Inside of You (Jessa & Paxton #2) (14 page)

Chapter 14 - Jessa

The girls and I are having a sleepover at Danny and Emily’s tonight. They are trying to play it off like it was just a fun sporadic thing they decided to do before I leave, but I know better. I haven’t had a sleepover since seventh grade. I’ve definitely passed out in Nat’s bed drunk, but a proper sleepover with pajamas…
no
.

They’re doing it ‘
cause I’m a basket case. They’re doing it because they know Pax’s show is tonight. They’re doing it because they know if he happens to call when it’s over then shit is probably going to go down that will leave me more fucked up than I have ever been.

Right now we’re trying to pretend like everything is cool. Nat has been making fancy blended drinks which I’m sucking down at lightning speed. But it’s not helping. I feel awful inside. I wish I would have let
Vi come pick me up. I wish I wouldn’t have ever left him. I wish I didn’t have to face reality. I wish I was there with him now as he gets ready for his show. But I don’t know if I have a place in that life anymore. I called my advisor at school and talked to her about getting an extension on my classes in case things go exactly how I’m pretty sure they are going to go with Paxton.

I take out my phone and check Stella’s
Instagram account. She’s been posting about her ‘baby’s’ show all day, but so far the only picture has been of the empty stage they will be performing on. “Anything new?” Nat asks me.

“Don’t encourage her,” Emily mutters.

“I’m not encouraging her, she’s gonna keep checking no matter how much we manage to distract her. If there is an update, I want to know about it.”

“What’s the point of looking at it? You haven’t even asked him about her, Jessa. You’re taking all your information from her. That’s just stupid,” Emily says.

“I’ll talk to him about it after the show. You know I’m not gonna do it before.”

I refresh the page on my phone. “Fuck,” I mutter. The new picture is of the guys on stage. It’s too far away for me to make anything out besides the fact that they are there. This is real and I’m not there with him. I should be there with him.
Sound Check!
her caption reads.
#babysbignight #sexyboy #almosttime.

“What?” Nat asks.

I pass the phone over to her. “God, this girl is psycho. She’s totally obsessed with him.” Nat tries to pass the phone to Emily but she stands up and walks to the kitchen so Nat gives it back to me.

Emily comes back a minute later with a bag of chips that she is eating out of. She hands it to me and says, “Is this what we are going to do for the rest of the night… wait around for that girl to post pictures that are just gonna piss you off?”

“Yes,” Nat and I say at the same time.

Emily inhales a big breath and flops down on the couch next to me. “You guys want to play cards or something?”

“No,” Nat and I say in unison again.

“Fine.” She gives up, snatching the chips away from me. “Can I just remind both of you that Paxton is madly in love with Jessa and that they belong together? And that Stella is probably just posting these pictures in the hopes that Jessa might discover them and get pissed off at him about it?”

“Oh my god, Emily. Like those are the thoughts running through her head right now. If you left Danny for a week and he called you like four times and some girl from his past was posting pictures of the two of them together with those stupid hash tags, you would be doing the same thing she is. Hash tag, Jessa needs to know what’s going on, hash tag, living in lies.”

“You are terrible, you know that?” Emily says, throwing a pillow at Nat.

“It’s the truth, babe. We all know it,” she says, throwing the pillow back at Em.

I actually feel myself smiling. If I have to go through this I’m glad I’m doing it with
Em and Nat. But then I hit the refresh button on my phone again and there are three new photos. All close-ups of Paxton which would hurt anyway because it’s been too long since I’ve seen his beautiful face. I open up the first one. His grey eyes are hard and focused. His fat lips are parted. His face is tense so his bone structure looks more perfect than usual.
Game face
Stella has captioned it.

The next photo is his profile, he’s smiling but you can tell he’s trying not to. He’s not looking at her but the photo is so close, like she’s on his lap or kneeling between his legs.
Happy
.

In the last one, he’s leaning into her. He’s smirking and his eyes are so intense they hurt. I love that look, but only when it’s directed at me because I know exactly what’s going through his head.
Mine
, she has written. All of them have her ridiculous hash tags attached to them.
#stellandpax #babysarockstar #dontbejealous #livinginlove
, the last one has an extra hash tag,
#warminghimup.

My phone is shaking in my hand. I hate it when I can feel them, when I feel like I’m there with them as the outsider. I hate that he has let her so fully and so blatantly back into his life. He made me promise him all kinds of bullshit but I only made him promise me one thing – stay away from her. But there she is, back stage with him, so close to him, being stared at by him.

Nat pulls the phone out of my hand and gasps. “Oh my god. Sorry, Jessa, but holy shit, your man is sexy. Jesus, did he look this good when he was living here?”

I let out a bitter laugh.
My man.

“Nat,” Emily scold
s her before telling me, “Jessa, they’re just pictures.” Apparently she looked this time. I don’t know because my vision is obscured by my tears that I hate that I’m shedding for that asshole. “They don’t mean anything. You can’t make assumptions.”

All I can do is shake my head. There are no assumptions to be made. She is there with him. “Shit,” I mutter, putting my head in my hands as reality starts to cover me. Nat tries to hand me back my phone but I tell her, “I don’t want to see anymore.”

“I don’t like that you’re doing this, Jess. You don’t know anything. Call him. He’s about to perform a huge show, you are his girlfriend, you should be calling him. He wants to talk to you.”

“I can’t,
Em. I can’t hold it together with him right now. He’s got less than an hour before he gets on that stage, I’m not going to drop all this shit on him right now and I can’t hold it inside any longer.”

“Call Violet then. Ask her what’s going on. Tell her to let Paxton know you’re thinking about him,” she says with concern.

“Give me a minute. I can’t talk to any of them right now.”

“Yeah… okay,”
Em says.

I lay back on the couch and wipe the tears away. Emily hands me my frothy, fruity beverage and I drink it back, getting a brain freeze. “Motherfucker,” I mutter. “I need something with less ice and more alcohol.”

Emily laughs and then stands, bringing my drink to the kitchen. I look over at Nat who was uncharacteristically quiet during Emily’s pro-Paxton speech. She’s got my phone in her hands and looks totally immersed. Fuck this. I’m an addict. “What are you looking at?”

“Nothing bad, just pictures of Paxton and his band backstage. Last run through,” she says with mock cheer and her fingers formed into quotation marks.

“Hash tag what?”

“Obsessed with my baby. Need a life. Can’t stop stalking.”

“Really.”

“Nothing interesting. This girl needs some new catch phrases. Or what the hell do you even call this… tag lines?”

“Fuck if I know.”

“Okay… Jesus… come on now,” Nat says shaking her head.

I don’t want to know but I ask anyway. “What?”

“It’s a close up of his hand strumming his guitar. Caption – ‘Most talented hands in the world. I would know’,” Nat laughs and shakes her head.

Emily comes walking in then with my whiskey. “What the hell are you doing, Nat? Are you still looking at those pictures? Jesus, you enabler. She said she was done.”

Nat looks up at me then, startled, like she forgot for a minute that it’s my boyfriend Stella is talking about. “
Oh my god, I’m awful,” she says, dropping the phone like its poison. “Jessa, I’m sorry. God, I have to stop being such a drama whore. This is not a tabloid. This is your life.” She’s in front of me now, between my legs hugging me around my waist. “Please forgive me. I’m a shitty friend.”

I pat her head like she’s a dog. “It’s okay,” I whisper. “I would have looked eventually.”

The three of us huddle on the couch. I voluntarily ask Nat for more details about her wedding just so someone fills the air with anything but silence. I put Emily in charge of the phone because my anger is now mingled with thoughts of this huge thing Paxton is about to do and I have to know how he’s doing so I’m waiting until I know they are onstage so I can call Vi.

“Okay, you’re good,”
Em tells me, handing me my phone. I look at the latest picture. Pax is walking onto the stage. His body silhouetted in the bright lights. She was with him right up until the last minute – just like I used to be. Just like she used to be too, I guess. I don’t even look at the caption or hashtags or likes or comments.

I open up my phone and dial Violet’s number. I don’t know if she will answer. It’s a big night for Jimmy too and I doubt her phone is a priority right now, but she picks up right after the first ring. “Now, Jessa, you are calling now?” is how she greets me. “You couldn’t have called
him
before he had to go on that stage? What the hell is going on with you?”

She’s angry at me. She knows what he has been doing, she knows Stella is there with him, but she’s angry at me. Because she is his friend. She loves him. She will always defend him.

“I’m sorry, Vi,” I mutter.

“You should be sorry. What the hell is going on? Why is it such an effort for you to pick up your damn phone?”

“How is he doing? Was he okay before the show… I mean, is he feeling better. How was he?”

“Not good, Jessa. You know that. I love you, but I don’t get this. Why are you treating him this way? You are really starting to piss me off.”

Her words hurt, but I ignore them. “Is he high, Violet?” I ask her. Part of me wants her answer to be, yes, because it might be an excuse for why Stella is attached to his hip. But the bigger part of me wants her to say, no, because I don’t like thinking of him like that. I don’t know him that way and I don’t want him experiencing this night as anyone but himself.

“No, Jess. He hasn’t touched anything but beer since he came back home with me. Is that why you’re doing this to him? Because he started using again? Because he’s done now. He’s sorry and he’s done.”

Jesus
I am apparently the villain in this situation. The only thing that matters in that life in Chicago is him. None of those people give a shit about me if I’m not attached to him. “Just… don’t tell him I called. Just…take care of him,” I mutter through my tears.

“You should be the one taking care of him. What time are you coming home on Sunday?”

I guess I don’t have to keep lying to her. Paxton is safely on stage and I don’t think my staying away is going to have much effect on him. “I’m not coming back, Vi.”

“What?” she screams.

“I’m staying here for a while. I… I can’t go back there right now. I’ll come get my things when I have a chance. I’m sorry.”

“What are you talking about, Jessa? This doesn’t make any…”

“I’m sorry, Vi,” I say, cutting her off. “I have to go,” I mutter, ending the call.  

#

I didn’t sleep last night. I’m never going to sleep because every time I close my eyes all I can see is the look in Paxton’s eyes. The look that was not directed at me, but at Stella. All I can see is the shit eating grin on his face in the last picture she posted of Paxton walking out a door, his hand raised as he says goodbye.
Outta here. #goodnightbitces #itsbeenreal #babysarockstar #timeforbed.

I don’t want to go home necessarily, but I do want to crawl under my covers and never get out of bed.
Maybe I’ll never leave this town again. Maybe I’ll never talk to Pax again. Never see him again. Oh god, those thoughts, piled on top of each other are almost more than I can handle. I can already feel myself falling apart but I manage to get my mom’s minivan safely back into the garage. I take a couple of deep breaths, preparing to put my ‘life is dandy’ face on in order to fit into the fake bullshit inside that house.

Being back here just fortifies all of the reasons why I never wanted to fall in love. How
could I have forgotten what love did to my mom? How could I have forgotten the way I almost let myself get screwed over here myself? How could I have let myself believe that Paxton was different than every other guy in the world? I drop my head and push my palms into my eyes and laugh. I’m such an idiot.

I get out of the c
ar, thinking I should have changed out of my PJ’s. I can just imagine the judgmental look I’m going to get from Dean when I roll in there in my skimpy tank top and shorts, my makeup from the night before on my face, hair completely untamed.