The Apocalypse (46 page)

Impulsively, Jake jerked his coat on and abandoned his house, heading across the street to Hannah's. He'd tried calling her several times after she'd gotten home from school, but, of course, Hannah hadn't answered. Jake figured he had nothing left to lose by trying to see her in person, and, if she refused, maybe he could conspire with Isaac to make things better.

That is, if Isaac didn't get pissed at Jake for the disaster he'd created.

If Isaac was on Jake's side, then success was pretty much guaranteed.

Jake paused at the Ayers's front door but only briefly; then he strode in, shedding his coat and hanging it near the door. The house was pretty quiet, and Jake wondered where everybody was.

Hearing shuffling in the living room, Jake wandered over there. And there Hannah was—he'd found her effortlessly. She was sitting in front of the fireplace, apparently starting a fire. Interested and unsure of how to start
a
conversation, Jake watched Hannah pick up a brown book, rip a couple of pages from it, and toss them into the fireplace. Flames engulfed the paper immediately.

Jake continued watching as Hannah ripped out several more sheets of paper, a satisfied smirk on her face. It was then that Jake recognized the brown book as Hannah's diary; he blinked in shock.

Perhaps talking to Hannah when she was in a violent mood wasn't such a good idea. But if Jake didn't try it now…

"Hey."

Hannah didn't flinch. Instead, her head turned slowly in Jake's direction, and piercing blue eyes—those uber blue eyes that had the power to mesmerize Jake—looked at him fiercely. Without looking away from his gaze, Hannah blindly ripped out more pages from her diary and flung them into the fireplace.

Jake cleared his throat and shifted his weight nervously. "Can we talk?"

Finally, Hannah looked away from his eyes and ripped out more pages. She fed them to the fire, evidently watching the blaze seriously. Cautiously, Jake moved farther into the living room, walking until he was decently close to Hannah but still far enough away that she'd have to give a warning sign if she moved to attack him.

Not that Jake was paranoid or anything.

He especially wasn't scared. Of course not.

"We can talk," Hannah said hesitantly. She shifted so that she was sitting Indian style and facing Jake. "But only if you tell me what you're trying to pull."

Surprised, Jake stared at Hannah as he dropped down to sit on the floor next to her. "What are you talking about?"

Hannah sighed impatiently. "What exactly are you playing at?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Jake said as earnestly as he could. He felt his forehead wrinkle in confusion from her accusations. "All I want to do is set a few things straight."

"Huh." Hannah crossed her arms over her chest in clear disbelief. "So there's no reason in particular why you're trying to turn my friends against me? You're not planning some kind of sabotage to screw me over? You've suddenly quit playing mind games with me?"

Anger shot through Jake. First, Hannah's friends had accused him of being up to something when he was being nice to Hannah. After that, Hannah's own grandmother had warned him not to mold Hannah to his will and make her into whomever he wanted her to be. Then Hannah's friends had been suspicious of him yet again when he tried to help Hannah get her memory back. And now Hannah herself was accusing him of playing cruel games with her.

What kind of sick, twisted bastard did people think he was?

"Very original, Hannah," Jake rolled his eyes, agitated. "You're not the first one to accuse me of shit like that."

"Probably because your real intentions are so easy to spot," Hannah snapped. "So just tell me, Jake, why the sadistic fascination with ruining me? Are we really going to do this for the rest of our lives? I mean, okay, it was all fun and games when we were kids, but now you're just getting vicious. When does it stop?"

"I haven't been doing anything cruel like that!" Jake finally exclaimed, his eyes widening to make his point. "You just wouldn't give me the opportunity to explain that to you before."

Hannah shrugged easily. "That's because you were pissing me off."

Raising his eyebrows, Jake insisted, "You still should have let me explain everything to you."

"You're doing it again. Pissing me off."

Frustrated, Jake blurted, "I know you think that I was only trying to hurt you, but I really do care about you, Hannah. A lot. I'm sorry that I said what I said—because I didn't mean it at all." He stopped and sighed, stalling. "I only said it because I was afraid of feeling…what I feel for you."

Immediately, Jake looked at the ground, sheepish for sounding like a soap opera or something equally tacky. He wasn't the mushy type, and he'd never been in this kind of situation before. When he'd dated Mercedes, who was his only serious girlfriend, they both were open with their feelings from the beginning, not having any childhood hatred to overcome.

Suddenly, Jake felt like
a
hypocrite. Hadn't he accused Hannah mentally of trying to pull one over on him as well? Her trying to break his heart had definitely been on his list of possibilities.

When Hannah still hadn't said anything, Jake glanced up at her. Her eyes had returned to the blazing fire, and her shoulders had slumped in defeat. Jake wasn't too sure what that was about; he was pretty convinced that he would never entirely understand Hannah Ayers, but that was something that he could accept, if Hannah would give him the option of doing so.

"It did start out with me just wanting you to get your memory back so things could go back to normal," Jake confessed, peering at Hannah with utmost seriousness. He wanted to be totally honest, just as he would have been with Mercedes. "But really, can you blame me for that? At that point, I didn't know what to think of you. You've been around for my whole life, you know? It wasn't easy to have you become some new person that I didn't know at all."

Hannah scoffed. "You say that like it was easy for me."

"I know it wasn't," Jake said quickly. "But imagine if you were the one who remembered everything and I was the one who, for some reason, always wanted to spend time with you. It all really messed with my head too."

"Mm." Hannah glanced at Jake for the briefest of seconds. Then, extremely obviously unwillingly, she muttered, "I see why you were freaked out."

Jake hadn't expected Hannah to admit to that one. She should have been way more stubborn. It occurred to him then that the accident had changed more than her feelings for him; it had changed her in general as well. That was probably a good thing, Jake thought, because it was the amnesiac Hannah that he had fallen for. If there were no traces of that girl left behind, would he still feel the same way about her?

"I stopped thinking that way, Han," Jake said softly. "I honestly am crazy about you." He watched her face, trying to read her thoughts while she processed that. "Everybody but me, I guess, has kinda known that for awhile now, but I didn't want to admit it."

Hannah's face was unreadable. "Why not?"

That was certainly an awkward question. It made Jake think very heavily—not about the answer to the question, since he knew that well enough, but about how to respond. If he was really serious about pursuing something with Hannah, and he liked to think that he was, then he needed to be completely upfront and honest with her; that's how Jake rolled. But, on the other hand, he was putting himself out there to be severely hurt and judged. Maybe he deserved that though.

Jake took a deep breath. "I was scared," he admitted. "I knew you didn't hate me, but I didn't know if that was going to change when your memory came back." He shrugged gently. "It kind of had me paranoid. I didn't want you to feel like I'd betrayed you and let you fall for me—and I know that's how you feel now—and then have you hate me when you got your memory again."

She was quiet for awhile, but then Hannah sighed. "That's the only reason I got mad, you know. I really did think you were just trying to make me fall for you." She frowned to herself. "But I should've known better because, looking back, you were a real asshole to me after the accident."

Mildly surprised, Jake surveyed Hannah. "Was I? I didn't even mean to be."

"You didn't talk to me very much." Hannah nibbled her lower lip, tilted her head, and let her strawberry blonde hair fall in a wave. "You know, I faked you out and acted like I didn't know what simple things were, just to make you talk."

That one stunned Jake. "You're lying," he accused lightly, smiling in his amusement. "That's the craziest thing I've ever heard."

Hannah half smiled and looked away. "Jake, if…if your feelings changed, why were you trying to get rid of me?" Her eyes narrowed. "And don't even try to convince me that you weren't trying to do that because I'm not an idiot. You were trying to brush me off on the girls."

"Because you scared the hell out of me," Jake answered easily. He thought he'd gone over that already. "Even without admitting to myself that I like you, I knew I was getting in over my head. If you got pissed and hated me when you remembered everything, I didn't want to get caught on the warpath I thought you'd be on."

Regarding Jake curiously, Hannah sighed and sat up on her knees. "I've got to go work on some homework," she told him after taking a glance at the clock. "But…thanks for explaining things."

Jake was perhaps more confused than ever. What did that mean? Slowly, he exhaled, prepping himself for what was to come. "So where does that leave us?"

Hannah nibbled her lower lip more as she stood up. "I don't know, Jake. Really, I don't."

In silence, Jake watched Hannah walk out of the living, wondering what he was supposed to do. He felt somewhat accomplished, since he'd been given the opportunity to clear the air with Hannah. She no longer seemed pissed at him, but she was as uncertain about where they stood as he was. Were they friends now, or were they just calling a truce and getting on with their lives? Was she interested in something romantic, or had Jake blown any chances of that?

He looked over near the raging fire and glimpsed that brown book. Curious, Jake glanced around, and, once satisfied that no one was around to see him, he picked up the book and opened it. The age of the pages let Jake know that he'd been correct in recognizing the book as Hannah's diary, but none of her childish handwriting was sprawled on the pages. In fact, there was no handwriting at all. Frowning, Jake flipped through all of the pages, but the only writing he found was the near the very end of the book, written in handwriting that he figured belonged to Hannah when she was probably a sophomore or so.

I love Jake.

That's all it said, in tiny sprawl, as if it was the sole piece of information that Hannah had forgotten to destroy.

To say that Jake was intrigued would have been one of the greatest understatements of the century. His heart skipped a beat, and his mind reread the words over and over. While the three words offered him some hope that things would work out in the end, he almost wished he hadn't snooped through the old book because now he was more bewildered than ever.

The sound of the front door opening made Jake drop the book like it was on fire. He spun—as innocently as possible—to look near the doorway, where Isaac was coming in, a smile on his face.

Jake half smiled. "Hey, man. What have you been up to?"

"Oh, you know." Isaac smiled, excitement lighting up his blue eyes, and he flopped stomach-first onto the couch, stretching out. "Went to eat with Avalon after school, and then we watched a movie at her house."

A slow, significant smile started to spread on Jake's face. Carefully, he commented, "Really now."

"Mmhmm. You know her, right?"

Jake thought back and recalled a petite girl that he'd seen pretty frequently with Isaac lately. Their high school was pretty large, and the girl was a freshman, so Jake didn't know anything about her. "I'd recognize her if I saw her."