The Life of Jezebel Firetongue

13

I glanced into the rear view mirror towards Jake, then back to the road. It was time to heal the rift between us. This distance wasn’t solving anything, and made me feel just as anxious as before. We needed to be a team again, before anything else happened.

I glanced at him nervously as he fiddled with the radio. How could I start a conversation with him? I felt like a mom trying to start a conversation with her kid after school.

The mental image sent a shudder down my spine. Not the type of metaphor I was going for. Especially not with this confusing attraction.

“So Jake,” I started uneasily. He gave me a wide eyed look, and I grimaced. prehaps I had pushed him a little far. “Um…the area looks nice.”

Jake chuckled and I mentally groaned. The area looks nice? Really? The place was mostly barren, aside from a few dying trees with falling leaves scattered here and there. Stupid, I scolded myself.

“Yeah, I guess it’s nice.” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and watched me closely. I could feel it, and was trying to keep the blood from rising to my cheeks. “Jez?”

“Hm?” I murmured, trying to keep it cool.

“Are we on speaking terms again?”

I nodded slowly, looking out at the road while I thought about my next words. Jake couldn’t know about my jumbled feelings towards him until I had them straightened out, but I still wanted to reconnect with him. “I’d rather we stay on speaking terms.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

He watched me closely, his eyes analyzing me now. “We have to go hunting again tonight, don’t we?”

I sighed and patted his knee, trying to comfort him. “You don’t have to come. In fact, you don’t even have to watch.”

“No,” Jake muttered, shaking his head. “I want to help you out.”

“Jake, you really don’t have to,” I argued.

“No. I’d rather help you than be the wuss who let his best friend go hunting alone. What if there’s…a bear?

I chuckled as we drove through another town, smaller than the last. Best friend…I mused. Did he really care about me that much? Wanting to keep the conversation light, I replied, “Yes, because there will be bears here, and it’ll completely escape my range of notice.”

“The princess needs a knight in shining armor,” he joked.

I rolled my eyes and nudged him with my elbow. “You see me decapitate deer like I’m chopping a vegetable and you still think I’m a princess?”

He laughed. “Maybe I should rethink that analogy.”

“Yeah, maybe you should,” I chuckled back. As we drove out of town, the surroundings around us turned into forest, and the sun sank lower in the sky. We would have to stop to set up camp soon.

We found a radio station that wasn’t filled with static that played a lot of country music. As I started looking for a secluded place to hide the car while we camped, I heard a strange tapping noise on the car. I looked over at Jake to see if he was doing it, but he looked just as surprised as I was. Then I looked through the windshield and saw where the tapping noises came from.

“Is that-”

“-rain,” I confirmed.

It was coming down hard, and there was no way we could leave the car. Turning on the window wipers, I scowled at the sight. I preferred to be settled by nightfall, so we’d have to come up with a solution soon. When I had been flying, I would have seen the rainstorm and avoided it. Now that I was driving with Jake, I would have to deal with unpredictable weather.