Bleed Until You Heal

33- Movie Dates

"It isn't adorable," Scott argues.

"It's adorable," I say with more emphasis as I stand up from the couch with my phone ready to make the call to the office. "Anyway, I'm going to go upstairs and make this call and then we can go to the movies."

I hurry upstairs before Scott can pull me back into a tickling match because I'm painfully ticklish and I will definitely lose. Once I'm safe in my room, I call the school and the secretary sets up an appointment for me on the Wednesday after this one with seven members of the Board of Governors of the Art Institute of Atlanta, including the chairman, which is a big deal. She'd been happy to oblige when I told her how important this information is and that I needed to talk to as many of them as possible right away.

Once the appointment is made, I politely thank the secretary and then I hang up and go over to my mirror to make sure that my hair and makeup look okay. As I'm fixing some loose strands of hair, I can hear Jasper talking downstairs and me, being the little eavesdropper that I feel like being right now, I snoop closer to the edge of my room, blocked by the hanging blanket, to hear what he's saying. Perhaps he's talking about me down there.

"I'm just saying that I'm really kinda protective of her," Jasper's saying and I immediately assume that he's talking about me.

"Yeah, I've noticed," Scott says, clearing his throat a bit. "And I think that it's really cool of you. How you look out for each other."

"Right, well this is me looking out for her, so it's nothing personal," He says and I want to stop him from saying whatever it is that he's about to say but for some reason, I don't. I just sit there in my room and listen to the conversation going on in the living room.

"Okay..." Scott trails off curiously.

"She is a gorgeous human being inside and out and you better not hurt her. She's a magnificent creature and you know more than anybody the kind of hell that she's seen. But she could still rule the world if she wanted to because she has more confidence in her pinky than most people do in their whole lifetime. She's like a unicorn, and you better not hurt her. I love her to death and I won't let anything happen to her."

There's a long silence after that and I'm about to head downstairs to break up the silence down there but right before I take the first step down the stairs, Scott starts speaking.

"I know that you want me to tell you that I won't hurt her," He begins and I remain silent, wondering what he's about to say. "But I can't. Maybe I will hurt her. Or maybe she'll hurt me. That's kind of part of the guessing game that is a relationship, you know? You just never know what's going to happen. I mean, I can't imagine ever letting her go because you're right- she's absolutely gorgeous and magic and amazing and I don't think that I'll ever let her go but you just never know. All I can promise is that I will try my absolute best not to hurt her but that's about it."

"Wow. That's deep, man," Jasper mutters, obviously taken by surprise by Scott's response and honestly, I'm a bit surprised as well. "You know that she can probably hear what we're saying right now."

"Yeah, I kind of figured," He sighs. "That's alright."

Jasper doesn't respond and I think that it's because he's thinking about Conner now. Last week, they had that dinner like Jasper said that they would but it didn't go as well as I was hoping. But it didn't go as badly as Jasper was worried about. From the vague details that I've gotten from Jasper over the past week, they're still friends but the romance is on pause right now while they both figure some stuff out. Seems complicated to me.

"Okay, movie time," I say, quickly trotting down the stairs with a bright smile on my face as I pay dumb to the conversation that I just heard, even though they just said that they knew that I was listening in on it. "I'm getting the biggest popcorn that they have, I'm so hungry."