“Oh my god,” I whispered, gaping at his lack of injury.
“I told you it wasn’t bad.” Jack yanked his arm back from me and pulled down his sleeve.
“How?” I stared up at him. “There’s all that blood…”
“I bleed easy. I’m a hemophiliac,” Jack replied, and for some reason, that answer made him smirk.
“No, it’s not possible,” I shook my head. “I heard the dog crunching into your bone. There’s no way that wounds that shallow would hit bone.”
“It all happened so fast. You can’t be sure of what you heard,” he attempted to explain it all away.
“I know what I heard!” I said it with more conviction than I actually had. “You should have massive bite marks and maybe even a broken arm. And how did you even get that dog down?”
“You saw me do that.” He looked at me skeptically, but there was something brewing in his eyes that I couldn’t read.
“That dog was huge and crazy!” I remembered the way that Jack had stopped it with one hand before he threw it the ground. It easily weighed over a hundred pounds, and it had clamped onto his arm. “It’s not even humanly possible for you to be able to stop a dog like that, not without a massive fight, and you have one barely-there bite mark! If he could be taken down that easily, then…”
“What exactly are you saying?” Jack narrowed his eyes at me, but there was a brightness to them. He was hoping I would figure it out.
“You were bit, but there’s hardly a wound, and-and you have like super human strength and… everything in the whole world wants to have sex with you and… you don’t have a temperature!” I spouted.
Biting my lip, I didn’t look at him. I tried to figure it all out, but none of it made sense. I could feel him looking at me, but I just couldn’t put the puzzle together.
“So?” Jack asked encouragingly.
“So…” I threw my arms up in the air, feeling completely exasperated. “I don’t know! You’re a werewolf!” Jack scoffed and looked disappointed.
“There’s no such thing as werewolves,” he rolled his eyes and opened the car door.
“Well, what else is there?” I whined, but he shut the door instead of answering me. I ran around to the other side of the car and jumped in. “What’s going on, Jack?”
“I bleed a lot, you’re confused cause you got caught up in the emotion, my adrenaline gave me the power to take down the dog, and I am just stunningly attractive,” he explained, but his tone was teasing, especially on the part about him being attractive. “Oh, and I do to have a temperature. Everything has a temperature.”
“Okay, yeah, but you don’t have a normal human temperature.”
“Are you like a walking thermometer?” Jack started the car and looked over at me.
“Where are we going?” I asked, ignoring his question.
“I’m taking you home,” he said, then added, “Just for the night. I’ll see you tomorrow. But you’ve had a long enough night, and you have school in the morning.”
“You still need to go to the hospital,” I pointed out. “The bite broke the skin. You need a rabies shot.”
“I do not.” He started to pull out of the parking lot and turned on the stereo, but kept it low so we could talk.
“Look, I know the wounds aren’t very big, but if any of his saliva mixes with your blood, you can get rabies,” I said. “I read this book by Chuck Palahniuk all about rabies, so I’m almost nearly an expert. It’s even sexually transmitted.”
“Well, luckily for you-” (at that point he stopped to wink at me, but I just rolled my eyes) “-I do not have rabies.”
“You don’t know that,” I said. “It wouldn’t hurt you just to get a stupid shot.”
“No, Alice, I don’t need a shot.” He looked at me, completely serious, and then it finally dawned on me.
“You can’t get rabies.” I sighed and leaned my head back against the seat. “That really blows my whole werewolf theory.”
“I already told you they aren’t real.”
“So is it just rabies or is it any communicable disease?” I asked it even though I wasn’t sure he would answer. “Oh my god. It’s any disease, isn’t it? Any form of illness?”
“You’ve had a very long night,” he said quietly. “Maybe we should drop it for tonight.”
“But-” I started to protest but I couldn’t think of a single argument for it. All of this was getting maddening, but for whatever reason, he couldn’t tell me what was going on. So all I could do was get more and more frustrated and perplexed. “You’re okay, aren’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like… you got injured tonight for me, and I just want to know that you’re okay.” That might be the only information I’d get, and it had to be enough for me to settle with that.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Jack smiled at me. We had stopped in front of my building, but I was reluctant to get out.
“Ugh, this is so unfair,” I groaned, opening the car door to get out.
“You know what you’re problem might be?” Jack asked, giving me an odd look. “You worry too much.”