seven.
By the time midnight blazes, The Book Thief still clutches in her hands, Jade has shifted her reading position many times, from holding it eye-level to placing it on her lap so she crouches down reading to waving it up above her head. She’s lost count how many times she yawns that particular night.
It’s not the book that makes her lull, no. Jade’s only fifty pages in and she’s enjoying the book thus far. It’s her. Herself. She’s tired and it’s midnight and she really, really wants to just lay her head back and close her eyes but –
“Go to sleep,” Jasper says from beside her. She stretches open her dripping eyes at him and shakes her head.
“I’m not sleepy.”
“Sure you aren’t. Before you found the book, you’ve been snoring in my car like a pig.”
“I don’t snore –”
“Just go to sleep, Jade.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
"Because I don’t want to. Am I bothering you, no? Just drive, alright.”
"Okay then,” he says. “Whatever you say.”
Jade, unable to say anything, sings a hum of buzzing melody and nods her head, a sign of agreement. She stretches out an arm and her fingers touch the temperature knob, fiddling, turning it right and left for a long moment until her arm starts to pain. She retreats her hand back to her lap, the heater in the car is now a few degrees warmer. She peels her mittens out of her hand and stuffs them in her bag. She dumps her bag in the backseat. Out of the corner of her eyes, she feels the presence of Jasper’s irises following her every movement.
Jade rests her head on the window pane, arms hugging her stomach. Then she straightens herself back on the seat, tilts her head up as if trying to stay awake by looking at the starry sky.
She reads a couple more paragraphs from The Book Thief before rummaging the dashboard once again, obtaining herself cold glares from Jasper. But she doesn’t care – she needs to stay awake. She chose a strange-named band with the strangest-looking cover art and inserts the CD in the player. Although the piercing screamo isn’t her usual cup of tea, she listens to it anyway, hoping the too-loud music with the relatable lyrics helps her to not fall asleep.
Jasper looks at her, long and mystically she could almost sure he would’ve missed the road.
Jade forces herself to keep her eyes open.
“You’re scared?” he says then, facing the road. What he said, it was a statement to her than a question like Jasper intended it comes out as.
She raises two lost eyebrows.
“You’re scared that if you fall asleep, you’ll be left alone in the dead of night.”
Her eyebrows remain raise and lost.
A sigh, like an exhausted leaf falling off its branch in the chapped autumn winds, escapes his lips. “You’re scared and you don’t trust me.”
“I never –,”
“I get it. Trust won’t be earned within a day. But your untrustworthy makes you scared, of me. Of what’s going to happen to you if you fall asleep. You think that I’ll kick you out of my car while you were asleep because, well, you probably think that I’m annoyed by you. You did annoy me at times, by the way. But I won’t kick you out like that.”
