“It’s good though, right?”
He took another sip and nodded. “Better than the Keurig shit I drink.”
I made a face. “What? Why?”
“It’s easy?” He shrugged. “This would drive me crazy every morning.”
I shrugged back, unwilling to admit it did drive me crazy most mornings. But it was also worth it. Sometimes the effort to do something good was hard. But that didn’t mean the thing was bad. Hard things could be good things.
In more ways than just coffee.
“This is weird,” I said instead. “That you’re still here.”
“You’re so damn pushy,” he scolded in a low rumble, tossing the last of his cup back. I thought that meant he would leave, but instead, he walked over to the coffee pot and poured himself another.
I eyed the remaining coffee to make sure there was enough to get me through my required two cups per day. Caffeine was something I liked to be careful about. But mostly because I absolutely loved it. I loved coffee and soda and chocolate and even, secretly, energy drinks.
It was my night owl life that got to me. I was an early-to-bed, early-to-rise person by nature. The bar had effed with my entire circadian rhythm. And even though I’d had four years to get used to the schedule change, I still struggled in the afternoon, when I needed to be my most productive self in the office. And then again late at night, when the main floor needed me to help out and I was trying not to doze off standing up.
If I gave in to my baser needs, I would spend every day sucking down a two-liter Coke and slamming Red Bulls. But I was bound and determined to stick to two creamer-rich cups of homemade coffee and let iced water and Big Red gum fill in the gaps.
Most days.
I was only human, after all. And some afternoons demanded caffeine overdoses. That was just the way of life.
“You don’t think it’s weird that you spent the night at my place?” I asked, truly perplexed by his nonchalance.
He screwed his face up in thought. “Mmm, I’m pretty sure you made it abundantly clear that nothing would happen between us, English. So I wasn’t exactly worried you were going to take advantage of me in my vulnerable sleep state.”Little did he know.
Reaching REM and drooling on his T-shirt didn’t exactly qualify as sexual misconduct, but when I closed my eyes and remembered what it felt like to be nestled against his chest, what he smelled like so close to me—even the damn cadence of his breathing—it was hard not to feel like I overstepped some boundaries. Boundaries I’d put in place. Not just because I didn’t want to be another notch on Jonah’s bedpost. Or worse... another one of his regrets. But because it was oh-so easy for me to forget who I was today and get swept up in who I used to be. Or rather who Jonah used to be to me. Not the best friend I loved and respected and thought the absolute world of. But the man of my dreams who I would have done anything just to get him to notice me.
Ugh, stop, Eliza. Get your shit together.
“That’s not what I mean,” I said coolly.
“Then what do you mean? I’ve spent the night at your house a thousand times before.”
Was he serious? “You’ve spent the night at mymom’shouse a thousand times. WithWill.This was so not the same thing.”
He shrugged for the three hundredth time. My eye twitched, and I had the briefest fantasy of punching him on his collarbone. Having company in the morning had lost its luster now that we were bickering.
“Semantics, Eliza. We both survived still virgins. All is good.”
I rolled my eyes so hard they nearly lodged behind my eyelids. Neither of us was virgins, and he knew it. But clearly, he needed to be reminded of the rules. “What if Will would have stopped by, Jonah? How would you have explained our sleeping arrangements then?”
I expected him to tense up and get serious. Or to panic and run out of my apartment screaming and waving his arms over his head because he just remembered that he’d promised my big brother he’d never lay a hand on me. Never even look my direction in a way that was anything but platonic and brotherly. I expected a lot of apologizing and pleading and reminding me I had just as much at stake as he did. We couldn’t anger Will because Will was the boss and sacrificedso muchfor all of us, and we owed this to him at least and blah blah freaking blah.
I felt queasy waiting for him to make last night the biggest mistake of our adult lives. Because I’d already lived through this scenario in my teens. And I could safely testify that it lived in infamy as the worst night of my teenage years by a landslide.
seven
It was actually eerilysimilar to these circumstances, now that I was thinking about it. Mentally reliving the nightmare that refused to give up and die already in my memory.
Jonah had been spending the weekend with us. His mom had checked herself into the hospital the day before. She did that sometimes. She had a lot of issues, but one of them was debilitating depression, where she regularly considered taking her own life.
Sometimes her hospital stay was a good thing. She was sick and needed help, and at least she was protecting her son.
But other times, she blamed Jonah for being the reason she was so depressed. Then she would leave her only child to pick up the pieces of her emotional terrorist attack and the physical destruction of their house while she got a state-paid weekend getaway. Even if it was in a psych ward.
