You’re so beautiful.
No one is good enough for you.
Please stay.
Stay…away from me.
“Bye,” I whispered, unsure if she even noticed. In the blink of an eye, our moment passed, and she was gone. But the aftermath of my actions tonight was far from over.
I’d returned to my room all of one minute before Ryan walked in without knocking.
“What the fuck was that all about?” he spewed.
“Ryan! Please. Feel free to just barge into my room whenever you like and shout f-bombs at me.”
“Answer my question.”
“What was that?”
“What kind of a game are you playing with Nina?”
“Game?”
“Yes. You’ve been spending all this time with her under the guise of tutoring, playing with her mind. Then, you take off every fucking weekend probably up to some shady shit. Now, the one time she actually goes out with a normal person, you try to fuck it all up.”
“Normal person, huh? What does that make me?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No. Why don’t you enlighten me before I vacuum my fucking rug with your face?”
“I don’t really know a thing about you, Jake, and I don’t care. But that girl is like family to me, and I don’t want to see her get hurt.”
“Why would she be getting hurt by spending time with me?”
“She’s not your type, okay? She’s a good girl.”
“And how would you know my type?”
“For one, I’ve seen you with Desiree.”
Fuck. Touché.
“That was nothing.”
He looked down at the floor then sighed. “Look, Nina told Tarah that she’s developing feelings for you. I’m not gonna sit back and watch her get destroyed by some womanizing asshole.”
His admission seemed to melt the anger inside of me.
She had feelings for me?
Fuck. She really did have feelings for me.
It wasn’t all in my head.
“You don’t know jack shit about me, Ryan, or how I really feel about that girl,” I cracked.
Tarah walked in. “Hey, what’s going on in here?”
“Tell your boy toy to stop making assumptions before he gets his ass kicked.”
She looked at Ryan. “Do you mind leaving me and Jake alone for a minute please?”
He didn’t move until she gestured her head toward the door. Then, he quietly huffed and exited the room.
I needed a cigarette badly. I took one out and walked over to the window to smoke.
“You know, you have a really funny way of showing Nina how you feel about her. Why don’t you just tell her?”
The smoke slowly streamed out of my nostrils as I stayed staring out at the midnight blue evening sky. My voice was barely audible. “I can’t.”
“I see the way you look at her. I don’t know what’s holding you back, but I suspect it’s not something small.”
Understatement of the year.
This conversation was bordering on dangerous. In my periphery, I could see Tarah with her head of short black hair tilted and her arms crossed as she waited for me to say something. I threw the cigarette butt out.
Finally, I turned to her. “She really has feelings for me?”
Tarah looked behind her shoulder as if paranoid someone was listening. “She’d kill me, Jake, if she knew I was talking to you about it. But yes…she does. She has really strong feelings for you, but I’m pretty sure she’s giving up, okay? There’s only so much rejection a girl can take before she has to move on.”
Rejection? It was resistance.
I let out a deep sigh and rubbed my temples. “Thank you. I’d like to be alone, okay?”
Tarah quietly slipped out of the room as I sat on the edge of my bed with my phone in my hands. The urge to tell Nina how I felt about her was unbearable. I wanted to text her but didn’t know what to say.
My fingers then seemed to have developed a mind of their own as they typed.
Don’t give up on me, Nina.
Erase.
Come home. We need to talk.
Erase.
I’m sorry I was an asshole.
Erase.
Nina, I was a jerk to you and your little friend.
Send.
I’m sorry.
Send.
And the Barney joke was stupid.
Send.
Actually, you looked so fucking hot in that dress, it made me a little crazy in the head.
Erase.
Actually, you looked stunning.
Send.
I lay back on the bed and shut my phone off before I could say anything further. Staying here tonight in my current mood wouldn’t have been good. I felt very out of control and worried I wouldn’t be able to resist showing her exactly how I felt when she came home. I could easily see her coming to my room to talk. I could more easily see me taking her against the wall before the words even came out of her mouth.