“If you really didn’t care what my job was, you wouldn’t have used it as a weapon and you would have talked it up, not down,” he snapped, turning his head away to glare out the window. He crossed his arms over his chest. “You could have done something else to distract your aunt, but you didn’t. You deliberately chose to do something that would be embarrassing for me.”

“You were already embarrassed by me,” she snapped back. “From the second I called out to her, don’t deny it.”

“So, because I was uncomfortable having everyone stare at us... What? You decided to make it worse for me? Why? What the hell is the point?”

“The point is I successfully distracted her, like my cousin asked me to. You have no idea what my aunt is like when she’s on a mission - the only thing that was going to distract her is making a bit of a scene!”

“You didn’t even try,” he retorted. “You’ve been deliberately getting under your parents’ skin since we arrived, without even attempting to get along with them. You were completely normal at dinner, so it’s not like you can’t behave with your family if you want to.”

Later, Sharon would realize that it wasn’t entirely Jake’s fault he’d hit on the two phrases guaranteed to piss her off the most, especially since Rina had already faulted her for not being ‘normal’ earlier that evening. And yeah, she could behave if she wanted to, but she didn’t. Behaving actually made her parents worse, not better. They took it as an invitation to try and push their agenda and control her.

“You have no idea what my family is like.” The wheels on the Mercedes squealed a little as she made a sharp turn into the driveway. “You don’t know what will and won’t distract my aunt, you don’t know what will and won’t make my parents not be dicks to me. You have an awesome family that loves and supports you unconditionally and you have no clue what it’s like to not have that.”

“Fine! Your family sucks and they totally deserve how you treat them. What about me? You’ve had a ‘bug up your ass’ from the moment you met me, and I thought you’d finally gotten it out, but tonight I can see that you haven’t.”

“Because you’re just like them, Judgy McJudgerson Asshole!” she shouted at him, slamming on the brakes in front of the house hard enough that both of them jerked in their seats. She whipped her head around to glare at him. If she could have burned a hole through his head with her gaze, she would have. “The second you met me, you were judging me and finding me lacking, why the hell should I try to impress you?”