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conds to realise he wasn’t trying to take hold of me.
I handed over my shoulder bag, and he waited while I wriggled out of my backpack. Something about the way he was looking at me made me feel like he could just as easily be watching me peeling my clothes off. It was making my heart pound with fear… and a little bit of something else that I really couldn’t deal with right now in this situation or any other.
The expression was gone when he took the backpack from me too. Maybe I’d imagined it out of my own anxiety. “Jump in. I’ll put these in the boot.”
“Your mum reminds me of mine,” Jess spoke up after I’d closed the passenger door behind me. “Just in the way she reacts to things. I wonder if he has a type.”
“I don’t want to think about what his type might be,” I said, harder than I meant to.
Jess ducked her head. “Sorry.”
“No… you don’t have anything to be sorry for.” I could see I hadn’t patched things over at all, and I wanted to just put my hands over my face, but that would probably only make Jess feel worse. Everyone who thought I wasn’t up to this was right: I hadn’t even been able to help my mum in all the years I’d tried to act as her support, what would possibly have made me think I could help a teenage girl work through something I couldn’t even begin to figure out how I would work through myself?
I needed to get out of here. Out of the car—
Both of us flinched when Steven slid into the car.
“Bye,” Ryan called as the door was closing. That was it, none of us were getting out.
“Sorry you have to leave your home because of me,” Jess muttered as I was turning around to see my family before the moving car yanked them out of sight entirely.
Steven got in before I could figure out how to explain it was just the strangeness of it all making me want one last look. “Nothing is because of you. You hear me? Don’t ever fucking think someone else being a fucking horrible human to you is your fault.”
“Sure thing.” Jess’s voice was small and surprised. She was probably finding out a lot about Steven she hadn’t known from her previous encounters with him, too.
Steven got us booked into a clean-smelling hotel with an air of not giving a fuck about the suspicious looks of the woman at the front desk. I probably looked about as underage as Jess, and Steven’s size and unsmiling persona made him seem a lot older. But once he’d walked us to the door of our room, Steven glanced at a fire escape door and announced, “I’m off.”
“No,” Jess protested, reaching towards him and only stopping herself just short. I kept forgetting, I was the only stranger to her here.
He shook her off pre-emptively. “Sorry kid, it’s better if I go back to my own bed for the moment. Less chances of getting us all into more trouble.”
Jess scowled after him as he stalked off. I had a feeling she would be more understanding if she knew about Julia, but it was my job to protect Steven’s secrets now, just as he was protecting Jess’s.
And it was also my job to focus on my relationship with Jess, not mine with Steven or hers with Steven. For this evening at least, men were a distraction that should be completely avoided.
I got the door open for us after a few false starts with the keycard, and we unpacked into what was more of a compressed house than a room, like Ashleigh’s bloody bungalow but cheaper. There was a little kitchen area with a microwave, a huge bathroom, and a sitting area with a TV.
Jess peered into the fridge. “You’re not supposed to touch the drinks and stuff in here, right?”
“I think I’ve heard something like that,” I said. “Better just leave them alone.”
We were fine while we were bouncing around getting excited about the room, but then things became uneasy. We drifted towards the couch, taking an end each, and Jess switched on the TV more easily than I would have been able to, navigating a series of menus more complicated than the average computer program.
For a while we watched some drama show I didn’t recognise. Mum usually controlled the TV back home, and she always insisted on educational programs. I didn’t know why I was insisting on thinking ‘back home’ though, since I didn’t really see how I could go back now.
I should talk to her. That was the thought that kept going through my mind, but I couldn’t get past the idea to figure out what I would say.
“Look,” Jess spoke up abruptly, “I get along with him too… there has to be something in that.”
“Steven?” So much for not focusing on men that night. “He… Jess, he’s not who you think he is.”
She screwed her face up at me. “I know he’s got issues. He doesn’t hide as much as he thinks he does. Yeah, he’s not a super-good guy… but I’ve been around bad guys my whole life. It doesn’t bother me.”
I was lucky, compared to her. Mike had always been a good guy. Even if he had terrible taste in women.
“I just don’t want to come out of this losing even more, you know?” She stared at the TV with such intensity I had a feeling she was taking in as little as I was.
I felt terrible. What could I say that would make any of this better for her?
