so I supposed football was in his blood. Normally, I hated small talk. As an introvert, I was more than happy to sit in comfortable—or even uncomfortable—silence. But Jackson stirred something in me, making me speak when normally I’d be silent.
“Big Cowboys fan?”
“No,” he replied flatly.
For a moment I thought he was being sarcastic, but when he gave no other indication that was the case, I asked, “Really?”
He glanced over at me and I looked down at the Cowboy floor mats and the Cowboy helmet hanging off the rearview mirror.
“This is my dad’s truck.”
“Oh.”
A small thrill raced through me. It seemed my detection skills were still on point. Maybe my attraction hadn’t dulled my senses after all. Silence fell once again, and again, I found myself eager to fill it.
“So, Mia mentioned that you have a lot of siblings.”
His only response was a dip of his chin. I might’ve been mistaken, but I thought she’d said that Jackson was the “wild” one. It made me wonder just how wild he could be, but I immediately tried to wipe that question out of my mind.
I bit the side of my mouth, a nervous habit I’d picked up during the scandal. “I’m sorry that you had to come all the way out here. I could’ve taken a car. I tried to tell Mia, but she insisted. And thank you, again, for saving me back there. From the girls.”
“No problem,” he said, keeping his stare straight ahead.
It was strange to me that he hadn’t asked why the girls wanted a picture with me or…oh shit. A lightbulb went off. He must know. That was why he wasn’t asking me why those girls had wanted to take a picture with me. Or who Gio was.
And why he couldn’t even look at me, which meant he’d seen the tape.
I felt moisture begin to fill my lower lids. I’d honestly thought that I’d come to peace with my past. But, apparently, that was when my past was in the past. Now that it was occupying my present, I wasn’t as cool with it.
Logically, I knew there was nothing that I could do about it. Over the years, my therapists—yes, plural—had given me mantras to repeat.
Judgmental people will judge you no matter what you do, and non-judgmental people won’t judge you no matter what you do.
Other people’s opinions of me are none of my business.
I can only control my thoughts, not anyone else’s.
Sadly, those platitudes just weren’t cutting it.
“Are you an actress?”
“What?” I turned back to Jackson, who was still focused on the road in front of him.
“Those girls, they wanted to take a picture with you.”
Hope sprang up in my chest. Maybe he didn’t know. My excitement was short-lived, however, because the truth was if he didn’t know now, all he had to do to find out was type my name into a search bar. One quick Google search and all would be revealed. Literally.
I shook my head, doing my best to push all the feelings of insecurity down. “I was on a reality show. A long time ago. When I was eighteen. Netflix just picked it up, so it’s found a new audience.”
“Oh, that’s…cool.”
“Not really,” I muttered under my breath.
“It’s not?”
Shit. I hadn’t meant for him to hear that.
“It was a long time ago. I’d rather just leave my past in the past.” It was the same answer I gave everyone who asked me about House of Love.
This time when Jackson fell silent again, I had no desire to fill the dead air. I didn’t want the conversation to lead back to my time on House of Love, or the fallout after. I might be living on borrowed time when it came to him not knowing about my past, but I wasn’t going to borrow trouble before trouble came calling.
Once people found out, they always looked at me differently. Some had pity in their eyes, others judgment. I knew it was inevitable that, at some point, Jackson would also look at me through different eyes. But I was going to enjoy the time I had before that happened.
Chapter 5
Jackson
“The road of a well-lived life is paved with bad decisions.”
~ Josephine Grace Clarke
Inhaling deeply, I stretched my fingers out before grasping the Dallas blue leather-covered wheel once again. The drive from DFW back to my hometown had taken close to three hours thanks to rush hour traffic getting out of the city on a Friday.
Right after I’d asked her about the TV show, she’d pulled out