Untouchable ~ A Jared Leto/MARS Fanfiction

Chapter Seven

The simmering eye contact isn't broken. Instead, Jared strokes my rough hair, the smile playing at his lips still, regarding me silently for a moment that stretches out interminably long. Too long. I squirm under that intense perusal. I want to tell him to be prepared to be moved when the chopper arrives; something that's  likely to cause him a fair bit of agony. I want to be all businesslike now and pretend a part of me that's lain dormant for a long, long time didn't just wake up screaming. I want to pretend the way he kissed me didn't just knock my world totally off its axis.

"Tell me something true, Lanie," he says quietly. "Something real. Something about you that no one else on earth knows."

I blink. "I...me? I'm an open book." The flippancy in my voice isn't intentional, but it disguises the mayhem inside threatening to bubble to the surface, turning me into a hysterical babbling idiot. The idiot that was turned loose the instant Jared's lips met mine.

"C'mon." Jared isn't convinced. I can see that clearly written on his face. "Everyone has something. Especially you. There's that air of mystery about you, like I said yesterday. Give me just a tiny glimpse into that place in you, Lanie."

"Okay, okay," I sigh. I've hit on something relatively innocuous that hopefully will satisfy him. "Maybe this isn't something nobody knows, but it's something I don't go around advertising." I pause and take a deep breath for dramatic effect. "My real name is Marlena. Marlena JoAnn McCarty." I make a sour face. "What a mouthful, huh?"

"Marlena." The way he speaks my given name, rolling it off his tongue slowly, so rich and so decadently smooth, I find myself wondering why I've always hated it so much. "That's a beautiful, classy name."

Sure, coming from him it is. I'm reddening again. My cheeks burn and I turn away and mumble something that sounds like a thank you, adding, "So. How about you?"

"No, that didn't count." Jared shakes his head and gives me that quirky half-smile I've come to find completely endearing. "Your given name isn't the kind of deep secret I'm talking about and you know it."

Well, so much for that. I tear my eyes away. Now is the perfect moment to tell him the truth— now, before the helicopter comes. I visualize the shock, the disappointment, the anger in his face. I even can hear his words: So Shannon is right about you. Even though he isn't. At least, I don't think he is. I'm not an obsessed fan, and I certainly bear no resemblance to Stephen King's psychopathic antagonist Annie Wilkes.

But then Jared says,"I mean something you're not proud of, maybe. Something that'll make me feel like less of a total fuckup myself."

Startled, I look at him. He's no longer looking back at me; his focus is on the makeshift roof over us, his hands locked together behind his head, a faraway expression on his face. My eyes look over that face, the knitted brows, the absence of a smile on his lips now, and I know that what I should tell him is what I absolutely cannot say. But there is another thing. Something I am deeply ashamed of.

"Okay," I begin instead. "When I was young, all I wanted was to travel, to gain more skills, and get my Wilderness EMT certification. I didn't want to get married, and I knew fairly early on that marrying Todd was a mistake. And I never wanted to have kids.  I believed that having a baby would derail me from the life I wanted to have. It would tie me down. Would tie me to him and make ending the marriage too messy, too complicated. So when I got pregnant, I almost...stopped it." I can't say the word, but I'm pretty sure Jared gets my meaning without needing me to spell it out.

Jared looks at me again. "That's the kind of something I'm talking about. How close did you come to...terminating?"

"I got as far as the clinic," I murmur. I play with a loose thread on the sleeping bag covering Jared, twisting it around my first finger. "In Duluth. I got there, I was determined to go through with it, but I couldn't do it." My voice has dropped to a whisper. "Todd was furious, he didn't want kids, either. But my dad said we'd find a way to make it work. My EMT studies, helping him run the camp, and having a baby."