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I’d known then, far earlier than then, that I wasn’t built for life in a small town. No picket fence for me. Which was exactly what I grew up with. No trauma behind closed doors, no abusive alcoholic to give me wounds that would explain my desperate desire to get out of there and away from suburban family life. Nothing to understand why, unlike my sister and mother, I wasn’t enchanted by love stories or fairy tales. I was much more interested in the villain of the story. Even then, I hadn’t wanted some cookie cutter Prince Charming. No way would he know how to give multiple orgasms.
Jafar fromAladdin, for example? You bet he was kinky.
Not that it was exactly kink that I was interested in. Especially at sixteen, just discovering my sexuality with fumbling boys. I wanted something … more. Something a little bit dangerous.
Which was Jasper Hayes, even at sixteen. He came into the school with black-painted fingernails, ripped jeans, muscles and busted knuckles. And a black eye.
The rumor mill had circled about him, as it did in small towns. He was a troubled kid from a terrible family situation and had been taken in by the McPhersons, a well-respected couple who had lost their own son five years prior.
All of the tragedy surrounding him only made him more attractive to teenage girls who were very much into the bad boy.
Although I considered myself above a lot of the stereotypical teenage rites of passage—like romanticizing losing one’s virginity and expecting it to be romantic when it’s really just painful, awkward and messy, or thinking I was going to marrymy first boyfriend—I could not say that I wasn’t charmed by Jasper.
I totally was.
I just hid it better than my classmates.
He was not interested in the girls who dropped books in front of him and bent over to pick them up, offering tours of the school, tutoring opportunities. He wasn’t exactly rude, but he was standoffish enough in a vaguely threatening way that most girls lacked the confidence to approach him.
Nor did he seem to find friends of the male variety. Not because of the clique system nor the toxic masculinity of the jungle-like behavior of teenage boys to take down their competitor—although I’m sure there was some of that. He had the same response to any boy who tried to talk to him about football, music or who offered him a joint.
I knew this because I watched carefully.
I had developed a deep crush, but I was also smart enough to recognize that Jasper Hayes was dangerous.
“You know, you smoke those to look cool, but really they’re just going to give you yellow teeth, premature aging and most likely lung cancer,” I informed him when we came upon each other at the back of the school one afternoon.
I’d left my home economics class on principle, knowing I didn’t need to learn about sewing or baking in order to become a well-rounded person.
My plan was to go home and read the books I’d bought on the stock market—much more valuable than learning to make the perfect pie crust—and manage to eat some food before Rowan and Kip came home and emptied all of our cupboards.
Jasper’s presence diverted my plans.
A black converse rested against the wall as a plume of smoke wafted from his mouth.
“And really, you just look like the overtrodden cliché of the ‘bad boy’,” I continued. “It works, for the simpler minded, but it is beneath you since I see Tolstoy in your bag.” I nodded to the beaten-up, leather satchel that he’d tossed on the ground beside him. “Which is actually used and read if the dog-eared pages are anything to go by, which would have all the literary bookworms aghast at dog-earing, but it’s all about the anarchy isn’t it?” I arched a brow in challenge.
His eyes never left me as I spoke. Not once. Not to glance away to take stock of our surroundings or communicate that he was bored. What was more, his eyes stayed on my face, never traveling to the lower regions of my body which had matured to a womanly shape boys in school made a point to leer at.
Well, they made a point to leer at it secretly ever since my brother and Kip threatened to beat the shit out of anyone looking at me. Which pissed me off to no end since I didn’t need a couple of wannabe alphas trying to defend my honor.
Jasper didn’t leer. Not once. Though maybe I wanted him to.
But there was something all the more probing when someone looked at you right in the eye and didn’t stop. It felt like something adults did, not high schoolers.
I kept the eye contact, even though I felt uncomfortable, uncertain for the first time in a long time.
He didn’t answer straight away, just took a long, purposeful drag of his cigarette.
“You want to get out of here?” His voice was deeper than I expected. Raspy. Like a folk singer.
Immensely attractive.
Even though he was uttering a line I’d heard from many boys before and had vaguely disgusted me. But when Jasper said it, there wasn’t the desperate, sexual undertone that was present in the past.
I wanted to ask where. Because this was a boy who promised a bit of danger, and leaving with him could be risky.
Asking why would make me a coward, though. Predictable. The last thing I wanted anyone, let alone this boy, was to think I was predictable.