Always Him (Always #1)

Chapter Four

Jasper followed me back to the apartment. The sun was beginning to set, covering the town in gorgeous pinks and oranges. It really made him look better than I remembered. He climbed out of his car, lugging a couple of suitcases with him.

He sheepishly glanced at them when he caught me staring. "I'm sorry, I came prepared."

"I'd be shocked if you didn't, Jas. Besides, what's family for if we're not flexible with living arrangements? We take care of each other, and you know that."

"I do." He conceded. "It's nice to be back."

I walked to the door, opening it for him. "It's good to have you back. I bet my parents talked your ears off when you first arrived."

He placed his suitcases next to the door; his eyes were inspecting my meager apartment. "They did." His eyes surveyed every detail, from my pictures on the wall to the lamp in the corner.

"It's not much," I whispered, suddenly insecure of my apartment and it's meager contents. "I haven't cared. Not for a while."

Jasper only gave a nod in understanding. That was a good thing about having him back; I didn't have to go into details if I didn't want to. He wouldn't press the issue. If I wanted to talk, he'd listen, but he wouldn't force anything out of me. I would do the same for him. That's how it always was.

It was a pact that we'd made, Jasper, Blaine, and me. Don't press the issue if you wouldn't want to say it yourself. We'd never gone back on it—our most cherished rule.

"It's not bad, Sades; it's you." He stepped forward, examining the pictures on the wall. Many of them were of the three of us. Some were just me, and others were Blaine and myself and some with our parents. There was no organization with the pictures; I just threw them on the wall and smiled when I looked at them. Sometimes I cried, I couldn't help it. He grinned at some of the pictures.

He pointed at one of us on the beach, just a few days before Blaine died. "Blaine swore he saw a shark and made us leave just after you took this picture." His voice was sad, exactly how I felt whenever I talked about my brother and the good times I'd had with him. It was nice knowing I wasn't alone in that aspect.

He had. He'd done the whole high kick, arms flailing as he ran towards the car, leaving Jasper and me on the sand, watching him run away. Neither of us knew what to do for a minute until we saw the girl still standing in shock, eyes in the direction of where Blaine had trotted off too.

I nodded in agreement. "Yeah, but it turned out that Blaine only wanted to leave because he got rejected by the girl who was trying to surf."

We both burst into laughter at the memory. Blaine had finally worked up the nerve to talk to this girl; her name was Rebecca, he'd told us later. He tried to speak with her about surfing like he knew what he was talking about because it was evident that she did. (He didn't.) She'd laughed at him and said he wasn't a surfer. She was from Europe, on vacation, she didn't want some American boy. That's when he concocted the story about the shark. Jasper and I humored him and left but not before Rebecca had come up to us begging to keep Blaine from her until he learned about surfing. She'd handed me her number.

I forgot to give him the number until it was too late. I'd forgotten about it when we got home. I'd found it the morning of the funeral and stuck it underneath the jersey, just above his heart. He managed to get her number after all; too bad she'd never get the call.