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.

Over the next few minutes, whenever I looked at my bedroom wall, all I could see was a vision of fucking her against it until all of the rage inside of me exploded into her body.

Fuck. I really needed to go.

If I left now, I’d still make the late train to Boston.

I wanted to leave her something so that at least she knew I was thinking of her.

I took out my construction paper and folded a piece into an origami bat. Every time I’d start to write a message, I’d change my mind and crumple it, having to make another from scratch. I did this a few times but just couldn’t decide what to write.

The more time that passed, the more I second guessed leaving. What if she came to talk to me? I’d never know. For some reason, I just had to know whether or not she’d come to my room when she got home.

Then, a brilliant idea came to mind. I made yet another bat and wrote inside: Looking for someone?

Bunching up some blankets, I attempted to make it appear like a body was inside my bed. I stuck the bat in the middle of the pile, covering it with a comforter and strategically placed a Red Sox cap peeking out from the top.

Stepping back, I cracked myself up because it really did look like someone was sleeping in there. I made a note of exactly how everything was configured. If she messed it up even by an inch, it would be obvious that she came to see me. At the very least, the thought of freaking her out was amusing. Seeing the look on her face would have been priceless.

It was now completely dark out, and there was only a small window to get to the train station in time. Desiree was exiting the restaurant when I stepped outside. I tried to pretend I didn’t see her.

“Jake! Wait up.”

I turned around. “Hey, Desiree.”

“Long time no see.”

“Yeah. I know. I’ve been pretty busy.”

She grabbed my shirt and tugged at it with her long painted nails. “I just got off work. You want to hang out?”

Hang out. Right.

“I’m actually in a rush. I have to catch the last train to Boston. So…”

She leaned in and whispered in my ear, “I’m wearing that thong…red lace…the one you said you liked.”

Her saying it had no effect on me. If this were months ago, I’d have likely gone upstairs and taken that thong right off of her. The thought of that was now repulsive. It made me truly realize how deeply Nina had gotten under my skin, how strong my attraction to her was, both physically and emotionally.