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And before the message fully registers as sent, my phone starts ringing in my hands. I slide the green answer bar over.
“Jaxon? As in YOUR Jaxon?” she shouts as soon as the line clicks on.
“Well, he never wasmyJaxon. But yes, him.”
“What the hell happened?”
I recounted the entire night to her and as suspected, Jaelynn wasn’t entirely shocked when I told her about Jax and Liam, considering he was always that way with me and she can understand where Jax is coming from. She told me to give him a chance. But I don't really know what that means right now because in Jax's eyes, he left me as his best friend, and he may never really know how what he did affected me. And him coming back doesn't really mean the same thing to me as it might to him. It's not going to be easy to look at him the same way ever again. Plus, there’s the part where I never returned any of his calls or texts. I wonder what he thinks about that or if he doesn’t even care.
After hanging up the phone and downing a few Ibuprofens, I get myself out of my bed and dressed for the day.
I opt for a more casual look today; A pair of black leggings, an oversized Carhartt t-shirt and a white ball cap to throw over my hair, which I leave down. I slide on my Chucks and head down the stairs to have breakfast with my family.
Saturday mornings are my favorite. No one has to work, so we have a normal family breakfast and sometimes we'd go shopping or maybe the movies. There are also times we kind of go our own separate ways and then come back together to get ready to go out for dinner.
I turn the corner, hearing my dad sing his favorite Tejano song in the kitchen while he twirls my mom like she's a ballerina. Her laughter soothes my mind as I open myself up to the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.
My parents really are a dream couple. I might give my mom a hard time and vice versa, but one thing you’ll never catch me saying is that my parents didn’t love each other.
They catch me watching and jump out of their love-lost trance.
“Morning.” I wave, walking over to give my dad a kiss on his cheek. My mom swipes at her apron and pretends to busy herself back by the stove.
“Smells good.” I observe as the smell of brown sugar waffles and loaded hash browns wafts through the air. I also smell fresh coffee brewing which calls my name like a siren.
I walk toward the coffee pot and pull myself a ceramic mug out of the cabinet above it before pouring myself a cup. I turn around to the fridge to grab the cream and I catch my dad with a worried look on his face. He drags it over to my mother then back over to me.
I stir the creamer into my coffee, put it away and take a nice little sip. Then I see both of my parents staring at me like I'm the one made of ceramic and that I might break if either one of them so much as sneezes. The feeling in the air isn't like it normally is on days like this.
“Okay…I’ll just see myself over to the dining room then.” I give them both a weird look before I start to navigate toward the dining room, coffee in hand, when my mom frantically turns around, presumably in an attempt to warn me but it’s too late.
“Hey, Holli.” A smooth-as-whisky timbre reaches my ears in a pillowy comfort. But the comfort dissipates when I see where the voice is coming from.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Jaxon is standing in my kitchen threshold, staring at me with his blue as fuck eyes and a devilish smile painted on his face as if the man himself sculpted it for this exact moment.
“Mija, that’s no way to greet our guests,” my dad says coming up behind me. I look back at him, then at my mom who seems to duck her expression behind her curtain bangs. "Traitor,"I mouth to her.
"Sorry," she mouths back.
“No, seriously. What is he doing here?” I ask as if it's not directed at him, but my eyes look nowhere but and my thumb is hooked in his direction.
I couldn't look at him at all yesterday. It hurt too much. All of the memories that I'd spent years forgetting about threatened to flood back in at the mere glance of his eyes. So I didn't do it. But right now, I can't help it.
“Ouch,” he says, feigning pain as he brings his palm to his chest.
That’s when I notice that his skin iscoveredin ink. Almost the same as mine. I only saw hints of it last night, but his short sleeved shirt allows me to take it all in. He’s got two full sleeves of delicate ink, whereas I only have one arm mapped out. His tattoos dip under his sleeves, leaving me curious as to how far they run.
The rest of him is as curiously attractive, I hate to admit. I mean, I always thought he was good looking, but he’s all grown up. His blonde hair is a little lighter than I remember though a tad dark at the root, and his bright blue eyes still have that mysterious dark ring around them. I hate that I’m close enough to smell him, which is a tangle of Heaven and Hell; dark, fresh waters and smoky, amber light. It’s infuriatingly intoxicating.
“Hollis.” I hear him say, almost a whisper, knocking me out of my zone-out.
Shit. Had he caught me staring at him?
But who cares? I don’t pretend to have been paying attention, I actually let him think I was checking him out. But only for the sake of throwing him off a bit, and it does.
He never got the chance to know the confident and straight forward me. He knew me when I was shy, and probably a little clingy at times but I didn’t like confrontation and I sure as hell hated being the center of anything. And of course, he wouldn’t know that I’ve grown a lot since then…because he doesn’t know me anymore. There’s a decade between us. Time lost.
He doesn’t know my strengths or weaknesses, my likes or dislikes. He doesn’t know the pain he caused me. Doesn’t know how it changed me. All he knows about me now is that I’m dating Liam and he doesn’t like it.
