“Oh great! You met your connected,” she gushed as she nudged her elbow into his chest, with a familiarity. “And at your age!”
Jace cleared his throat. “No, Molly, she’s our connected. All of ours; Remy, Jaxson, Noah, Troy, Drake…and I.”
She let out a tinkling laugh, looking between Jace and Remy. Jaxson, Troy, Noah, and Drake chose that moment to join Jace in the opening of the kitchen. “Oh,” she gulped, sadness flitted across her features before she pasted on a wide smile. It looked effortless. I imagined if you spend hours in front of a camera, you became an expert on how to hide your true feelings. “Well congratulations.”
I could tell she was making a conscious effort not to look at Jace.
“How?” Then her eyes widened before she closed them. “The tattoos,” she said quietly.
I shifted uncomfortably, feeling like I was intruding on a private conversation. In that moment I felt sorry for her. Jemmy sincerely liked her, and Jemmy was always a great judge of character. I had been jealous of Molly’s relationship with Jace in the pa
st, especially after they showed up on every gossip rag in the country, but there had to be a reason she was still considered family…right?
“Yeah, the tattoos,” Jace confirmed. He came up behind me and pulled me close to him. “Do you mind if Remy and I take this into the den?”
I looked at them uncertainly. Was there a reason they didn’t want to have this conversation in front of me? Not that I wanted to be there. I was super uncomfortable right now. I didn’t want to repeat our past mistakes, but at the same time, trust had to be established at some point.
“No,” I shook my head. It was my turn to see if I was any good at my acting skills. “Go ahead.”
Chapter 22
They had been in there for less than 5 minutes, before Remy came slamming out of the room and stormed down to the basement. When I went to stand up and follow him, Jaxson pulled me back into him and shook his head.
“He needs to work it out on his own,” he said quietly resituating me into the curve of his body.
When another half hour passed, I looked at the den door in confusion. What could be taking Jace so long?
Troy sighed and paused his movie. Not that any of us had been watching it. I was too busy watching the den door and looking towards the basement door. They were warily watching me.
Troy picked up his bean bag chair and placed it in front of me. “When we figured out we had a connection out there, we decided to hide it,” he said slowly as if he was gathering his thoughts. “By then, Molly and Jace had been dating for some time.”
I felt sick to my stomach as I looked down at my finger nails. I had felt insecure about their relationship before and those feelings still lingered.
He reached out and squeezed my leg. “He made a valiant effort to separate himself from her. He really did. Everyone, except for Jaxson, thought we were past the point of getting one. Especially Remy.
“Jace made the final break with her when he chose to leave the state and start teaching. I think she hoped that he would still come back to her. He’s just having a long overdue discussion. He’s probably clearing the air so that she knows he’s committed to you. In the past, he told her they needed space apart, and find themselves.
“When he got that teaching job, he was surprised when he found you. His student. He wanted to make sure you were the one we had been searching for.” He rubbed his head. “I remember a phone call between us, shortly after he got there, but everything is foggy after that.”
Drake sat down in front of me. “I wasn’t there to confirm our connection like I had been the first time. Jace was worried about your safety, and he wanted to speed our meeting up. I saw our connection the first time and the second time. I knew she was the one,” Drake said to us all, looking guilty. “I thought I was going crazy again. I would be walking in the halls at school, and I would see a faint wisp of green, like a thread. I followed it once and saw you as you were walking into a class. I let it go, then I saw you in the quad and I knew. I should have told you guys,” he looked apologetically at Troy, Jaxson, and Noah.
“When Noah introduced us, I recognized your voice, but something was off, “Jaxson said. “We talked together for years, but when I met you in person, it was like I thought maybe it had been a dream. It wasn’t until after you guys connected,” Jaxson pointed at Noah and me. “That I knew you hadn’t been a dream.”
Troy reached out and patted him on his back. “We’re all learning. We all realize our mistakes. We got our Misty now.”
I looked at him in shock. He hadn’t called me by that nickname since we had been reunited. Misty was short for Silvermist. Jemmy said I reminded her of Silvermist, Tinkerbell’s friend. She had told me the guys were like my own lost boys.
I smiled at him and then looked at the door. “Should someone go check on Remy?”
“No,” Troy shook his head. “Molly’s like family to us, but she is Remy’s cousin. Sometimes when she comes around, he doesn’t want to hear what she has to say.”
I knew they weren’t telling me something, but I was more concerned by the fact I was just now learning about Remy and Molly’s relationship. “Why wasn’t I told this before?” At their looks of confusion, I sighed. “Before time was taken from us, I was told about Molly. Molly and Jace had been on gossip magazines together, but no one told me she was related to Remy and why or how he came to be here.”
Jaxson frowned. “We all have our own secrets, some of them shared secrets, maybe we didn’t want to push you away.”
I felt even more confused by his statement. I felt Jaxson was my open book. He never seemed like anything bothered him. He was always laughing or trying to make other people laugh. I thought he never expressed any negative feelings because he never let anything get to him. His statement made me realize, that sometimes, the happiest people could be the ones hiding the most pain.
“It was my secrets that pushed her away,” Noah snorted self-deprecatingly.