“Your real name just slipped out, okay? You don’t hear me calling you ‘Gabriel’ now, so you really need to chill the fuck out.” Usually, Jia wouldn’t be cursing at all, but she was furious with him and with the way he treated her. Really, she wanted to hit him, but she was a pacifist at heart, and she wouldn’t let him of all people drive her to violence again. He wasn’t attacking her, and she knew he really wouldn’t attack her. He’d just continue trying to scare her.
Her skin flushed with shame when he reminded her how eager she’d been with him. “Well, don’t you worry, Jacky Boy. It’s not going to happen again. In fact, it probably wouldn’t have happened even if you hadn’t run for the hills with your tail tucked between your legs at the mere mention of you birth name. I wouldn’t have really let my first time happen just because you showed me a little kindness.” Regardless of her saying she’d wanted him in the heat of the moment, she would have stopped it before they had really gone all the way. She had thought about this a lot, and each time, she had come to the same conclusion.
Despite her obvious fury, when he mentioned his parents, her features softened slightly. He had suffered a great loss, and while it didn’t really justify who he’d become as a result, no one should have to suffer like that. She at least had her father. Who did he have? She’d lost her mother at birth, but he’d lost his entire family and a friend in a tremendous tragedy. “Oh? And who was Gabriel? Who are you?” She asked. Clearly, she was still upset, but the questions weren’t the furious hissings she’d been doing so much as her softly probing for an answer.
His eyes narrowed, and the dark scowl that passed over his face would have been really frightening if she didn’t trust that he wouldn’t actually physically harm her. Really, she didn’t have any reason to really trust him that far with the way he acted most of the time, but he had saved her from humanists, and he’d admitted that his only aim was to scare her when he messed with her. He’d never actually hurt her during those times unless a wounded ego counted.
That was probably why she felt confident enough to shove him again when her anger boiled over. “I never said you were a saint. In fact, I really think you’re as far from a saint while still being a quasi-decent living being as a person can get. Life is about choices, and even while you make incredibly bad ones for yourself, you still make good choices when it comes to others. If you really believed you don’t care, you would have let me be killed by those hicks who call themselves humanists. You could have just left my dorm when you saw my defect. Honestly, doing that probably would have been your best route for ensuring I never bothered you again.”
Unexpectedly, he actually paused and started to laugh at her. Then, he shared his ‘insights,’ and her eyes narrowed. “That’s not true.” Jia protested. “Well, some of it is, but not a lot of it. You’re right, I don’t want some jerk who’s going to screw me over again, and I am afraid to get close to people, but I don’t want some white knight who’s going to sweep me off my feet. I’m not some damsel in distress who can’t take care of herself.” The white knight had been the one who had turned out to have a murky, possessive, vindictive core in which fire was a cure-all for heartache, after all. All she wanted was a genuinely good guy whether he had faults or not, one who wouldn’t really hurt her.
Jia moved toward him again, and while she didn’t move in front of him, she did move her hand to his arm. “You’re afraid to face reality, too. You act like you’re big and bad, but people mistake it for what it really is all the time. Did you think I wouldn’t notice that you’ve never actually hurt me? The only person you ever hurt is yourself with your binge drinking and scaring people away.”