I leaned in a foot away from Jack, drumming my fingers, and said to Chris, “Hey! Nice to see you.” I didn’t dare look at my ex-boyfriend to myright. But I could feel him staring. My stomach was in knots. What was better: to ignore him, or to try and talk to him? I didn’t want to upset him even more.
“I’m so glad you’re around here again,” Chris said, smiling innocently, with no idea of the tension all around him. “My sister must be happy, too.”
“Yeah, she came to get me at the airport. She actually jumped over the barrier in arrivals.”
“That sounds like her.”
I knew Jack was watching. I could nearly feel his eyes moving up and down my body like some kind of scanner. I wasn’t sure if I could keep from saying something to him as Chris informed me, “I hope you’re not here trying to get a room. Naya mentioned it to me, but there’s still nothing available.”
Thanks a lot, Chrissy.
His mouth was just as big as it had been the year before. But what did I care at this point? I don’t think I could have offended Jack any worse. I noticed something shaking out of the corner of my eye. Was Jack laughing as he rested his chin on his fist? I turned and found him staring at me, irked, almost indifferent, with a contemptuous smirk. “So you want to go back to the dorm?”
His voice was gentle. That caught me off guard. Wasn’t he supposed to be mad at me? Or was I wrong in assuming I mattered that much to him? Maybe I barely existed for him now.
“Yeah…” I didn’t like how my voice sounded…too soft. “Naya told me you weren’t here and that there was going to be a sofa bed for me to sleep on, but now it seems like it’s easier if I just stay in the dorms.”
He toyed with a pen and responded, looking totally apathetic, “I guess.”
What was with him? “Hey Chris,” I said, “you sure there’s absolutely nothing available?”
“Yes,” he said, “I already told Naya.”
Jack butted in, “Just call one of the hotels and put her up in a suite. She’ll have no trouble finding some guy to pay for it.”
He said that so blithely, I needed a few seconds to react. Even Chris seemed nervous as he continued, “If something comes up, I’ll let you know, though.”
I was no longer listening, I was just scowling at Jack. I’d never heard him speak like that to anyone, not even to Mike or his dad, and he’d had no problem giving them a piece of his mind. He looked at me smugly, almost waiting for me to snap. He was hunting for an argument. I remembered then something my therapist had said: that I had to pick my battles. And this one, I thought, I’d be better off ignoring. So I turned to Chris. “Yeah, keep me in mind if you hear anything.”
“Oh, are you running away?” Jack said. “I mean, I don’t know why I should be surprised.” As Chris nodded, I apologized for bothering him, telling him I wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t important, and he mentioned a girl in an individual room who was supposedly having problems and might end up dropping out. “If she does, trust me, you’ll be the first to know,” he concluded.
“What’s up?” Jack asked. “Are you in a rush to stop sleeping in my bed?”
I fell into his trap: “I didn’t sleep in your bed, I slept on the couch.”
“How sweet of you,” he responded, “I guess that means you were worried about how I’d feel. Oh, no, I forgot, that can’t be true, because a year ago you left me hanging like I didn’t even fucking exist.”
I could tell Chris was eavesdropping, but he didn’t want to get in the middle of this and was pretending to dig around in a drawer. I tried to tell Jack I was sorry about what had happened between us, that I knew I hadn’t gone about it the right way, but…
“Just drop it,” he interrupted me. “Why would you even bother pretending that you ever truly cared about me? Or are you trying to say you’resorry? Because you can save that. I know you’d be doing it for yourself, not for me—you just want to make yourself feel better because you acted like a complete…”
He decided not to say the next word, stepped away from the counter, and looked down before pinning me in his stare, full of scorn. “Why did you even come back? Was it because you missed your little friends?”
“I wanted to come back to school, Jack. I thought you weren’t even here. If I’d known…”
“I know, you wouldn’t have come,” he said.
“It’s not that I wouldn’t have come, it’s just that this is so uncomfortable. I get it. But look, if you take your room and I just sleep on the couch until I…”
He laughed in my face. “Oh, wow, are you seriously giving me permission to use my own room? You know what, fuck it! You take the damn room.”
“Jack…”
“No. No, no, no. Nobody calls me Jack. That was a special thing I let you do because you were my girlfriend. Now you’re just some person. You can call me Ross like everyone else.”
I tried to tell him not to be childish, and he stepped toward me—I don’t know why. I was scared and stepped back and bumped into a short bookcase. I thought the argument would continue, but he turned around in frustration and walked out into the courtyard. Chris had seen the whole thing and still didn’t look like he believed it. “Wow,” he said. “And I thought he couldn’t be any more unbearable.”
“It’s not that, Chris,” I said. “He’s just hurt.”
