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“You fucking knew,” I reply, with an unmistakable growl in my voice. I couldn’t really tell you why this has bothered me so much but I think it’s purely because I lov . . . I mean care about them all and I want to share important moments like that with them and spoil them.
I’m not going to lie to myself; it stings a bit that Rip didn’t share it with me.
“Fuck,” Mason mutters, the sentiment echoed by the others as I storm ahead.
“Blue, I know you want to talk about this later but I feel like you’re letting your head run away with you right now and I just need to tell you that we don’t celebrate birthdays we never have, because of our upbringing. They’re just another day to us and we only really keep track so that we know how old we are.” Ace explains.
The sting starts to lessen as his words sink in.
“Oh fuck,” Rip suddenly appears in front of me, making me come to a stop as his hands cup my cheeks, forcing me to look up into his icy blue eyes that are more full of emotion than I thought they would be at this moment. “Jynx, baby, I promise that if I had ever celebrated my birthday like a normal person, then I would’ve told you. Honestly, and I’m not exaggerating when I say this, but my birthday means so little to me that it didn’t even cross my mind to tell the most important person in my life, and the guys all feel the same. I’m so fucking sorry that this has upset you.”
My heart feels like its soaring and breaking all at the same time, I’m stupidly happy and feeling all mushy because he said I was the most important person in his life and he made a big speech and Rip just doesn’t do that so I know he’s being sincere and also because the way he is looking at me right now is making me feel so loved. It’s breaking because if I understand him right, he’s never had a birthday, none of them have, and I’m going to have to fix that.
“You never got presents?” I ask, my lips turning down into a frown.
“Nope,” Ace replies from beside me, “our families thought it was spoiling us and an unnecessary frivolity.”
My heart pangs with another shard of pain as they all repeat that last line back to me. “Well, not anymore. From now on we celebrate birthdays together, because we care about each other and that’s what you do. Got it?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Rip grins and then gently brings his face closer to mine and brushes his lips against mine.
I smirk, “Oh, I like it when you call me that.”
“I’ll do it more often then,” he replies with a wink as he steps back.
Rip
She makes my heart beat like a drum in my chest, as soon as I realised that she was upset because of something that I said and worse, she was hurt because she thought that we didn’t want to celebrate our birthdays with her my heart dropped to my feet, I never want her to be hurt by something that I’ve said especially something that is so utterly wrong that it could never be true.
We really don’t celebrate our birthdays, we never have, and it’s never bothered us, so much so that I didn’t even think about telling her. We were so busy helping Micha and making sure that Waverly was okay that it seemed even less important than usual, and to be honest, I even forgot that it was my birthday. But seeing her face when she thought it was because I didn’t care about spending it with her, that gutted me, and I just hope that I did enough to reassure her that wasn’t the case.
From now on she will be told about every little thing, all the things that I don’t think are very important, just in case they are, and I should’ve told her. I don’t ever want her to look at me like that again.
I thread my fingers through hers as she looks around at the others, looking almost as upset about the revelation that we didn’t get presents as she did when she thought that I didn’t want to tell her.
“I mean it. From now on, we celebrate birthdays; as soon as we get home, I want to know when all of your birthdays are, and I will be putting them in my calendar, and we’re going to celebrate them,” Jynx tells us again, her voice firm.
“We know, and we can agree to that easily enough. You’ll be able to get away with surprise birthdays for a while, I can guarantee that Rip forgot it was his birthday and only remembered because you mentioned birthdays,” Rome points out.
When Jynx’s head whips around to look at me I shrug and nod, “He’s actually right, I wasn’t lying when I said that birthdays don’t mean a lot to us.”
She frowns but nods, “I get it, I just don’t fucking like it. I guess we should probably get going, I got so distracted because of this I almost forgot what we were doing like a damn rookie.”
We all smirk as she chastises herself, knowing full well that there’s no point in us trying to tell her otherwise because she’s just going to argue with us anyway.
As she starts off though a question occurs to me, and I ask, “What did you use to do on your birthdays?”
She comes to a stop and looks up at me, “Well, it depends where I was. I tried to always be with Waverly and Micha and we’d do the whole usual birthday thing, and D always tried to call me at least if he could, but that was dependent on if he was on a job.”
“And if you weren’t with them?” Mason asks, knowing that there’s more to the story when she pauses.
“Well, then I spent it much like you guys,” she shrugs.
“Except, we weren’t always aware that we were missing our birthdays, and you were,” Ace points out.
“Your mom never remembered?” Mal asks her as I squeeze her hand.
She shakes her head as a hard laugh bursts from her lips, “Don’t be silly; of course she didn’t, or actually, I guess that’s a lie. She remembered it was my birthday, and she went out of her way to ignore me or be out. She wouldn’t even acknowledge my existence on my birthday.”
