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I shook my head and then realized he wasn’t looking at me. “No.”
“I would’ve gotten there quicker, so I’m sorry about that.” He finally turned the engine on and cool air blasted out of the vent. Neither of us spoke until we were on Route 45 heading back to Shepherdstown. “He needs to stay away from you. I’m going to make sure he does—hey, I’m not going to beat on him or anything crazy, okay? He just needs to not pull any shit like that again.” He cut me a sharp look. “That was the first time he said anything to you?”
“Why?” I asked. “Why do you even care, Jase, what he says to me?”
Another razor-edged look was cast in my direction. “That’s a stupid question.”
“No, it’s not. We aren’t friends. We were two people who were a little more than friends for a very short period of time and we had sex.” My heart turned over from my own words. “That’s all we were.”
Jase clenched the steering wheel. “Is that what you think of us?”
“Isn’t that what you want?”
He didn’t answer immediately, and when he did, it was so low I wasn’t sure I heard him right. “No.”
I sucked in a sharp breath. “No?”
“That’s not what I wanted from us. God, Tess, not at all.” He propped his left arm on the driver’s window and pressed his cheek into his fist. “But I’m just . . . I told you before you didn’t want to get with me.”
A burn encompassed my chest and throat as I stared at his profile. “I know,” I whispered, and I hoped he didn’t get too upset with Cam. “I know about Kari.”
His jaw clamped down so fast and hard I wouldn’t have been surprised if he cracked his molars. A mile passed before he spoke. “I don’t even have to ask how you know.”
“Please don’t be mad at him. He thought I already knew, because I knew about Jack. You can’t get mad at him.”
“I’m not.” He sighed heavily. “So you know the whole sordid tale then.”
“I . . . I didn’t think it was sordid.” I bit my lip. I knew what Jase had said about not wanting Jack at first and now his guilt made even more sense, because what if Kari had wanted Jack down the road? “It was just sad.”
“Oh, I must not have told him everything.” He coughed out a laugh. “When Kari got pregnant, I wasn’t there for her when she told her parents. I should’ve been. I knew they would be hard on her and when they said they were going to send her to her grandparents down in southern West Virginia, I was kind of relieved, because it was like if she wasn’t there, I didn’t have to think about the fact that she was pregnant.”
He laughed again, but it was such a sad sound. “I was never there for her. You know, I was just a kid, but still . . .”
“But you were—what? Sixteen?”
He nodded. “When my parents stepped in and adopted Jack, and Kari came back, she talked about a future with all three of us. Scared the shit out of me. We got into an argument. She drove off and she died. End of story right there.”
Oh my God . . .
“You don’t blame yourself. Please tell me you don’t.”
“I did for a long time, but I know I didn’t cause the accident. We’d sort of made out before she left, but you know, the last conversation you have with someone, you don’t want it filled with shit like that.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I know that’s not a lot, but I’m sorry.”
Jase didn’t say anything again until we reached the apartment buildings. “I haven’t even visited her grave.”
I pulled myself out of my own thoughts. “Not once?”
He shook his head. “I just . . . I don’t know. I’ve moved on, but . . .”
“You haven’t moved on, Jase. If you haven’t been able to visit her grave, you haven’t moved on.”
We pulled into a parking spot in the middle of the lot. He turned off the engine and looked at me. His gaze dropped to my lips, and he seemed unable to drag his attention from them. The hand on the steering wheel tightened.
“Do you still love her?” I whispered.
Jase didn’t answer for a long moment. “I will always love Kari. She was a great person. I don’t know where we’d be right now if she had lived, but I will always care for her.” His chest rose slowly. He looked like he was about to say more, but changed his mind.
I recalled what Cam had said about him being scared. Maybe that really was it. Maybe he did love me, but it wouldn’t be enough. Some wounds, festered by silence, ran too deep. And there would be nothing I could do to change him and how he saw relationships. He had to find that in himself and he had to want to. And I hoped he did. Not just for my sake, but because, even though the wound he’d left on my heart was fresh and bleeding, he was a good man.
He just needed to sort himself out.
As I watched him work through what to say, I did what was probably the most mature thing I’d ever done in my almost nineteen years. Like earn-a-medal-or-a-box-of-cookies type of mature, because I was still hurting so badly when it came to him.
I leaned across the seat and pressed my lips against his cool cheek. Jase sucked in a sharp breath and turned a wild gaze on me as I pulled back. “I’m sorry for everything you’ve had to go through and I . . . I still love you, so I hope one day you’re able to move on, because you deserve that, Jase Winstead.”
Twenty-seven
Living in Cam’s apartment should’ve made life better. It did in a lot of ways. Staying there made it easier to avoid fixating on Debbie’s death or living somewhere that creeped the bejesus out of me. It helped with steering clear of crazy-sauce Erik. I caught rides to campus with either Avery or my brother, and since my knee rarely hurt as badly as it did in the beginning, the trek from music over to east campus wasn’t a big deal.
