(ON HOLD) Spellbound (BxB)

Chapter 14 | Colliding

Jackal had his elbow pressed to an open window sill, wondering why Logan's pot always burned so quickly. It felt a waste to watch the paper devoured while his lungs took time to sober themselves of smoke. He could always get more, but it wouldn't be the same if it wasn't cultivated from Logan's garden and twisted up poorly by hand in cheap rolling paper.

"Jack?" said Josie. "Hello?"

She was sitting at her desk in her reading glasses, her hair still wavy from her shower. It ribboned down her spine like ocean waves. She looked like her old self this way—undone, in pajamas too large for her, her European lips smaller without liner and lacquer.

"The farmhouse is fine," said Jackal, praying she'd been talking about a farmhouse and hadn't simply mentioned it in passing. By the way her lips flattened, likely she hadn't. Likely, there was no farmhouse mentioned at all. Jackal sucked in the joint with all he had.

"I hate when you do that around me," she said, taking a soft-bristled brush to her hair. "You don't act like yourself when your high." She had set her laptop up on her vanity to pamper herself with oils and moisturizers while she typed up a paper for physics. Or French. Jackal squinted at the screen from his spot on her window bench.

Physics.

Jackal blew the smoke through her bedroom window out of courtesy and said, "Are you going to fry an egg on the stove and tell me it's what my brain looks like?"

Josie dragged her French nails across her keyboard, plucking up a single golden hair that had been trapped between the keys. "I don't get the reference, but I trust it was as clever and devious as all your others."

"You're too young," Jackal said.

"We're four months apart." She removed her glasses and turned to him in her swivel chair, but Jackal didn't allow her gaze to lock him in. He turned back to the window, sucked in another draft. "You're going to have to tell him eventually," she said.

Jackal wasn't surprised she knew. Josie knew most things. All things when it came to him. "Says who?"

"So you'll wait to break his heart until it's too late?"

"Are you asking for his sake or yours?" Jackal responded. One more draft. He tapped the stub out on her window sill and let it rest on the wood. He was starting to feel it—the weight lifting. He could breathe again.

"I'm asking for yours," said Josie. She placed her glasses back on and turned to her laptop screen. "I've seen his record. He's a ticking time bomb."

"You don't know him," said Jackal. "He's not a bad guy."

"That's not what I mean."

"Then what do you mean?" Jackal asked.

Josephine had been typing, but her efforts slowed considerably. "I can't share personal files with you."

"Josie."

She wouldn't look at him. She wouldn't, because if she had, she would break. And she broke easily for him, despite her armor.

Jackal rose from her window bench and leaned over the back of her chair, drawing her long hair away from her neck. He noted the chill bumps on her nape. She was delicate in all ways but the ones you couldn't see.

"You saw it yourself," she said. "The day at the cove. We all watched him walk out."

"That was an accident," said Jackal over her shoulder.

"Then according to his records, he's had a lot of accidents."

"What are you talking about, Josie?"