“I wasn’t waiting for you. Now if you don’t mind, I’m on the phone.”
She walked back inside without another word and closed the door.
“Fuck, she’s so goddamn annoying!” Kevin said.
“What’s her name?”
He tried not to groan at the commencement of her questioning. “Jazz…Jasmin.”
“That’s a pretty name. Is she pretty?”
More questions, but he took some time to answer this one, trying to think of the right words. There wasn’t a simple way to describe Jasmin, but simple words were all he had. “She’s beautiful…” he whispered, “…in the most unconventional way…I just wish she’d shut up once in a while.” He opened the door and walked back inside, changing the topic of conversation to put an end to the interrogation. “So I hear you got a boyfriend.”
“Where’d you hear that?” she asked, a bit surprised. “Mom?”
“Nope.”
“Shane?”
He didn’t want to reveal that Kay was actually his secret source. “Just answer the question, Jo.”
“Yes. I have a boyfriend and he’s great.” She sounded like a lovesick puppy. Tyler must be really something to get his snarky sister all girly like that. He wasn’t fully convinced, though. Her track record with men hadn’t been the greatest.
“Well, when you’ve been with the likes of Billy Mason and that douche, anyone else is—” He stopped, stunned into silence by the sight before him.
“Bink? You there?”
“Jazz…” Her name caught in his throat. “What are you…uh…Jo-jo, I gotta go.”
“Wait, Bink. What’s—”
He hung up and walked across the small room to Jasmin. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor with two small tubs of vanilla ice cream in front of her. However, one of them was topped with five lit candles.
“What’s this?” he asked, sitting down beside her.
“It’s your birthday, right?”
“How do you know it’s my birthday?”
“Your phone has been ringing off the hook today. I already knew you were a Scorpio, so it was easy to figure out. And I also figured out that you have four siblings. Three brothers and a sister. Shane called in the car, then there was Dom, Max and…Jo-jo?”
It was pointless trying to keep his personal life a complete secret. “It’s Jordan,” he corrected, “but all of us call her Jo-jo.”
“It must be nice…having a big family, so many people who care about you.”
She looked at him with so much longing, he didn’t have the heart to tell her that he took them for granted every day. “It’s great.”
She accepted his short response and didn’t push for more information. Instead, she slid the ice cream towards him. “Well, make a wish and blow out your candles.”
He’d never believed in that tradition, and a wish wouldn’t undo the past, so he just blew out the candles. She reached behind her for a bottle of chocolate sauce and somehow seeing it took him back to his birthday three years ago. The contrast was astonishing. His eighteen-year old self was excited about life, about the future. The possibility to do great things was right at his fingertips. He’d never been diligent in high school. His siblings were all nerds and he’d tried his best to rebel against it. However, the family gene finally caught up with him in college and Perry’s little speech had been the source of more motivation. He’d worked damn hard, not just for the promise of money and success; he genuinely loved what he was studying and he’d pushed himself to do better, be better.
But now his twenty-one-year old self was a college dropout drowning in guilt, a bum going nowhere. Money, success—it meant nothing to him now. He didn’t even deserve to wear the chain anymore, but he couldn’t bring himself to take it off. Possibility had been replaced with emptiness. Perry had told him to forget about Hope, and in the last three months he’d used that advice in an entirely different context. He knew at that moment that he would never feel whole again.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
He slowly shook his head. Filled with so much disappointment, he couldn’t even find the will to lie. “No.”
“Did I do something wrong?”
