Isolated

Chapter 39

Chapter 39

Luke was sipping his coffee next to me on the couch. Whenever he caught my eyes, it was hard to keep a straight face. You couldn't blame me with the building excitement in my system. Any time now, Jackson was going wake up and appear from around the hallway. Don't even ask how we were awake before him because I had no clue.

"How great would it be if he screams?" I asked under my breath. The last person we needed to know about this was Bill. He was sitting in the chair adjacent to the couch, sipping at his own cup and doing a crossword.

Despite how nervous Luke was of Jackson's reaction at the present we left him, he was excited. "That would be the best possible outcome... as long as I don't die," he whispered with a scoff.

Jackson didn't scream. Instead a few minutes later, his heavy footsteps rang definite. His tense and ridged body stiffly marched around the corner in view. The man's eyes were wide in fury, instantly shooting disgusted glares between me and Luke. This was a new level of frustration. I couldn't do it.

The moment I took him in, I fought the instinctual need to crack up, but it was too hard. Failing to hide the smiles and begging laughter wanting to escape, I let it out. Unlike Luke who kept a straight face, my snickering revealed me. It drew Jackson's eyes to single me out, more anger growing through him.

Once he saw Bill was in the room too, who's eyes turned to me in confusion at what I was laughing at, Jackson instantly attempted to tone down his demeanor. It wasn't enough when Bill noticed him. "Someone's not a morning person," he said in amusement to where Jackson's eyes locked on the ground.

"You could say that," Jackson mumbled.

"What's wrong?" Luke asked. Dipping eyebrows moving between me and Jackson, he successfully pulled off confusion.

Jackson shot me a glare. "Nothing," he muttered. Then he glanced between Luke and Bill. "Where's Carter? We were going to town and I want to go right now," he said. It triggered another shameful smirk out of me. This was awesome; he was so pissed and refused to show the reason around his friend. So he was ready to get away for a little bit.

Fetching Carter, they wrote down Melinda's instructions to a convenient store and headed out. By the time they returned, Jackson was back to his normal self and ready to get to work. He knew we had to tackle a lot today and there was no room to get worked up over a dildo. The supplies they returned with proved it too. Carter bought his brown hair dye and they also realized contact lenses would help to. Three brothers and three different eye colors? Not as believable as it could be.

However, the most important objective of the day was something none of us looked forward to thanks to yesterday's difficulty with each other. At least we were progressing more today.

We were all bunched around Bill's computer in his messy office. Cords, stacks of documents, and computer parts laid around the bland square office. Sure enough, there was no room for the big sex toy box.

Luke was sitting in the desk chair in the middle of our huddled figures around the desk and computer. Our eyes pinned on the screen, he let out a sigh of relief. "It's actually the best we found so far." He minimized away from the real estate sites we were on and back to the digital map of the area we pulled up.

"It's two and a half hours away from where we will be looking," Jackson snapped.

Luke swung his head up to the left where Jackson was hunched close to the screen. "The further we are, the safer. Sorry we'll lose some gas money," he snapped back.

A big issue we faced this whole time was not knowing where in Washington we should settle. Carter explained that he knew the general area where Reid's main headquarters was. However, this 'general area' spanned many miles between Lake Macklen and a city called Quincy. It was a lot of land to cover in what would be mostly wilderness. That didn't mean any of us were keen on settling near where we would be looking. We agreed that we would find places to rent no closer than an hour away from that area.