Ones Ignored

Chapter 24 | "You can't keep wanting things, Ivory."

I stare at him for a long time, taken back about the fact that this—whatever it was between the both of us— was about his ex. One he was still hung up on.

Then why didn't she?

He is still mad at his ex-girlfriend for leaving him. And I'm the one stuck with him as he works it out. God, why was I so stupid? How did I not see the way he would look at her? How did I not see the way his jaw would clench whenever he would catch her eye? He was mad at his ex for not staying and that's why he was distancing himself from me.

Only, that didn't make the most sense in the world.

"Jessica didn't stay?", I decided to test the waters by asking for clarifications instead of the hundreds of thoughts in my head. Jameson takes another step back and angles his body away from me and I try not to feel the hurt as he does so. He places a hand on his jaw and swipes at it before looking at me. "She saw my back. She wasn't supposed to."

"You guys were dating", I say a little embarrassed about the fact that we were talking about another girl. "I would imagine she did."

"But she wasn't supposed to", he says softly and takes a step, a tiny step, closer to me. He meets my eye for the first time in a while and I'm left with just staring into it because I'm hurt to see the hurt in his eyes. "Jessica and I started dating the first week of school, we had only met the first day. But she was awesome and I liked her. Our relationship moved really quickly. She was either at my house or I was at hers every day. We were inseparable."

Yay, he is talking about things that he did with his ex, to me. That sounds really nice!

"But we never got that far", he says, probably reading my mind. "Yes, we would spend a lot of time together but never alone. She met my family and I met hers. We went out on dates. Everything."

For like a week, Jessica had said when Ally metioned the both of them dating. But this wasn't just a week right?

"Come Thanksgiving break, she comes over to my house and we somehow make it to my room—

I try not to look away at the obvious lust in his eyes. He was talking about his ex and thinking about what had happened between the both of them with lust— desire— in his eyes.

"But I had known we would come this far. So I planned it out, you know me, I plan out everything."

It checked out in the way his walks were calculated and what he says. Jameson was a planner; he always had a plan on how certain things would go.

Jameson smiles, just a little and says,"I planned it out. She wouldn't see my back, but she insisted we keep the lights on. Told me she wanted to see my face. And I couldn't say no to her, she was already unbuttoning my shirt. I wasn't worried about my back then—

Okay, I looked away because this eyes were too full of something I couldn't get him to react to me like. I look down at his neck instead.

"But she saw it, she did."

"Why is that a problem, Jameson?", I ask, looking back at his eyes. He frowns and says,"Because she saw me. I was the talkative, makes-jokes-that everybody laughs at Cooper. I wasn't a guy who had a back painted of someone's anger. But she saw me and she..."

"Did she try to help you? Is that why you resented me when I saw your back?"

"Opposite", he says softly. "She told me that I was strong but then she stopped coming around as much. She stopped finding me in the hallways and eventually we drifted away so far that I couldn't even make her look at me."