Inside of You (Jessa & Paxton #2) (20 page)

“I don’t care,” she calls back
.

I lay back in her bed and laugh at how fucking stupid this whole
situation is. Jessa’s phone buzzes from the bedside table, which is good. She’ll probably come back for it soon. The girl doesn’t go nowhere without her phone. I look over at it- it’s a text from Emily. I’m not gonna go snooping around in the girls business, so I ignore it.

I ignore it for about thirty seconds before I remember what Jessa was doing when I walked in here – looking at pictures that Stella took of the band. I pick her phone up and open up her internet. I’m expecting it to be the radio
station’s home page, but it’s not. It’s an Instagram account. Stella’s Instagram account.
What the fuck?
Someone should have notified me if we were giving that girl permission to post shit on her own personal accounts.

I look at the close up shot of me that Jessa has it opened to. 
I’m pissed off and laughing to keep from screaming at her. The captions says,
Mine
. I look back at the picture and begin to see what Jessa would have seen with this word attached to it. With that one word, the intense anger in my eyes could look like intense passion. The half-smile on my face could look playful instead of irritated.  Then I see the hash tags and it takes me a minute to separate the words, ‘cause I’m honestly not expecting Stella to be so low down and fucking dirty, but then they all become clear.
Stella and Paxotn. Baby’s big night. Don’t be jealous. Living in love. Warming him up.
Holy. Shit.

I go back to the pictures of the show, all of them looking like something they aren’t because of the words Stella has attached to them.
The last one is a picture of me leaving the Lincoln. You, of course, can’t see that I’m following Vi out the door and Stella’s stupid lies make it sound like I left there with her.
Jesus Christ
. I was actually feeling bad for that bitch. Seeing things through her eyes, thinking she was innocent in the way our relationship went down and I was the fucking villain. But this shit is crazy.

Why the hell can’t Jessa just
talk to me about this shit? She never even brought this up to me. Did she believe it? Are these stupid pictures the reason she’s trying to kick my ass out of her life? Why she wants to be my friend? This shit cannot be real. I close the pictures down and glance through the thumbnails and my anger becomes so overwhelming that I’m having trouble making out the small images. I click on one and realize it’s of the run through we did at The Lincoln a couple of days before the show. I didn’t know Stella was there but her fucking captions and hash tags make it sound like it was something we did together.
Fucking hell.

Then I get to a photo of the night I wa
s tripping in the back room of The Open Bottle and I start to hate myself. Jesus, I am so fucking stupid. Of course Jessa wants out of this shit with me. She thinks I’ve been lying to her all along. She would have no choice after looking at bullshit like this. It looks like I’m with Stella and it looks like I’m completely cool with the fact that she is snuggled up on my chest, her hands all over me. This one don’t even need captions or hashtags.
Motherfucker
.

I get out of Jessa’s bed and head to the spare bedroom, t
hrowing on my jeans and a t-shirt before heading out to my car with Jessa’s phone in my back pocket. I head to Emily’s place, thinking that’s where Jessa probably went.

No one responds to my pounding on the cabin door, so I take the path
to Emily’s grandparent’s farm. I see Emily out in the pasture with her horse. She’s alone and my heart sinks. She spots me and starts heading my way with the horse, so I meet her half way.

“Pax, what are you doing here?” she asks confused. “Is
everything all right? I texted Jess a little while ago, but I haven’t heard back. Is she okay?”

“Jesus, no,
Em. She’s not okay. Did you know about this bullshit?” I ask her, Jessa’s phone in my hand, Stella’s Instagram account opened up on it.

“Yea
h… Jessa didn’t bring it up to you?”

“No,
Em. She didn’t. She just keeps telling me she’s done with me, but doesn’t bother to mention it’s because of this bullshit. Is this why she’s doing that shit?”

Emily bites her lip, like she’s not gonna tell me what she knows.

“Em, she’s given me nothing. She wants us to go back to being friends. She wants me to leave her here and she wants me back in Chicago. If there is something I need to know about, if there is something I can do to convince her that I love her and I would never hurt her, you gotta help me out. I can’t lose her.”

“Shit, Pax. What happened to her? I mean, the Jessa I know would have
reamed your ass the second she found out about that disturbing account. I didn’t push her because she was trying not to upset you before your show at the Lincoln, but why is she still not talking to you about it? That’s just not like her.”

“She didn’t ask me about this bullshit
because of my show?”

“Well yeah, Pax. I
mean, she wanted you to do well. She didn’t want you to lose your focus.”

“Who gives a shit about that fucking show? If she had been sitting here, thinking
something was going on with Stella and me ever since that night at The Bottle, she should have talked to me.”

Emily cocks her head at me. “Did you just open up the first few pictu
res before tearing out of wherever you were to come looking for her?”

“What do you mean the first few
pictures? What the hell else would she have pictures of? That was the first time I had seen her since Jessa left me.”

“
Did you know about her Instagram account?

“No. I don’t know
anything about her anymore. I don’t go searching for her through social media.”

“Shit, Pax,” Emily says, shaking her head. “Danny,” Emily calls to wherever her man is on the farm.

Like magic, he is by her side in a matter of seconds. “You okay?” he asks her.

“Yea
h, but I need to talk to Paxton for a few minutes. Can you take Winnie?”

“
Yeah, of course,” he tells her, leaning down to kiss her before taking Winnie’s reigns and walking away.

“Come on,”
Em tells me, heading towards the road. She takes a path through a small patch of trees that separates her grandparent’s land from the Donovan’s. She heads to my car and gets in on the passenger side. I get in on my side and wait to hear what kind of shit she’s gonna tell me. She pulls Jessa’s phone out of my hand and taps it a few times before handing it back to me. “This is all Jessa’s been doing since she found out about this account the first night she came back here. All she has been doing is looking at those pictures.”

I stare at the pictures – almost all of them of Stella and
I together. From day one. She literally has a picture of me from that first night I met her.
Jesus
. As they progress they just get worse. I’m staring at the two people in the photos wondering who the hell they are. I don’t remember being with her like this. Fuck, I mean – we look happy. Not even that, we look like we are in love. Shit, in half of them I got my hands or my mouth on her. And we are in Stella’s apartment. In her bed. Naked. And Jessa had to see this shit.
Holy fuck
. When that thought hits me I can’t look anymore ‘cause it’s painful. I can feel Jessa’s pain. I throw the phone up on the dash.

“You need to look at all of them
, Paxton,” Emily tells me. Apparently there are so many I couldn’t have possibly scrolled through them already.

“I can’t look at that bullshit,” I mutter.

“You need to, Paxton. You need to know what she’s seen so that when she is being all crazy and alluding to things you don’t think exist, you can understand.”

“Just give me the highlights,
Em. That shit makes me sick.”

“Well obviously, based on how happy you look in the p
hotos and the captions and hashtags, Jessa came to the conclusion that her instinct, which grew stronger every time she had to see you with Stella, was correct and that you did actually love her. In fact, she thinks Stella is the love of your life and that what you have with Jessa can’t compete with three years of Instagram photos. And if I didn’t know you, and didn’t understand what you and Jessa have, I have to admit that I would totally agree with her. You shouldn’t have pretended like you never loved Stella, that what you had with her meant nothing.”

I lean my head against the
steering wheel, wanting to disappear from Em’s honesty and reality altogether. Who fucking knew there was years of photographs of me with that girl out there? I mean, shit, if I came across that hit of Jessa with another guy I would be way more fucked up than Jessa’s been. “I never did love her, Em. I mean, shit, maybe I thought I did, but what the hell did I know? I didn’t know anything until I stepped into Jessa’s life. I don’t even remember most of that shit with Stella. I was so fucked up during those years. Most of my life with her is a blur.”

“But you understand what it did to Jessa to see that, right? You get that she’s not being crazy and irrational.”

“Yeah… I do.”

“Okay. Pax, I love you and I love her, and I
realize this is a lot for you to take in, but I’m going to run through the highlights of the photo’s of you two ‘living in love’.”

“Yep,” I mutter, my head still firmly planted on the steering wheel.

“The
first picture she saw of the two of you wasn’t on Stella’s account. It was a fan picture of you two at the bar. Stella was on your lap and you guys looked happy. She probably could have dealt with that but your hand was buried in Stella’s hair and something about that set Jessa off and she ended up finding all of the rest of this crap.”

My hand in her hair? That don’t
make no sense. The only hair I’ve felt the need to touch as much as I can is Jessa’s. But, shit, I mean I probably put my hand in Stella’s hair at some point and some motherfucker caught it on his camera.

“Obviously
, Jessa hates the pictures of the two of you in bed, and she hates the abundance of pictures where you have your mouth or tongue on her…”

“Jesus,
Em,” I mutter, feeling physically sickened by her words.

“But what hurt the most were the
pictures of you just looking at Stella who is holding the camera. The look on your face. The way she thought you only looked at her.”

“I never looked at Stella like I look at Jessa,” I mutter.

“When you’re up to it, look through all nine hundred pictures and see for yourself. God knows Jessa’s looked at them all a million times.”

Nine
hundred pictures.
Jesus
. I looked at maybe ten of them before it was too much. I’m surprised Jessa didn’t just ram a fucking knife through my balls.

“I think the deal was sealed when she found the
picture of the matching tattoo you got with her.”

I sit up
from the steering wheel now so I can look at Em. “What did you just say?”

“The matching tattoo…the one of the birds.”

I shake my head at her, completely confused.

“Jesus, Pax,” Emily mutters, grabbing
the phone of the dash and whipping her finger across the screen until she finds what she’s looking for. She hands the phone over and I look at it. Stella is on my lap, my tongue is licking her neck. I have to hold down the bile in my stomach. And then I see what Em is talking about. “What the fuck,” I mutter into the phone like it’s gonna give me answers. Stella’s got her arm propped against my back and her feather tattoo, that breaks off into black birds, aligns perfectly with my neck tattoo when she has her arm wrapped around my back. “Holy fucking shit,” I mutter.

“Read the tags,” Emily tells me.

I don’t want to, but I force myself to read Stella’s words. ‘Our latest tattoo,’ it says, insinuating that we not only got this one together, but that there are more. Her hash tags say, birds of a feather, flock forever, Pax and Stell, In Love Forever, Living In Love.

I drop the phone and open my door, getting my head outside just before I
spew my guts all over the Donovan’s driveway.

#

When I get back to Jessa’s house I’m already shaking, my whole body is vibrating. Then I see Dylan’s sad ass Corolla parked in the driveway. As I pull closer I can see Dylan propped against it, talking to Jessa who is standing in front of him, barefooted, her breasts completely obvious under her dress. My instinct is to fly out of the car and shove that asshole’s eyes into his skull but I know how unfair that is and the pain crushes my chest again when I think about the shit Stella has put Jessa through.

I get out of the car and walk to them, shoving my hands in my pocket
s so that I don’t do something stupid like bust Dylan’s face or tear Jessa away from him and tell her she don’t get to talk to him anymore.

“Where were you?” Jessa asks me when I’m next to her.

“I was looking for you.”