Chapter 277

“I was a catastrophe of a person,” Jackson groans, laughing softly as he presses his eyes shut and remembers his first few days in the city. “I was…so shocked by the noise, Ariel, and the pavement – god, stone and metal everywhere - and the people. God, I didn’t think that there were that many people in the world, let alone one city.”

I stay quiet, letting Jackson tell at his own pace. He moves pretty quickly through the story of how he was chosen from the ranks of the young men in his community to attend the Alpha Academy, to gain what new military knowledge he could and bring it back to his own world.

Jacks leaves out a lot as he tells me about how they barely prepared him and then dropped him at a boarding house in the city three months ahead of time, I think not wanting to remember all of it. But he tells me how he showed up basically with a spare set of clothing, a handful of cash, and the order to acclimate himself.

“I stayed inside for a whole week,” he murmurs, shaking his head with an embarrassed smile on his lips. “Like, inside my room. I had this little window? And I sat at it all day, just watching people walk by, trying to…to figure out who they were, what their lives were like. I felt like a complete alien – like I was from another planet, Ariel. There were just – men and women, walking together, holding hands, in these weird clothes – and just like, kids everywhere…” he shakes his head at what must have felt so bizarre. noveldrama

“Well, what changed?” I ask, desperately curious.

“The landlady came,” he murmurs, looking down at me with a smirk. “Demanding the next week’s rent. And that’s when I realized that…I was going to run out of money very, very soon.”

“What!?” I gasp, horrified that he was out of money after a week. “Jackson, how much did they send you with?”

“Like, fifty bucks,” he says, laughing and shaking his head. “Which I’m sure to them felt like an insane amount of money to just hand over – we don’t deal with a lot of cash in the community. I’m not sure they knew how fast it would run out? Or maybe they did.” He shrugs like it doesn’t matter.

I curl up closer to him, so sorry for my mate and feeling guilty that I’ve never once wondered about paying rent or whether or not I’d have enough money to get by. “So, what did you do?”

“Some of the other guys in the house noticed how miserable and scared I was,” he says, smiling at me and stroking his hand over my hair, “and that I hadn’t eaten in a week. They took pity - got me a job washing dishes at one of the restaurants in town. It was enough for some food, and the rent, and the utilities. And it made me leave the room, made me go do what I was supposed to do – which is learn how to be in this world.”

I’m quiet again as Jackson continues, telling me that he was basically a little mouse of an employee – always on time, reliable, hard-working, but silent. That he spent his days listening to people in the kitchen talking to each other, learning about modern life, starting to pick up the vernacular and get more comfortable here.

“I was lucky,” he murmurs, “that pretty much everyone in the kitchen was a man. There were some waitresses, of course,” he smiles here and covers his face with his hand like he does when he’s embarrassed. “And I realize now that they may have been…hitting on me. But I refused to talk to them – I was terrified.”

I laugh along with him at this and press myself closer, secretly grateful that none of those other girls got their mitts on him. As hypocritical as it is, the idea of another girl touching Jackson makes me want to bare my fangs and tear her stupid face off. And even if Jackson has hinted that there was another girl in his past…well. I guess I don’t want to talk about her right now, do I?