Parrish Read online

  A moment later I felt Jefferson move beside me.

  “Sadie?” he whispered quietly.

  I wasn’t sure why, but I kept my eyes closed and my breathing slow.

  I felt Jefferson’s thumb trace a light line down my jaw, running back and forth across my skin. I tried desperately to be annoyed or creeped out by his behavior, but some small part of me felt content to stay there, so I kept my eyes closed, still pretending to be asleep.

  There was something liberating in the guise of sleep. It was like running an experiment where you got to watch the results unfold without the test subject knowing they were being observed.

  After a moment, his thumb trailed over my lips in the lightest of touches and I knew my goose bumps would give me away, so I shifted my weight, hoping that the signs I was waking up from my fake sleep would deter any further physical contact from Jefferson . . . partly because it was totally weird, and partly because I wanted to keep pretending I was asleep so he’d keep his thumb running over my lips. That was a dangerous thought to have.

  Luckily, the second I shifted my weight and let out a sigh as if I were waking up, he pulled his hand away from me quickly, just like I’d wanted him to. Sort of.

  “Sadie?” he said again, this time a bit louder.

  “Hmmm?” I answered, slowly opening my eyes. My intention was looking at the ceiling, although I stole a quick glance at Jefferson first.

  His curls were sticking up in an unruly coif, but he looked well rested. A lot more well rested than I felt.

  “We should probably get ready to leave,” he said after a moment, his voice husky from sleep.

  I let my eyes wander back to him and found that he was, as usual, looking at me, though his large green eyes were now trained on my lips, which made me infinitely more uncomfortable. And slightly curious. But mostly uncomfortable.

  “I’ll go kick Brighton out of the shower. Besides, we’re sleeping on all of the towels, so she might have a nasty surprise when she gets out.” I was unsure of what else to say. “Is it okay if I shower first?”

  “I’ve got to map out the next leg of our trip anyway,” he responded. He stood up and started gathering various papers and maps, suddenly out of whatever spell he’d been in.

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said, slightly confused by his behavior.

  If I was being honest, though, it wasn’t Jefferson’s behavior that had me worried. It was my own.

  He was Jefferson Parrish. There was no way on earth I should have been okay with him touching me. He was hardly human on a good day, and there I was, finding myself sad that we weren’t in close quarters anymore. I actually had to resist the urge to go stand next to him, just so we could be close again. It was ridiculous and slightly insane. Maybe being around the Parrish boys for so long had finally unraveled my mind.

  I grabbed some things out of my bag, but found myself unintentionally stopping to stare at Jefferson. He was sitting at the small table hunched over a piece of paper, writing like a madman. He puckered his lips for a moment as his pen hovered above the page, anticipating what he’d write next.

  Suddenly he glanced over at me. “Hey, Sadie?”

  I looked down in embarrassment, startled out of my little episode. “Yeah?” I tried to be nonchalant as I gathered the rest of my toiletries.

  He grinned. “You’re staring at me and it’s really weird,” he teased.

  My cheeks instantly flushed and instead of saying something witty back to him like I should have, I grabbed two towels and darted into the bathroom, shutting the door behind me and wishing I could crawl into a hole and die.

  “That had better be Sadie or there’ll be a dead Parrish in about five seconds,” Brighton called from the other side of the shower curtain. She turned off the water and poked her head around to see who it was.

  “You need a towel and I need to get away from Jefferson, so I come in peace.” I threw the towel at her and busied myself with brushing my teeth to give Brighton some privacy.

  “Right. Jefferson,” she said, her voice irritatingly slow.

  “Don’t even.” As I spoke with a mouthful of toothpaste, I dripped a glob onto my yellow tank top.

  I was horrified by the spikey mess that was my hair, so I avoided looking in the mirror until I could shower and make myself look decent.

  It didn’t really help that Brighton stepped out of the shower, fully clothed in a cute pink shirt and skinny jeans, looking like a model, even with wet hair and no makeup.

  I rinsed my toothbrush. “Did you put your clothes on in the shower?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s quite a skill,” I said. “You didn’t get your clothes all wet?”

  “I have social anxiety disorder, Sade. Do you really think I could have survived a high school PE class if I didn’t know how to change in the shower?”

  She did have a point.

  “Here’s your mirror, by the way,” she said, handing me an ornate, sliver, antique hand mirror.

  One of the few I’d brought with me.

  I collected antique hand mirrors.

  Well . . . maybe collected was the wrong word. I was sort of a hoarder. I wasn’t sure if the obsession had sprouted from some weird Bloody Mary infatuation. Or maybe just the idea that so many people had looked into these mirrors for so many years. It felt like keeping a piece of their historical reflection.

  Which sounded crazy. Probably because it was.

  Of all the not-normal things I couldn’t seem to stop myself from taking an interest in, the mirror thing was maybe the weirdest. Although my newfound admiration of Jefferson Parrish was high up on that list.

  I hadn’t even known Brighton knew about me bringing some of my mirrors with me. I kept the weird obsession pretty well hidden.

  “Where did you get this?” I looked suspiciously back and forth between her and the mirror that I finally took from her outstretched hand.

  “You asked me last night to put it in the bathroom for you,” she said, sounding completely unconcerned.

  It was like Michigan putting words into my mouth all over again.

  “I never told you to do that.”

  Brighton shot me a sideways glance that said I might just be crazier than her. “Maybe you were too tired to remember. But you definitely said, ‘Brighton, there’s a silver mirror in my bag. Can you put it in the bathroom for me?’ I mean, I thought it was a weird request, but I obliged.”

  I opened my mouth to protest since I 100% hadn’t said anything even close to that, but she quickly cut me off in favor of a topic she thought was more interesting than this phantom mirror requester.

  “So are we just ignoring the fact that you slept with Jefferson, then?” she asked, toweling off her hair and getting out her makeup bag.

  I quickly put my hand over her mouth in case Jefferson was lurking outside the door, which—let’s be honest—he probably was. “I didn’t sleep with him.”

  “But you slept next to him,” she said, removing my hand and wiping my “germs” on her pants.

  “That’s definitely not the same thing,” I said. “And besides, I wouldn’t have had to sleep on the floor if you weren’t beating me up all night.”

  She nodded solemnly. “I’m a violent sleeper. So how did the two of you end up sleeping on the floor?”

  “It’s not some big scandal, Brighton. I was just tired of being hit and he was tired of Deacon trying to snuggle him.”

  Brighton’s eyes became almost as big as Jefferson’s at that statement, and I knew I’d said exactly what I needed to in order to steer the conversation away from my taboo sleeping arrangement.

  “Deacon was trying to what?”

  “Didn’t you know? Apparently Deacon is a sleep snuggler.”

  Brighton giggled at this revelation, grinning as she applied her makeup. “Well, that’s adorable.”

  I had to refrain from making a comment about how she probably already knew he was
a sleep snuggler, since that would inevitably turn right back around on me and we’d be talking about Jefferson again.

  “I don’t know why you’re even bothering with makeup. You know we’re going to be in the jeep for fifteen hours today, right?”

  “And yet it’s ten o’clock and we’re still in the hotel.” Brighton sighed, finishing up her mascara and looking even more perfect than before. “We really need to get a move on or we’ll probably break down at two in the morning in a strange place and get robbed.”

  “Stop hogging the bathroom and go take a Xanax,” I joked, shoving her toward the door as she tried to apply her lip gloss.

  “See, you joke about that, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do,” she said as I locked her out of the bathroom.

  “Have fun, crazy,” I shouted to her.

  ~

  “Jefferson?” I rested my chin on the steering wheel of the Jeep, trying to stay awake while I drove.

  “Ten minutes,” he said in a low monotone. His British accent much thicker when he was tired.

  “What?” We had much more than ten minutes left in our trip.

  “Until we stop to eat.” He gave a deep sigh. “Blimey, I’d kill for a custard cream right now.”

  Apparently the act of speaking was too much for him. We had been in the car for thirteen hours and I had a sneaking suspicion we were about two seconds away from having our own version of The Hunger Games in the car.

  Brighton would probably win by blowing up her inhaler and creating a Xanax bomb that would render us all useless.

  “Do you think the Jeep is making a funny noise?” she asked for the billionth time.

  “There’s nothing wrong with the car,” Jefferson snapped.

  “Calm down, mate,” Deacon said, trying to come to Brighton’s defense even though his heart wasn’t in it.

  We were all too worn out by the drive to express much emotion.

  “I swear it’s been making a clicking noise since we last stopped,” she went on.

  “Would someone please just sedate her so we don’t have to deal with a full-on panic attack,” Jefferson said.

  “Okay, I know you aren’t a human being,” I said, “but you need to tell the scientists who made you to do a better job of programming compassion into the next version.”

  “You’re a regular stand-up comedian, Sadie,” he muttered.

  I gritted my teeth against his insults, refusing to engage. There was no good way to deal with Jefferson when he was in a mood like this. Literally an hour before, he’d been joking around with us and acting totally manic over the clue we’d found in Texas. Now he was sitting in the passenger’s seat with his head resting against the window, looking like he wanted to kill someone as he poked his fingertip with his pocket knife over and over again.

  A little shudder passed through me at the sight of the sharp metal making contact with his skin, so I tried not to look at him, concentrating instead on the freeway signs that would direct us toward the next exit.

  “We need to get gas and fill up the Jeep,” I said, trying to find a distraction.

  “Ouch,” Jefferson whispered as he drew blood from his finger.

  Apparently he hadn’t expected to cut himself when he’d become stab-happy five minutes earlier.

  “Will someone please take Jefferson’s knife away?” I asked. “I fear for everyone’s safety.”

  Deacon shifted as if he would take it, but one look from Jefferson put him right back in his seat.

  Yeah, we definitely needed to get out of the car. Crazy Parrish Number One was losing it.

  “We’ve only got about seventy dollars left in the budget for today,” Brighton said, trying to break up the awkward silence that had just fallen over us.

  Brighton hated awkward silences.

  “That should be fine. I mean we’re not exactly eating gourmet food,” I replied.

  “That’s for gas and food,” she corrected with a little wince.

  “Will that even fill up this beast?” Deacon asked.

  “Probably not,” she answered.

  “We could always go dumpster diving for food,” Jefferson said with a grin.

  We all swiftly and loudly gave an audible dissent to that idea.

  Then we fell silent again—slaves to our unfortunate financial situation. I wanted to point out the fact that we wouldn’t have so many money problems if the Parrish boys could just hold onto jobs, but it didn’t seem like a wise thing to do when Jefferson was holding a knife.

  Really, what I needed was a solution that could stretch our money as far as it could go and distract Jefferson from his dark and twisty place. It should have been difficult, but I was a little ashamed at how quickly I thought up a plan—and how happy the plan made me, although I’d never admit it to anyone.

  I turned off the freeway and pulled into the parking lot of a fast food place. “We might be able to make this work.”

  “How?” Brighton asked.

  “Can I borrow your ring?”

  She looked at me skeptically, but slid the simple silver band with its pink stone off her finger. The second I put it on my ring finger, her face lit up with realization.

  “Jefferson, how would you feel about being married to me one more time?” I asked. It wasn’t the best plan, but it was better than starving.

  “Nothing would make me happier,” he said in a completely serious tone.

  I instantly regretted my decision.

  “You two go get the gas and pick us up here when you’re done,” I instructed, getting out of the car.

  Chances were, it wouldn’t even work and we’d just have to dip into tomorrow’s food fund, but it was always worth a shot.

  “I don’t know what you’re up to,” Deacon said, “but make sure you take good pictures.” He threw his cousin a wink.

  This was definitely a bad idea.

  “So, married people eat free?” Jefferson joked, instantly turning into the lighthearted version of himself.

  “Just shut up and follow my lead,” I said. As we walked into the restaurant, I laced my fingers through his and put on a bright smile.

  There was a small line, which was surprising, since it was a little past midnight, but being one of the only stops off the freeway I guessed it was normal. We got in line and I decided to lay the groundwork for our story, making sure to remind myself over and over that I wasn’t going to enjoy this . . . mostly because I sort of was enjoying it.

  Turning around, I wrapped my arms around Jefferson’s neck and smiled up at him. He looked a little confused for a moment before shrugging his shoulders and sliding his arms around my waist. Apparently it didn’t take much for “Fun Jefferson” to just roll with the punches.

  Keeping my smile in place and talking through gritted teeth, I let my fingers play with his curly hair.

  “Don’t ruin this by speaking or calling me some ridiculous pet name, Jefferson Parrish, or you’ll be the reason we all starve tonight.”

  He smirked at me infuriatingly. “I love you too, cupcake.”

  He was definitely going to ruin it.

  “I can help the next person in line,” the teenage boy said slowly, obviously not too thrilled to be working so late at night.

  Jefferson tried to move toward him but I stood my ground, my back turned to the boy. Not thinking nearly as much as I should have been, and wondering why I thought I could make a good plan I wouldn’t regret after a long day of no sleep, I stood up on my tiptoes and lightly touched my lips to Jefferson’s.

  It was hardly a kiss, although the boy at the register wouldn’t be able to tell, and after the brief contact (that was definitely not a full kiss), I let my nose nudge Jefferson’s for a moment, making sure I kept my eyes closed so I wouldn’t be too aware of the fact that I had sort of just kissed a Parrish. I was pretty sure kissing was anti-Parrish rule number one.

  Jefferson’s hands were grasping my waist so tightly that I
could barely breathe, and I could only assume it was from the shock of what I’d just done. It wasn’t my fault—I had to show the worker that we were so madly in love that we couldn’t be bothered with simple things like ordering our food.

  “I can help you when you’re ready,” he said again in the same dry tone.

  I finally opened my eyes and looked up at Jefferson for a split second—long enough to see that his huge owl eyes were bigger than ever and his breathing was deep—before turning around and pulling him up to the register with me.

  I put my smile back in place and tried to look annoyingly flustered. “Sorry about that,” I said breathlessly. “We just got married, like, literally a few hours ago.”

  The boy didn’t even look up from his phone as his thumbs flew over the screen. I had sort of kissed a Parrish and the stupid worker wasn’t even looking at me.

  “We lost track of time at the reception, so we’re just on our way to the hotel now,” I went on, trying to be overly loud to get this boy’s attention.

  It didn’t do any good, of course. His eyes were still locked on his screen.

  “So we thought we’d stop here and get some food,” I said, even louder this time. “You know . . . because we just got married?”

  “That’s great. Go ahead and order when you’re ready,” he said, still not looking up from his phone.

  I let out an indignant sound, furious that my attempt at making a clever plan like Jefferson had on the Queen Mary had backfired. Now all I had was a sort-of kiss with a Parrish, and that awful Parrish here to witness my failure.

  “I’ll order for us, love,” Jefferson said in that overly sweet voice, winking at me.

  He proceeded to order our food and then paid the boy with a large chunk of the money we had allocated for the next day. All I could think about was how I would explain my failure to Brighton and Deacon, or better yet, how Jefferson would elaborate on the real story to make it that much worse.

  As soon as the boy left to get our food, Jefferson wrapped his arms around my waist again, coming very close to getting a good slap in the face.

  “I just figured you’d want to keep up the charade so we wouldn’t have to tell that boy you lied to him to try to get free food,” Jefferson said, having way too much fun with this.