The girl behind her smile

- 20 -

JASPER

The hatred in me was always going to be my downfall, I knew it. In fact, I've know it since the moment my father invited another lady into our mourning house, and with her, a small boy, not much younger than myself. He called her his love. He called him his son. And all I could feel was wrath. My thirteen year old self did not understand that the boy wasn't to blame, but that his mother and my father was the cause in the slow breakdown of our family.

I hadn't even tried to be civil, not once. I extended my rage to the boy, knowing it wouldn't travel as far with mother and father. I did everything in the book to make sure he knew he wasn't welcome. I pushed and pushed until one night he stoped listening. Instead he mirrored me, copying all of my actions - giving me a taste of my own medicine if you'd prefer to put it that way. And I stopped, his plan worked. We remained hateful of each other, but as time went on, the loathing wore down and we began to tolerate one another, after all we had one common ground.

My father couldn't care less about what I felt, he was always busy with work, running his empire in the city of Chicago. He had enough control over the majority of the state, that he didn't particularly care about controlling my emotions. Well not until he decided it was time to train me to become his successor. Don't get me wrong, I've always been constantly tutored, moulded and beaten into his idea of perfect heir - but my feelings and emotions weren't something he regarded important. And soon I discovered that I too shared that bond with him - except with other people.

Until I encountered Eliza.

Suddenly, her reactions were all that mattered. Her emotions, her thoughts, her feelings - I had taken an interest in her as a whole.

I had been placed in this small town as a final test, to prove to my father how I could thrive from the bare minimum. What I could cultivate and grow from basically nothing, it would reflect how I would do once I inherited his company.

And I had succeeded, albeit a few issues caused by Ezra, I had managed to grow my own business, as I had expected. My only setback had been Eliza.

At first everything about her irked me, starting from the fact that she was related to Ezra, to her selfless acts of favour. She was always getting in the way. Her constant dismissal of my authority was something new, something I was not accustom too, and I wasn't sure how I felt about that. The kiss was not something I had planned, just seeing that she was unbothered by me, disturbed me. And if anger wasn't going to elicit a reaction, I had presumed something more intimate might warrant a response - and I was right. But what I didn't expect was for it to affect me aswell.

I hated that she made me feel different to what was normal. She had managed to make me feel uncertain about my emotions the moment she and I met one another, and that infuriated me. So I decided to teach her a lesson, show who she really was defying.

I had rigged the entire match, I knew that Ezra was an excellent fighter - he won practically every match he had attended. But by setting him against someone three times his weight class would kill two birds with one stone - both Ezra's rising ego and Eliza's defiance. But noticing her teary eyes, her horrified face and her short, stuttering breath had made me despise myself for subjecting her to such torture - just because I felt threatened by her existence. My eyes followed her until the door of the exit had closed, and a small clenching feeling had settled in my heart. I asked myself for the first time if what I had done was right.

Perhaps I had pushed too far, maybe she would really tremble in my presence, which is what I wanted, right? But why did it feel depressing, knowing I would be the reason she stops fighting me?