“Air hockey!” said Drew. “Come on.”
I ran after him. That was more fun. Drew could knock that thing around the table with such force though.
“Put some muscle into it,” he said.
“I have no muscle.”
As I rolled up my sleeve to show him, he whacked the puck down the table and got another point.
“Hey, that was mean.”
“You need to get some killer instinct.”
“Who do you think I am? Carlie or someone?”
I’d never be like Carlie. Hell, if I was, I’d have punched Jackson in the face when he laughed at me instead of running home and crying. She’d have screamed and kicked until he was the one crying. Sometimes I wanted to be like that. Not just with Jackson but with the girls from work who could be such bitches or with just life in general. In my head, I screamed and fought but the words never came out. They were stuck behind this wall of “being nice”. My mouth dried up and there was no way for me to speak and my heart beat so loud no one would hear me anyway.
I didn’t want to tell Drew all that. I could talk about those things with Jackson but Jac
kson wasn’t here. I was with Drew and I was determined to have fun.
I went with Drew to cash in the tickets.
“What do you want, Gina?” he asked. “It’s all yours, anything you want up to the value of these tickets.”
“But you won them all. Well, except that one from the basketball game, and I only got that by accident.”
“There’s nothing here I want. You could get a stuffed toy.”
In the end, I picked out a large red teddy bear. I wasn’t that into stuffed toys but it made Drew happy and the bear was kinda cute.
“You could call it Jackson, it has a fierce look like him.”
“I’m not having a teddy bear called Jackson,” I said. Then I held the bear up in front of us. “Grrr, get me some more whiskey, woman. Grrr.”
Drew and I both broke into giggles.
After that, we went for coffee.
“What are you going to do about Jackson?” Drew asked.
I had no idea he even knew anything about that. I shrugged.
“You can’t just give up, Gina. You need the killer instinct there too. If you let him go, he’ll sink down and down until there is no saving him. You too. You need Jackson just as much.”
He stared at me while sipping his pumpkin latte, waiting for a response.
“It’s not possible, Drew. He rejected me. He made his thoughts well known. If I do anything now, I’m just going to look like a desperate fool.”
“Nope, you’ll look like you are trying to break through that tough armor. He’s like an armadillo. He’s all squishy and meaty inside but you never get to that sweet armadillo meat because the shell is so tough.”
“That is the most disturbing image I’ve ever heard. You want to eat an armadillo?”
“Not real armadillo. The Jackson armadillo. And I don’t want to eat him, you do.”
That wasn’t making it any more appealing, but I totally got what Drew said. Just how, though? I couldn’t even talk to Jackson without that horrible laughter playing in my head. As much as I cared, the hurts inside had grown too strong. If he made a move, just one little thing to let me know he was sorry or that he wanted to talk to me again, it’d be different but I’d gotten nothing from him but lingering glances. You can’t build anything on glances. They were as substantial as air. I’d found that out already.
Chapter 11 Jackson