days lounging around in jeans. Jack was back, so I tried
to look extra pretty today, and I had still gone for jeans with a
fancy green top.

Maybe that was why Mae had bonded so much more with
Milo than she did with me. He was probably more feminine, and in a
weird way, needier than me, even though he was also far more
self-sufficient.

Enter Jane, the walking Barbie doll. All clothes,
boys, fashion, and a constant need for attention, the exact thing
Mae needed. I’m not sure if this solved Mae’s crisis over what to
do about her terminal great-granddaughter, but it lifted her
spirits for a while.

For her part, Mae seemed to be making a massive
improvement on Jane as well. She had already put on some weight,
not enough for Jane to complain, but enough where she could almost
pass for someone that wasn’t anorexic.

The wound on her neck had healed, leaving a mangled
scar. Vampire bites usually don’t leave scars or marks of any kind,
but if the tissue is damaged often enough, it’s going to scar.
Eventually, her father would probably have to pay for some cosmetic
surgery to fix that, but for now, even she wasn’t whining about
it.

I felt weirded out watching the three of them laugh
and titter about boys and clothes. Mae and Jane getting along I
could understand, but I had never imagined that Milo and Jane could
really enjoy each other.

One of the positive side effects from Jane spending
so much time in the company of vampires was that she had grown more
immune to the charms of our pheromones. She wasn’t tripping over
herself to be with Milo or Jack or Ezra the way she would’ve been
before, although she did seem to be nursing a crush on Peter.

I moved onto the living room to wait out Jack’s
discussion with Ezra. Bobby sat cross-legged in the middle of the
living room with a sketch pad on his lap and stared up at the
television intently. This was the first time I’d seen anyone
watching the new flat screen, other than the dog. Instead of
watching some action packed blockbuster that got the most out of
the HD, Bobby had the TV on CNN.

I assumed he was trying to seem smarter in some way.
He had on thick black glasses that I had never seen him wear
before. On closer inspection, I saw a fairly nasty black eye from
the fight the other day, and he tried to mask it with fashion
glasses and side bangs. He had another smaller bruise on his chin,
but the worst of them were hidden under his shirt on his chest and
abdomen.

“What are you watching?” I flopped
back on the couch. The news wasn’t my favorite thing, but it had to
be better than watching the re-imagining of
Steel Magnolias
going on in the
dining room.

“Anderson 360
,” Bobby replied absently. “It’s for school.”

“How is it for school?” I raised an eyebrow. “And I
didn’t think you still went to school.”

“I go to school during the day, when you’re sleeping.
A whole lot of things happen during the day that you don’t even
know about,” Bobby said. Still staring at the TV, he sketched
furtively on the pad. A box of charcoals lay next to him on the
floor, and he had the sleeves pushed up in his shirt, so he was
getting black smudge marks all over his tattoos. “I’m supposed to
watch the news for an hour and draw how it makes me feel.”

“How does it make you feel?” I asked.

“Like the whole world is coming to an end.” He didn’t
sound that upset by it. I sat up straighter, trying to see what he
drew, but I was at the wrong angle to really see his sketch pad, so
I flopped back on the couch.

The TV, I could see, so I watched it to see what had
Bobby worrying. The screen had been divided into two boxes. The
smaller one had news correspondent Anderson Cooper explaining the
story, which took place in the big box. It showed a giant boat,
like an ocean liner or a tanker, that appeared to have crashed into
the shore. The boat tilted to the side as helicopters and smaller
boats swarmed around it. The bottom of the screen said “Cape Spear,
Newfoundland,” but other than that, I didn’t really understand what
I was looking at.

“So what’s going on?” I asked Bobby.

“An oil tanker crashed into Canada,” Bobby nodded to
the screen. “The hull was ruptured, but hardly any of the oil
leaked out. They’re saying it’s a miracle, because if it had, it
would’ve been like four times as bad as the Exxon Valdez cause this
boat is much bigger.”

“I don’t know what that is.” It sounded familiar to
me, and considering the context of the conversation, I should’ve
gotten it.

“It was an oil tanker that crashed by Alaska in
1989.” Bobby glanced back at me. “I didn’t really know that off the
top of my head. They were just talking about it a lot.”

“But there isn’t an oil spill, is there? Not really?”
I squinted at the TV, trying to see a sheen on the water around the
tanker. “So what’s the big deal? How does that make you feel like
the end of the world?”

“Because of
why
the tanker crashed.” He stopped
sketching and stared at the TV in kind of amazement. “The whole
crew died.”