“He’s definitely not my type.”
“As far as I’m concerned, that only speaks in his favor.”
I let out a long, dramatic sigh. “Gem. I’m not hooking up with my nerdy roommate. Ever. Seriously. Let it go.”
She shrugs and turns her attention back to her essays. “Okay. Then maybe I will.”
My pen jerks to a stop on the paper, resulting in a long red line, straight through this kid’s whole quiz. “I’d really rather you didn’t.” And I’d really, really rather she didn’t. “But only because my roommate hooking up with one of my best friends could only lead to trouble, right? When you inevitably break up. I’d have to move again, and really, this place is just too good to give up. So I’d have to choose, you or the house, and honestly, Gem, where I’m sitting right now, it doesn’t look good for you. So you might want to consider if hooking up with Jack is worth losing me as your friend before you make any rash decisions.”
Gemma is fighting back a huge smile, and I know she’s about to get all up in that the lady-doth-protest-too-much business, which obviously cannot happen. I can’t even let myself question why the idea of her and Jack makes me want to puke up my coffee.
“But speaking of hookups, do you think Nick and Harley are hanging out without us right now?” I am nothing if not a master deflector. “Did they finally bite the bullet and go for it?”
Gemma purses her lips like she might not let me off the hook, but the chance to gossip about our two besties and their possible love story is too tempting to resist. “Do you really think they’d do that without telling us?”
“Um, yes. One hundred percent. They’d actually be idiots if they did tell us. At least at first.”
Gemma frowns. “If they move in together, can I come live here?”
I drain the last of my coffee, all of a sudden ready for something a lot stronger. “You’ll have to take that up with Jack.”
“There’s no way that man could handle both of us at once.”
“Truer words have never been spoken.” I take both of our empty coffee cups to the sink and rinse them before putting them in the dishwasher. Yeah. That’s right. We have a dishwasher.
Gemma marks a score on a final paper, then gathers all her numerous stacks and stashes them away in her bag. “Thanks for helping, Sade. This would’ve been a nightmare without you.”
“I hope I didn’t screw it all up and you don’t have angry parents calling to yell at you.”
She sighs, standing and stretching. “That will happen regardless.”
I open the fridge and pull out a bottle. “Wine?”
“Yes, please.”
I pour each of us a glass, and by the time we’ve gossiped our way to glass number two, Jack’s back with the sushi. The three of us sit around the dining room table, eating and drinking and chatting about nothing important. Jack seems lighter around my friends than he does when it’s just the two of us. The gang has already come over a few times to hang out, and those are pretty much the only times he willingly engages. Sure, when we actually talk one-on-one there are moments when it feels easy and natural, but our conversations are always short, and we still have our fair share of awkward encounters. But that doesn’t happen when my friends join the circle, and as I watch Jack and Gemma banter back and forth, it does something weird to my stomach. Like it gets all twisty and squishy.
Shit. I hope I didn’t eat bad sushi.
Gemma calls for a Lyft and heads home early, since she has toactually get up and go to a grown-up job in the morning. I hug her goodbye and stand on the stoop until she’s in the car. I make a mental note of the license plate number because, yeah, you never know.
Closing and locking the door, I head straight for the kitchen and another glass of wine. I’ve DVRed all of this week’s Bravo episodes, and I’m planning on climbing into bed and imbibing three straight hours of drunkenness and debauchery.
Jack boxes up the last few remaining pieces of sushi and stashes them in the fridge. “You know, if you want to watch TV or something, you’re more than welcome to use the basement whenever. I know it’s kind of my territory, but it’s just as much yours if you want it.”
I pour the last remaining drops of the wine into my glass, saving the bottle for an experiment I have planned for this week. “It’s all good. I’ve got a date with the Real Housewives, and I’d never subject you to that.”
He grabs a beer from the fridge and shrugs. “I don’t mind. Can’t say I’ve ever watched an episode before.”
“Oh, Jack of All Trades. You have no idea what you’re in for.” I head for the basement, testing the limits since I assume he’s not actually going to join me, given how he usually cuts our interactions short as quickly as possible. I can’t imagine him voluntarily sitting next to me on the sofa for three hours, especially for a Bravo marathon. But when I reach the bottom stair, I hear the thud of his steps behind me. I hide my smile.
Other than a quick peek during my initial tour, I haven’t set foot in the brownstone’s lower level. Probably because it looks like a frat house threw up down here. A clean frat house, but a frat house nonetheless. In addition to the pool table, there’s a huge sectional sofa covered in some kind of velour fabric that belongs in a seventies porno.The TV is bigger than some movie theater screens, and it has at least a thousand wires coming out of it like alien tentacles, each one attached to some sort of video game apparatus.
“Should I be scared about what kinds of fluids have graced this couch?” I check for suspicious stains, but it looks relatively clean.
“Other than Nick and me, no one has sat on it, so I think you’re good.” Jack plops down at one end of the sofa.
I curl up in the opposite corner. “Should we talk about why you haven’t had anyone other than my friends over to join you in this den of all things teenage boys cream their jeans over?”
