“Tate doesn’t keep things from me. You know that. And, yes,” he continued, “there was a sort of press release. Liam, your asswipe ex, posted it on Facebook.”

I halted in the middle of the parking lot.

“What?” I burst out, every muscle in my body tightening.

“Let it go.” He tried to calm me. “Damage is done, and he got what was coming to him. Jax put a nice, fat fist in his gut.”

Dropping my head back, I closed my eyes to the sky and felt my chest flood with emotions so strong my nerve endings felt like sparklers. Burning, sizzling, searing sparklers.

“Unbelievable.” I sighed. So that was why Jax had jumped Liam last week. It wasn’t about the incident between him and me at the party but about Liam humiliating me publicly on social media.

“Don’t get mad at Jax,” he scolded. “It would’ve been worse for Liam if Madoc and I had been there, too. Fuck,” he continued, “if Tate had been there? Yeah.”

Yeah. Tate would’ve done even worse to him.

I shook my head. People—hundreds of old classmates and Liam’s family members—were now laughing at me.

Now I wanted to put a fat fist in his gut. Was this how Tate felt when she’d finally had enough? I suddenly felt as if I were five and wanted to push people.

I heaved out sigh after sigh, remembering that Jared was still sitting on the phone. Jared. Tate’s boyfriend. A guy I’d kissed before they were together. Tate’s boyfriend. Yeah.

“Why are you calling me?” I asked finally, getting to the point.

He was silent for a few moments, and my other hand started tapping my leg. Jared never called me.

I heard him suck in a long breath. “Relax. Tate knows I’m calling. I just want to know”—he trailed off, hesitating—“how my brother is doing,” he finally finished.

Jax? Why would Jared be asking me that? And then I remembered Jared and Jax’s fight when Jax was in the nurse’s office.

“Um … ,” I drawled out, trying to find an innocent reply but thinking about the weight room and the Loop. “I’m not sure how to answer that, actually.”

“Does he look healthy?”

“Healthy?” I repeated. I thought of Jax’s muscles that had seemed to double in size in the last two years and the bright white smiles he wore on the field when I tried not staring at him out the window. “Yes. Very,” I said.

“What does he do with his days?”

“Jared, what’s going on?” I prodded.

Jared calling me. Weird. Jared asking me about Jax. Weird. Jared acting worried about anyone other than Tate or himself. Very weird.

“Sorry,” he offered, sounding unusually embarrassed. “It’s just that you’re right next door. I don’t think it’s escaped your notice how much weight he has to throw around, right? The changes at the house. The Loop. I just want to make sure he’s okay.”

“He’s your brother. Ask him.”

“I have,” he shot out. “And I have no reason to suspect he’s not okay. I’m just not there, and I … I …”

I raised my eyebrows, finding his stuttering amusing.

“I just hate not being there,” he finished. “I need to make sure he’s happy and taken care of, is all.”

Hmm … I started walking again, thinking about how worried Jared must be if he resorted to calling me. “Well, everything seems fine.” Not normal but fine.

“Fine.” He started laughing. “You really have no idea, do you?”

I rounded the parking lot and stepped onto the sidewalk, my heels digging into the concrete. “What are you talking about?”

He paused long enough to piss me off. “Kind of convenient how the state of Arizona let you come all the way back to your hometown to complete your community service, huh?”

I pinched my eyebrows together. “Well, why wouldn’t they?”

Yeah, why wouldn’t they?

“Mmm-hmm,” he teased. “And it’s pretty awesome that you’re sitting all comfy in your old high school tutoring a subject you love instead of cleaning up trash on the freeway, isn’t it?”

I slowed to a stop on the sidewalk under a canopy of trees.

Principal Masters didn’t know where the e-mail had come from to suggest me for the tutoring at the school.

I let out a breath.

And Arizona let me out without bail.

I clenched the phone.

And the judge let me off with no fines when the standard penalty for a first offense carried a minimum two-hundred-fifty-dollar penalty.

I could barely whisper the question. “What are you saying?”

“Nothing,” he chirped. “I don’t know shit. See you in a couple of weeks, Trouble.”

And he hung up.

Rocks flew across the street as I kicked the gravel on my walk home.

Jared sucked.

What the hell was he trying to tell me?

Oh, I knew what he was trying to tell me. I wasn’t an idiot. Sometimes I was a dipshit, but I definitely wasn’t an idiot.

I mean, did Jax really have the pull to get my community service transferred from one state to the other? And then Jared suggested that Jax got my placement at the high school, too?

I shook my head, my eyes wandering as I tossed his words around in my head.

Yeah. No. For one, Jax didn’t have that kind of power. Two, Jax wouldn’t care. And three?