Stuck With My Archenemy

2 | FINDING A WAY HOME

CHAPTER TWO

“Brenda, stop. You're making a fool of yourself in front of me,” Jack called out from where he stood.

I ignored him, grabbed another stone and threw it high into the sky. And when I mean high, I mean just two feet.

“I can’t believe this!” I clutched my blonde hair and shook my head. This was more than insane. 

“I can’t be here,” I continued to rant. “I mean, I have people waiting for me. Wanting to see me.” 

“You mean your dogs.”

I swiftly turned and faced him. “Not just my dogs,” I stalked towards him and jabbed a finger on his chest. “My laptop, my junior bicycle and my kids!”

He scoffed and swatted my finger away. “Don’t be paranoid. You don’t have any kids.”

“I do too.” I crossed my arms and muttered. “My bear babies.”

He shook his head disbelievingly and murmured, “You’re insane.”

I huffed and crossed my arms. It angered and frustrated me the way he was taking the situation we were in lightly. But just then, a thought occurred to me. 

“Where’s your phone? Give it to me,” I demanded.

“Why?” he questioned with an eyebrow arched.

“Well, smarty.” I made emphasis on the last word to show him that I thought he was the exact opposite. “We could call the bus driver and convince him to come back for us.” I grinned, feeling smart. 

Very smart.

“Well, obviously. Who wouldn’t have thought of that?” he muttered rhetorically and added. “I would’ve done that a long time ago but there's no signal here. No bars.” Jack’s words cut right through my smirk and my face fell as that seemingly brilliant chance of getting us back dissipated right before my eyes.

“But...but you’re the boss!” I exclaimed miserably. “Why would the bus driver leave you behind?”

Jack shrugged, but he replied with a determined voice. “I don’t know, but I’m definitely going to sue him for that. Then fire him.”

I ran a hand through my hair and eyed Jack as he stood there casually, biting the insides of his cheek as if begging for some source of something to give him some sort of knowledge. And as if whatever Deity he was calling on granted him that, he quickly moved away from the tree he was leaning on and pushed me out of the way, literally and hard making my almost trip, before he knelt down on the dirt and dropped his backpack to the ground.

I immediately recovered from my staggering and glared fiercely at his back. “At least I’m showing a lot of concern. You don’t seem fazed by this situation as you should be.” I accused him.

Jack opened his backpack and began to shuffle through it. “I am. More than you think. But freaking out like a sick teenage girl won't get me anywhere and besides, I have an idea that might lead us somewhere.”

“I’m not a sick teenage girl,” I frowned.

“Whatever.”

I grumbled and shuffled my feet in annoyance. The woods were quiet except for the occasional chirping of birds here and there. I peeped into Jack's backpack, wondering what he was busy searching for.

“What are you looking for?” I couldn’t help but ask as I curiously watched him search through his backpack.

“A map,” he mumbled and leaned back to pull his hand out of the backpack, revealing a folded map from it. Jack pushed the backpack aside, unfolded the map and laid it down on the ground. I knelt down beside him and peered at the map, trying to figure out what brainiac invented that kind of gibberish. 

I tilted my head sideways then back. Trying to figure out where we were exactly. 

“What are you doing?” Jack asked as he watched me with confusion etched in his expression.

“Shush, I’m trying to figure out where we are,” I said, dawning all my concentration on the map. To be honest, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. The lines were all confusing. Different colours, different sizes, it made my brain jam. And somehow, not surprisingly, Jack seemed to know that.

He continued to watch me for a moment then snorted. “Just move out of the way. Your peacock brain can’t handle this much information.”

I gasped in disbelief. Peacock brain?

Glaring, I just felt like snapping his neck in two but instead, he just ignored me and continued to study the map. After what seemed like a decade, he pointed to a tiny spot coloured brown and shaped like a hill.

“We’re here.” He pointed to the hill-like drawing. “But we have to get here.” He moved his finger to another point, but this one had railway lines on it.

“Train tracks? I thought we were getting the bus?”

“They won’t come back, it’s a one-way road.” He sighed and placed both hands on the paper. “We'll have to walk there.”

“How long a walk will it take?” I prayed for at least three miles.

“It says here that it takes...’

Three miles. Three miles. Three miles.

“Thirty miles.”

“Yes! Wait, what?” I frowned. How long is thirty miles anyway?

“I hope your mini-sized brain knows how long thirty miles is,” he said, not even sparing a glance at me.

“I may not know. But at least my puny brain got me a job. We both know how you ended up being the CEO of your dad's company.”

Finally, he turned to face me with a death glare. “Don’t you dare,” he warned me, the words spoken through gritted teeth to emphasize his anger.

Of course, I didn’t listen. “They were gonna give that position to your younger brother because you were a lazy brat, isn't that right?”

“Shut your mouth, Brenda,” he hissed out through his gritted teeth, almost making it difficult for me to hear a word he spoke. But I grinned nevertheless.

“You said you’d change because you really wanted the job, but they didn’t believe you. So you threatened to become a male w***e to destroy the family name and to infuriate your parents and finally get them to hand it over to you.”

“Okay now, that’s enough!” He lunged for me, but I dodged him and stood up.

“What they didn’t know was that your loins were too undersized to do any good in bed. Like they would’ve left you-”

“Wait, wait where did that part of the tale come from?”

“What part?” Now I was confused.

“The part about my manhood.”

“Oh.” I might’ve said too much. “It must’ve slipped out by mistake, you know.”

“You think my loins are undersized?” he asked dubiously. Jack seemed really baffled that I would actually think something like that after what we did before.

“I just got carried away,” I tried to explain but my bladder was already getting heavy.

He scoffed. “Come on Brenda, you should know better than that.”

“No no, I do.” I laughed nervously. “It’s fine. I’m fine. I just remembered how, uhh huge it is.”

“Are you positive?” Jack took a step closer to me. Another step and another till I couldn’t take it anymore. 

I brushed past him, settled myself behind the bushes somewhere away from sight but close enough and eased the pressure out. I could hear him laughing from where I left but I chose to let it go.

Bastard.

I returned to see Jack recovering from his laughter. I ignored him and leaned against a stem of a tree.

After hours of doing nothing but not minding our own businesses and occasionally throwing insults at each other, Jack raised his head and squinted at the setting sun. “Come on. It’s getting dark.”

“Wait, where are you going?” I asked when he rose from his position and started walking away from our little site.

“To find firewood,” he answered without looking back.

I sighed and slumped on the ground, playing with stones and sticks until Jack came back with his arms full of firewood. 

“Great!” I exclaimed while he dumped them on the ground. He picked up two stones from the ground and began to strike them against each other on top of the firewood.

“Let me do it,” I outstretched my hands for him to place the stones in.

He scoffed and continued his work like I hadn’t just said anything. I frowned and argued on. “But I can do it.”

“You couldn’t even jog a mile within an hour if your life depended on it.”

My eyebrows rose at his statement. “What has that got to do with anything?”

Jack stopped his actions to look at me. “You want to do something useful?”

“Yeah, what?” I shrugged.

“What’s in your backpack?” I picked up my bag and shuffled through it. “Just a set of clothes, a blanket, some apples, some other snacks and-”

“Give me the apples.”

My brows furrowed and I narrowed my eyes in suspicion. “Why?”

“Because I’m hungry,” he stated in an obvious manner and smiled smugly when the stones set off sparks on the firewood. He crouched lower, cupped his hands over the small part of the firewood and blew gently. Soon after, a fire was blazing.

I was mesmerized by his posture and the way he handled the fire like it was something he had been doing for years. It made him look more of a man than he usually was.

I can’t believe I’m complimenting him.

“Are you done gawking?” He snapped me out of my daze and I soon realised that I was staring at him weirdly, so I shifted my attention to the lovely sunset instead.

“I wasn’t gawking. Just observing,” I retorted.

“Whatever, just bring out some food,” he ordered.

I rolled my eyes and gazed back at him. “Are you really that hungry?”

“Would I be asking if I wasn’t?”

“Don’t you have any food with you?”

He sighed and rubbed his face in frustration. “I ate it all on the bus.”

“Hmm.” I shifted closer towards the fire and rubbed my hands together. The weather was changing, getting colder and colder by the minute.

I dragged my backpack from the ground and opened it. Grabbing an apple, I crunched it and moaned when the juice trickled down my chin. I licked the spot before it got any lower and took another large bit. Meanwhile, I was peeping to see Jack’s expression. 

True enough, he looked pissed.

“Aren’t you going to eat something?” I asked innocently and took yet another long, hard bite, this time watching him with my eyes wide open as I munched the apple.

Jack eyed the movement of my lips before looking at me in the eye. “I told you I don’t have any food.” His voice sounded off and his eyes captured every movement as if begging to have just a drop of the juice smoothly making its way down my throat.

“Too bad,” I said before turning the rest of my attention to the half-eaten apple in my hands. He cursed under his breath and took his own backpack to find something to devour in it.

He knew what I wanted him to say and it was slowly killing him that he didn’t have the willpower to say it. I fought to hide my triumphant grin as I finished the apple and moved on to the next one.

It's going to be a long night.