Read Online Jaq With a Q (Kismet) by Jettie Woodruff - Free Book Online Page A

towel, dark blue with white spatter marks covered her naked body. The same jeans she always wore were also wet, as was the gray hoody, and a pair of plain white panties. They hung over the bathtub, drooped over a rusty bar above the small tub. That answered my question of her hygiene. She did bathe, and put on clean clothes, the same ones every day. I guess I never thought about her needing clothes. Remembering something from her vacant bedroom, I switched my screen to that camera, to a pile of untouched clothing on the bed.
    “I don’t see the game,” she confirmed, my question about why she couldn’t just answer was intentionally forgotten, never to be talked about again. Not until I brought it up, anyway.
    For a second, I was star struck, unable to speak. Jaq held the towel over her chest when the tuck came undone from breasts, showing the side of her body, a thin waist, curvy hips, and long legs. There was no doubt that was the part she kept hidden, more for her own self-hang-up than anyone else’s. She didn’t want anyone to see her, not like that, not like other girls who looked like her. Jaq had no idea how beautiful she was, not a clue, and she didn’t want anyone else to know it either.
    “Ollie? You there?”
    “Sorry, yes. I’m sending it to you now.”
    Jaq placed her laptop on the toilet and reached up for her clothes, checking the progress of their drying before sitting on the floor in front of me. Her normal wild, curly hair was damp, hanging with loose tendrils around her face and I couldn’t help but see something. Something I was so close to, yet so far away from. Something I couldn’t quite reach. Then again, I didn’t even know what the hell it was I was reaching for, but it was there. Strongly there, pulling me in more and more.
    I set the game up, but I didn’t play, not really. My attention stayed on Jaq, struggling to place the numbers in the correct box, her thoughtfulness focused on the task at hand. She won because I let her win, and because I didn’t care. It was her I cared about, what made her tick, and what it was about her that made me tick, my own stable mind in question.
    “I’m going to the lake house to meet my brother tomorrow. I’ll be back sometime Sunday.”
    Jaq forgot all about Sudoku, and she took that trivial news way worse than I imagined. “What do you mean? You’re leaving?”
    “Just for the weekend. I can still talk to you.”
    “Where?”
    “Maine, remember? We talked about this.”
    “Yeah, but you said you wouldn’t leave. Something might happen. What if you don’t come back?”
    My eyes went right to the dropped towel and my words stuck in my throat. Jesus Criminy. It wasn’t even sexual, not really. It wasn’t like that at all. Explaining it isn’t even feasible. The attraction was more of just that, an attraction, a pull toward something stronger than I could control. I had to have her and not in the physical sense. It wasn’t like that; it was more than that, yet I didn’t know what, why, or how. Something about her consumed me and with everything in me, I wanted more and more.
    In the eyes of the beholder .
    My father’s words, his own raspy tone sang in my head, and I stared at her, in a daze. For the first time in my life, I understood what he meant when he said that. My mind couldn’t wrap around that, but something in me knew it was more. More than her tranquil eyes, her perfect complexion, the smile that always caused this flutter like thing that I had been trying to ignore. She hid it, always trying to keep from it. Sometimes she even placed her hand over her lips, hiding it from the empty room. But once in a while she slipped, I saw it, and it went a very long way. I would think about it, visualizing it in my head a few times a day afterward.
    In the eyes of the beholder.
    “Hello?”
    “I’m here,” I said, crossing double t’s and adding a period with a quick dot to the end of my notes. “You won’t even know I’m not