Dedicated to Miss CuticleCareENetwork because she is amazing and I loves her.
Chapters will be short!
Jesse is, Beca decides begrudgingly, like a cat. Disarmingly cute-adorable, even-and able to lure people into believing he was harmless with his smiles and playful attitude. But there are claws-and fangs, she gasps inwardly when he nips roughly at her shoulder-hidden beneath the surface...
It's 5:15 pm when Jesse finally pulls open the car door, a blast of frosty air invading the cab of Beca's car.
"It's no use," he groans, plunking down dejectedly into the worn out passenger seat and pulling the door closed. "We're stuck. Fucking stuck." Beca groans and she drops her forehead to the top rim of the steering wheel.
"This can not be happening," she grumbles. This was supposed to be a fun, relaxing weekend at Benji's family cabin. One final hurrah, their last Spring Break together before Senior year ended and they all went their separate ways for college. So Beca, her cousin Stacy, and her two best friends, Benji and Jesse, decided that they would spend Thursday through Sunday out at the cabin. It would be three nights of celebrating their departure from adolescence and their take off into Adulthood...which they planned to do by getting drunk off of whatever alcohol Jesse's older brother would buy for them.
March was a, typically, mild month for weather-usually bringing temperatures in the mid 50s with slightly overcast skies and sweeping wind that still carried a ghost of winter's bite to it. Indeed, Monday and Wednesday morning had been exactly that. But, the spring time weather for this Spring Break had not held out and by the time Wednesday night had rolled around it was a drizzling, frigid throwback to the winter that Beca and her friends had been trying to shake off.
"I told you this would happen," Jesse sighs, shaking his head. "After all of this rain, these dirt roads turn to mush. It's no wonder we got stuck."
'Mush' is putting it mildly, Beca thinks to herself sourly. The road was slicker than snot-as Beca's mother was fond of saying-and after fighting her steering wheel and cursing her not very effective four wheel drive, Beca's poor car had lost its battle with the sloping mud and had slid, ass first, off the road and into a three foot ditch off the side. Just six miles from the cabin. And no amount of pushing and rocking the car, or moving the steering wheel and cursing had gotten it unstuck.
"Well then, how did Stacy and Benji manage to make it?" Beca whines, tightening her grip on the steering wheel and raising her head to focus her glare at him.
"Because they were in Stacy's Chevy 4x4. Not this crappy Toyota Land Cruiser from the 1980s," Jesse offers, shrugging in the face of her hostility. He has long since gotten used to her laser like glare. Beca watches as he bends over and begins to tug his mud caked boots off of his feet, moving them further under the dash, before reaching up to the heat/AC controls to switch it to blow oh his poor, nearly frozen feet. Beca returns her gaze down to her lap when she realizes that she is no longer glaring at him, but simply staring…at the lines of his profile…at the unruly brown curls peeking out from the bottom of his red slouchy beanie…at his soft…kissable looking lips… Fuck! Stop staring, you idiot. He's gonna think you're some kind of weirdo. She sighs quietly. This was not how this was supposed to go.
Benji and Stacy had ridden together, heading out early to get the cabin aired out and to unpack the food and drinks for the weekend, thus giving Beca the perfect excuse to offer Jesse a ride and then she could finally maybe admit that she has kinda had a crush on him since eighth grade...sorta...like, a lot...okay, she's fucking head over heels for him and she totally wants to take his virginity...with her own...virginity. Uuuuughhhhh…
"Ugh," Beca verbally echoes her frustrated thoughts. And she'd had the perfect outfit planned for this drive too; her favorite pair of dark purple skinny jeans-because they made her ass look fantastic- and a sparkly turquoise tank top-because Stacy assured her it was cute and girly and boys liked that shit- with her best push up bra-because, well, boobs.
Well, she'd at least worn the bra. So her boobs were somewhat noticeable under her oversized grey sweater. But she'd had to substitute her skinny jeans for a pair of warmer, and subsequently less ass-fantasticifying, jeans. Maybe this was for the best? She'd had this idea of confessing to him for weeks-Okay…maybe months- and she still had no idea what to say or how to say it. Beca was a girl of few words and fewer actions, lacking confidence and preferring to watch others, like her out going and out spoken cousin Stacy, do and say the things she wished she could.
"I'll call AAA and see if we can get a tow to the cabin," she hears Jesse sigh and Beca bites the inside of her cheek and wills herself to not stare at his crotch while he shifts, arching his back to lift his pelvis up enough to pull his phone and wallet from his back pocket. Beca feels a shudder wrack her body hard enough that Jesse cocks an eye brow and stares at her.
"It's fucking cold," she says to him. And it's true. It is cold in the car, despite the heater blowing. But her cheeks are pink and the tips of her ears burn with her lie.