“Maybe.” Jase shook his head. “I can’t believe Gilly left him alone. She knows he’ll throw a party.”
“She probably wanted to be the cool aunt. Or she got distracted by her latest art project.”
Gillian was flighty and moved to the beat of her own drum, but she loved her nephews and niece. And she was always a safe place to land for me, too. She never cared if I came over to her art studio to work on homework because I didn’t want to go home to an empty house. And she always asked my opinion on what she was working on as if she really cared. To me, that outweighed all the flighty.
Jase ran his fingers through my hair. “Sometimes when my parents are gone, it feels like I’m the babysitter.”
“A couple more months, and we’ll be out of here. You’ll only have to be responsible for yourself.”
He tapped the end of my nose. “And you.”
“I never get into any trouble.”
“Suuuuure.”
Scott lifted a bucket of water and doused the fire. “Can we go or what?”
“Yeah, we can go.” Jase pinned him with a stare. “But no getting wasted and puking in my mom’s planter.”
I scrunched up my nose as I turned to Marisa, who I saw was doing the same. “That was so gross,” she said with a shiver.
I wanted to gag just thinking about it.
Scott grinned. “My tolerance is a million times better than it was at the last party.”
Lisbeth turned to Isaac. “Will you and Mitch be my ride? I don’t want to get stuck in a car with puke-face.”
I couldn’t hold in my laughter as Isaac wrapped his arm around her. “I got you, gorgeous.”
Jase wrapped a towel around me and then picked up our bags. “Let’s go.” He tugged me towards the parking lot. “You can shower and change in my bathroom when we get there.”
I just hoped no one was screwing in Jase’s bed when we arrived because that had happened before.
We piled into three different vehicles. Jase turned the key in his older-model Jeep. As soon as the engine started, I hit the stereo dial and turned it to my favorite country station. He grimaced. “Are you seriously going to make me listen to that when I already know I’m going to be tortured tonight?”
“Hey, I’m partial to Tim McGraw. You know, I lost my virginity to a song by him.”
The light in Jase’s dark eyes danced. “You don’t say.”
“I do.” I leaned over, my lips grazing the shell of his ear. “If you’re lucky, I’ll let you reenact it later.”
“I’m pretty sure you don’t want that. I think I lasted all of three minutes.”
“It was sweet.”
Jase pulled out of the lot and onto the gravel road. “It was mortifying.”
“You know what they say…practice makes perfect.”
“Now that’s a plan I can get behind.”
Jase turned onto the two-lane highway that led into Wolf Gap. The headlights from Scott’s truck and Isaac’s sedan swung across our back window as they followed. I bent down, pulling my cell phone out of my bag. I typed out a quick text.
Me:I’m going to spend the night at Marisa’s. I’ll see you in the morning.
My mom didn’t respond—not that I had expected her to. She was all about being busy. Because if she was busy, then she never had to deal with the fact that my dad had cheated and bailed. She numbed herself with activities and a full social calendar.
My older brother was the same. He’d looked out for me at first after Dad bailed, but then he simply had better things to do. Once he left for college, he only returned for the holidays and was home for forty-eight hours tops.