Will watched them talk. “The pajamas were actually Corry’s idea, you know,” he said quietly. “Make it look like we were having a pajama party, to explain why we were all together. I don’t know if she intended this or not, but it actually calmed a lot of my people down, to have something kind of silly going on.” He looked at me. “She’s pretty remarkable, isn’t she?”
I smiled proudly. “Yes, she is,” I replied. As if her ears were burning, Corry met my eyes. “Hi,” she mouthed, grinning. “Hi, yourself,” I said back. My gaze traveled past her and spotted Lydia, who was squashed in the corner of a couch, giving me the evil eye. No one was talking to her, or even looking at her. She sat there and scowled for a moment, then tapped her watch so only I could see it. Her message was clear: the clock is ticking. My skin went cold.
I’d almost forgotten. I had eight hours to produce Eli or she’d come after me. It might as well have been eight minutes. I shivered and turned back to the men.
“Have you seen any sign of her?” Jesse was saying to Will.
Will nodded. “It went just like Scarlett predicted. She followed me home, although I pretended I was trying to lose her. She parked across the street until sunset, and then she started sneaking around the outside of the house.”
“Is she still out there?”
He shook his head. “She left about ten minutes before you guys got here.” He frowned. “Since you guys stopped her today, I’m guessing she’s going to come after you next. She’ll want the bargest back, and she’ll want to make you guys pay for humiliating her.”
I looked at Jesse. “I thought we were very respectful. Except for the part where we made her pee herself.”
He just looked at me blankly, uninterested in banter. “Scarlett,” he said quietly. “Can we talk for a second?”
“Uh, sure,” I said, taking a deep breath. The worst was over, and he wanted to finish our talk. I hadn’t expected him to ask right away, but it made sense.
Will herded the outlying werewolves closer to Corry, and they all crowded together in front of the movie. Jesse and I went into the kitchen, where I could still see the group through the open doorway into the den.
Jesse’s eyes searched my face. “At the picnic table, you thanked me like you weren’t planning to take me up on my offer.”
I nodded. “I’m not,” I said simply.
“Why?” he demanded. Then, with an embarrassed smile at the harshness in his voice, he said, “Sorry. I just don’t get it.” He reached across the space between us and added softly, “I’m in love with you.”
I nodded, hitching up my courage. “No,” I said, as calmly as I could manage. “You’re not.” He began to respond, but I held up a hand. “I know, I know. You think you are. I believe that, Jesse. But you’re not in love with me; you’re in love with the version of me that you wish I was.” I absently rubbed the fading burn on my wrist, from when I’d thrown Leah Rhodes’s body into the furnace at the beginning of all this. “You think you’re better than the things that I do, and you want me to be better than them too.”
“So you think I’m, what, a snob,” he said incredulously, “because I don’t believe you should be destroying corpses?”
“I think . . .” I paused, trying to choose my words carefully. “I think that you were right when you said what I really wanted was control of my life. But if I leave LA with you, start somewhere new, that’s not me getting control. That’s just me giving it to someone else.”
He stared at me, wounded. “I don’t want to control you, Scarlett. I love you.”
“How can you,” I said very quietly, “when you don’t really know me?”
He stepped all the way into my personal space, touching my cheek with one warm palm. “You’re wrong,” Jesse said gently. He smelled wonderful, and it took every second of growing up I had done recently to not throw my arms around him.
Instead, I sighed and took a step sideways, away from him. “Maybe I am. But then why do I feel so right?”
He stared at me for a long moment, hurt, and I felt anxiety and sorrow twist in my gut. Then Jesse shook his head in disbelief. “This is about Eli. You’re pushing me away because of him.”
“Eli’s out of the picture,” I corrected him. “He left LA.”
“Then it’s still about Olivia,” he insisted. “You think you can’t be happy because of what happened with her.”
I gave him a sad smile. “No, Jesse. For once, this isn’t about the psycho hose beast. This is just me.”
He paced a few feet away from me, and then turned on his heel and came back. “Do you love me?” he demanded. I blinked, unsure of how to respond. “Do you?” he pressed.
“Yes,” I said quietly. “I love you. But I don’t trust you.”
Jesse rocked back like I had hit him.
I could have kept talking. I could have explained that I trusted him to have my back, to keep me safe, but I didn’t trust that he wouldn’t wake up next to me in a week, a month, a year, and decide that I was a stranger. That I was tainted.
I could have talked and talked, but we would have always ended up back here, with that betrayed expression on his face. “I need to take a walk,” he said abruptly.
“Jesse . . . ,” I began.
He waved an arm to dismiss whatever I was about to say and marched off toward the front of the house.
I breathed in and out, slowly. And I let him go.