Heartstrings

Chapter 24: Another Secret

Jake's Perspective

You'd think that telling the entire school to basically fuck off at a pep rally and publicly calling Emma my girlfriend would assuage the number of girls texting me, hoping for a hookup. But apparently, it made it worse.

Somehow the incident at the pep rally emboldened an unprecedented amount of girls, and every morning for the next couple of weeks, I'd woken up to a myriad of late-night texts. Maybe someone else would have been flattered, but it made me uncomfortable. And after a while, it even infuriated me.

I saw the way girls treated Emma, too. They shot her menacing looks, bumped into her on purpose, knocked books out of her hand - you name it. And of course, Emma would brush it off and say-

- Oh, whatever. I don't feel threatened.

But I'd started being excessively rude to any girl I caught mistreating her. In fact, the night of the party, Kayla and Nia had approached me while Emma was in the kitchen with Ramsey.

- Did you ditch her already?

Nia had purred, appearing on my left, Kayla on my right. They both latched onto an arm looking up at me with what they mistakenly thought were seductive eyes.

- Jaxson said there's an empty bedroom on the second floor, wanna go check it out with both of us?

They giggled and I jolted my arms out of their grasps.

- What the fuck is wrong with you two?

- Oh come on, don't spoil the fun.

- No. You two can go fuck yourselves, but leave me out of it. I'm not interested.

I'd stormed off in search of Emma, but things had only gotten worse from that night on.

- Jake?

The soft lilt of her voice shook me out of my thoughts. We were lying in bed together and my arm was draped over her waist protectively, the gentle eucalyptus and tea tree scent of her hair on the pillow captivated my senses.

It must have been well past two in the morning, because both of us had been silently wrestling with our insomnia for an hour or so since I'd crawled into bed with her. When we'd outlined all of our boundaries at the start of our relationship, we'd agreed to only sleep in her room a few times a week. We'd never followed that rule, though - I'd held her every night since then.

I sleepily whispered my reply to her-

- Yes?

She rolled over to face me and I could see her features through the dim moonlight pouring through the window.

- I can't sleep.

- Me either.

I couldn't resist the urge to touch her - softly resting my hand on the side of her head, I caressed the side of her cheek with my thumb. Her eyes glistened through the dark, and the familiar warm feeling bloomed in my chest - I hadn't given it a name yet, but I knew what it was. I felt it every time I heard her voice, every time she looked up at me with those grey eyes, every time I was apart from her.

It was too soon, right? We'd only been together a month... but I'd had a crush on her for at least two months before that. So three months? Plus knowing each other our whole lives... alright, so maybe it wasn't 'too soon' at all. Maybe it was even a delayed reaction. Either way, I didn't plan on naming it quite yet, because once I did, I knew I wouldn't be able to stop myself from telling her. And I couldn't risk scaring her off.

- How many girls have you slept with?

My eyebrows raised in surprise - if I'd been close to falling asleep before, I was wide awake now.