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He thought about his parents and sister, who had died twelve years ago. While time had a way of slipping away from Jack, as his weeks were busy with work, one horrid memory never faded with time, since the grief and guilt still felt as intense as if it had just happened.
“It doesn’t seem like you inherited anything from your mother,” Gabriel asked, reminding Jack that he was still hanging around.
Adela pulled her hair out of her long braid, combing her wavy hair with her fingers. “Unfortunately not.”
“Why? You’re beautiful…” Gabriel said, earning an eye-roll from Jack. Gabriel was well on his way to getting thrown back into the sea with the rest of the slimy jellyfish.
Adela politely thanked Gabriel, without giving further explanation about why she’d wanted to look more like her mother.
Jack understood why. At least, he thought he did.
Every time he looked in the mirror, a vague image of his father stared back at him. It was the only thing left of his father nowadays.
Some days he couldn’t remember the exact color of the specks in his sister’s eyes or the shades of brown of his mother’s curls. He often grabbed their family picture, memorizing their faces in a hopeless effort to fight off the veiling fog time put over his memory of them. It killed him that he hadn’t brought any pictures of them with him on this trip.
Jack stuck out his pinky, curling it around Adela’s tiny one to comfort her. The zing shooting down his spine was just as comforting as it was infuriating. Their attraction felt so undeniably strong. He knew he couldn’t walk away from her once he’d have a taste.
Back home, he grew quickly tired of the girls he dated. His life consisted of rolls where he would be away for fourteen days straight with sixteen-hour workdays. Regular workweeks in between rolls consisted of project work like station maintenance or digging lines for prescribed burns.
He would hang out with the Millers and enjoy single life, often bar hopping with Zane and his brothers, who were also looking for a fun time and not a long time.
Jack sighed, thinking about Pat and the rest of the Miller crew, who undoubtedly missed them. It broke his heart that Pat had to miss Zane after everything their family had been through. He was sure that Zane only put on a brave face, joking around and drinking beer to get his mind off his home front.
Adela lowered her head, taking in their linked pinkies. She didn’t pull back her hand, just like she hadn’t done last night.
“I’m eh, I’m going to head back…” Gabriel said.
“See you later,” Jack said, his eyes still trained on Adela.
“I’ll see you in a bit,” she said to Gabriel.
“Por supuesto…”Gabriel said with a wink before he swiftly descended the rocks. Jack watched his friend walk in a direct line to his twin before the two of them wandered off in the opposite direction of their camp.
No matter how much they’d grown apart over these past few years during Gabriel’s relationship with Mary, the twins always had each other’s back.
“Did he come on to you?” Jack blurted before he could help himself.
She let go of his pinky to braid her hair again. “He was just joking. We were talking about how bad I am at flirting, so he offered to help.”
Jack snorted. “Such a gentleman. Did he tell you he’s supposed to get married next week?”
Jack left out that Gabriel called off the wedding. The idea of Gabriel showing Adela how to flirt had been enough for Jack to throw the first punch. He would not sit by and let his friend swoop in.
With any other girl, Jack wouldn’t be the least bothered if she would switch to one of his friends. He’d shared girls before, even tag-teaming several girls with Zane and Reed in the past.
They warned him not to hurt Adela for a reason. Sure, they wanted him to handle Adela’s feelings with care, but Jack knew his friends. They wouldn’t have asked him to be careful if they hadn’t noticed something about the way he was with Adela.
Adela was different.
He wasn’t about to share.
Adela was his.
And as much as Adela’s feelings were on the line, so were his.
Like Zane and Reed, any real friend would have seen the shift in him and would have backed the fuck off.
CHAPTER NINE
