SKIPPING TIME

Chapter 24

                  

Jess scratched Shane's neck and smiled when the pup snuggled closer to his leg. He always felt better when Shane was back here with him. Not only because he loved the little dog like Shane was his own, but because Shane's presence served as a constant reminder that things might not be quite as bad between he and Cacee as they seemed.

The thing was, Cacee had done an incredible job training Shane. And if Cacee wanted Shane to stay away from him, it would only take a single command for Shane to remain permanently  by her side. Instead, Shane spent hours in his room every day.

Once, Cacee had laughingly told him that, as a little girl, she wouldn't sleep without her stuffed dog. She said no matter how late it got or what was happening, if she didn't have--what did she call it? Barkley. Right. If she didn't have Barkley, she refused to go to bed.

A small smile hovered around Jess's mouth at the memory. He could easily see a younger, smaller Cacee stubbornly refusing to sleep without Barkley. But Barkley got shelved when Shane came along.

According to Cacee, from her first day with Shane, she'd never spent a single night without her pup in her bed. She'd laughed and said she wouldn't be able to sleep without Shane anymore than she could've slept without Barkley.

Yet Shane had spent the last two nights in here. With him. And that, more than anything else, made Jess believe that, no matter how pissed she was at him, Cacee didn't want their friendship to end. Of course he might be wrong. Shane loved him as much as he loved the little pup. Shane might want to sleep in here and Cacee might be looking out for her dog. This might have nothing to do with her feelings for him.

But he didn't want to think that was true.

He gave Shane one last scratch on his tummy, wincing at the pain in his hand. He'd already found a packet of new strings in one of the boxes and re-strung the guitar, but there was no way to fix the cuts sliced across the bottoms of his fingers.

At least now he had an idea about what Ray was doing in here. All the boxes Jess had looked in for new strings seemed to have been recently dug through. He wished he knew what Ray needed to find, so he could hide it forever.

Jess pressed his lips into a thin line, straightened his back and stood. He turned to look at the small dog still sitting on his bed. "So what's your take on this? Will she forgive me?"

Shane wagged his tail and let out a single bark.

"I'm going to assume that's a yes. You better be right about this, buddy."

Shane barked again, earning himself a few more scratches under the neck and eliciting a low laugh from Jess.  His smile vanished as he grabbed a T-shirt and jeans from the clean clothes pile and glared at them in complete loathing. God he hated accepting anything from the dickhead. But he couldn't go talk to Cacee wearing sweat-stained clothes. Okay. Time to do this.

Jess hesitated and glanced at the guitar. He'd strung it again, but hadn't checked the strings or re-tuned it. He should probably do that. Doing his best to ignore his overwhelmed relief, he dropped the clothes on a nearby box, sat back down on the bed, picked up the guitar, and began to play.

One song later, with the cuts on his fingers opened and trickling blood, he was forced to stop. Jess reluctantly propped the guitar against the wall. Took a deep breath. Stood. Grabbed the  pile of clean clothes again. Glared at them, as if it were their fault he didn't have his own things. At least they didn't belong to Ray, as Ray was wider and stockier than him. Ray's brother Pete, however, must have been close to the same size because most of his clothes were a perfect fit.

Now Jess frowned. He studied the clothes in his hand more closely and then went to the horizontal metal rod in the corner and rifled through the hangers of shirts and pants lining it. Almost all of them still wore tags. He pulled out a black button-up shirt and a pair of dark jeans with crisp lines ironed into the sides. He held them up together and then shrugged and tossed the gray T-shirt and faded jeans he held onto the floor. Cacee probably wouldn't give a shit what he wore  but what the hell? It wasn't like he had anything to lose by trying. Jess took another deep breath. Told himself to stop being a pussy. Went to shower.

And suddenly, after all his stalling, he needed to see Cacee, to at least try to talk to her. He showered quickly, dried off even faster, dressed and ran a brush through his hair.

His heart went from a steady thump-thump-thump to the thumpthumpthump it picked up to whenever he got ready to walk into the main room. Regardless of how much he wanted to see Cacee, he had no clue how to act around her. So he did the only thing he knew how to do. He hummed a few bars of, "The Show Must Go On" and arranged his expression into one of total indifference before opening the door and stepping into the main room.