Nina, I was a jerk to you and your little friend.

I’m sorry.

And the Barney joke was stupid.

Actually, you looked stunning.

Stunning. Stunning. He thought I looked stunning. This was the first verbal indication that he found me attractive and the butterflies in my stomach were now doing a Greek circle dance.

I read the text as many times as I could before Alistair returned to the table.

I put my phone away when our desserts arrived, and unfortunately, my brain and appetite must have run away together, because I was now just sitting there…well, stunned.

Alistair returned and sat down. “Are you feeling okay, Nina?”

“Yeah…I think my eyes are bigger than my stomach. I’ll probably get the cake to go.”

He nodded because his mouth was full of cheesecake. I just wanted to get home as fast as possible in case Jake hadn’t left. He had said there was a possibility he would be leaving in the morning.

He held the door for me as we left the restaurant. The cold night air hit my face and blew my curls all over the place.

“What’s so funny?” Alistair asked.

I must have been smiling to myself as we walked, thinking about the text. And even though Alistair was holding my hand, all I could think about was how much I wanted to sleep next to Jake tonight.

***

Alistair leaned in to kiss me as he left me at the door to the apartment and I kept my mouth closed, allowing it but not encouraging it to turn into the type of kiss I dreamt of with Jake.

Intentionally not inviting him in, I wished him a good weekend and let him know I’d see him in class next week. I would have to come up with an excuse as to why I wouldn’t be able to accept another date with him if he asked.

The apartment was quiet, and all of the doors to the bedrooms were closed. My pulse raced as I approached Jake’s room and knocked.

“Jake?”

Nothing.

I knocked again.

He was gone.

I felt a mixture of sadness, frustration, longing and relief, only because I was pretty sure I would have said or done something stupid tonight if he were here…like maybe jumped his bones.

Loneliness set in as I walked back to my room and kicked off Tarah’s heels. I pulled the dress over my head, put on a long white t-shirt and brushed my hair back into a ponytail.

The water must have run for minutes on end in the bathroom as I washed the makeup off my face, lost in thought, without paying attention to the time.

I had really come to hate the weekends, when Jake was away. Even though we weren’t together as a couple, I missed him and felt safe when he was around.

As I tried to fall asleep, the restlessness was overwhelming. I could not stop thinking about him and replaying the entire night in my head.

Insomnia was winning out, so I got up and made myself some tea instead of rolling around aimlessly in bed.

As I sat up sipping my chamomile and watching late night television in the living room, it dawned on me that Christmas and the end of the semester would be here before I knew it. That meant the tutoring sessions would end. Getting an A on the next exam suddenly seemed less important than getting to spend even more time with Jake, even though the thought of another “excursion” terrified me.

I shut off the television and started back toward my room when I impulsively passed it, heading over to Jake’s instead. I opened the door and immediately jumped.

He was there. He was sleeping!

No way.

I approached the bed slowly to get a closer look and jumped again when I realized it was just a ton of bunched up blankets made to look like a body. And there was a baseball cap on the pillow.

What the heck?

I pulled back the covers. Underneath was an origami bat. I opened it:

Looking for someone?

I covered my face in a mix of embarrassment and disbelief that he somehow knew I was going to sneak into his room tonight. Determined to hide the fact that I took the bait, or in this case—the bat—I carefully folded it back together and placed it under the covers but not before I buried my face in his pillow, relishing the musky scent. The cigarette smell was almost completely gone, making me wonder if he was trying to quit.

Before I left, I noticed something else: three more bats crumbled in the wastebasket. I picked them out and saw that he had started to write something on each one before scrunching it up and tossing it out. It was as if he was struggling to find the right words and gave up.

The first one just said: Hope your date was great…

The second one: How does Ass Hair compare…

The third: You looked…

Wow…okay. I didn’t realize that he actually thought so deeply about what to write on these things. This discovery both flattered and confused me. How he finally came to the conclusion that the best course of action would be to trick me into thinking he was sleeping was beyond me.

Back in my own bed, I stared at the ceiling and concluded that tonight proved Jake knew he had an effect on me. I just couldn’t figure out what effect I really had on him and whether he thought about me the same way.

The same word replayed in my head until I eventually fell asleep: stunning.

CHAPTER 11

I had received two more A’s on the subsequent exams in November and now held a B average in math overall. Jake was happy for me but somewhat bummed each time, because apparently he was really looking forward to his next planned fear-facing exercise that kept getting put off by my stellar grades. Who knew this would become a problem?

With each A, I baked Jake something special to thank him for helping me. He didn’t seem to enjoy the banana bread as much as the Bananas Foster but still ate the entire loaf in one sitting with his eyes closed. The second time, I made him a chocolate banana cream pie and his response to that was nothing short of orgasmic. Seriously, he was mumbling things I couldn’t even understand. It was truly entertaining to watch.

During Thanksgiving break, I had bragged to my parents about my nerdy roommate who was helping me get through math, and they said they couldn’t wait to meet him and thank him. I would deal with picking my mother’s jaw up off of the ground when the time came.

***

There was only one exam left before the end of the semester. A couple of weeks prior, Jake and I were busy studying in his room early one Thursday night, and as usual, he was keeping things strictly business.

But that was the night that everything changed between us.

At one point, in preparation for a math problem, he went into his drawer and grabbed something, throwing it front of me. It was a pair of dice.

He looked at me intently then pointed to them. “You’re going to tell me how many different outcomes are possible. Then we’re going to have you figure out how many ways you can get a sum of five.”

Looking down at the dice, something came over me as an old memory of playing Yahtzee with my brother Jimmy came to mind. The object of that game had been to score the most points by rolling five dice to make certain combinations. Even though it was based on pure luck, Jimmy would always beat me. I could hear my brother’s voice, clear as day, “Yahtzee!” And that’s what did it. Yahtzee. That was the word that made me burst into tears for literally the first time in years. Looking down at the dice, I cried while Jake watched, horrified.

“What…what the hell is going on, Nina?”

I covered my face to hide the tears that wouldn’t stop falling.

Jake had been at the desk but moved over to where I was sitting on the bed and turned to me. “Nina?”

I wiped my eyes and looked over at him. “It’s my brother. Those dice…for some reason, they triggered a memory for me. My brother and I used to play the game Yahtzee to pass the time, while he—”

“What?” He blinked in confusion.

“It was one of the few things we were able to do together…before he died.”

Jake looked at me silently, his eyes blinking rapidly in an attempt to absorb the bombshell I had just dropped.

“Nina…God…I am so sorry. This is the brother in that picture in Ryan’s room?”

I nodded and sniffled. “Yeah. Jimmy was my only brother, my only sibling.”

“What happened?”

“He had leukemia.”

He looked down at the floor and sighed. “I had no idea. You never said anything. I just assumed—”

“I know. Ryan and I don’t really talk about him anymore. It’s just too painful sometimes for both of us. It surprised me that Ryan even had that picture displayed, because I know he gets really broken up over it.”

He closed his eyes briefly looking off to side then back at me again. I had stopped crying but was still shaken by the memories of my brother’s last days. Those were images I tried hard to fight on a daily basis, and two little dice managed to completely unravel everything I worked so hard to bury.

Jake startled me when he put his hand on my knee. “Why don’t you want to think about him?”

It was hard to admit the true reason that it was so difficult to think about Jimmy, and I never talked about it. Never. But I wanted to tell him. I wanted to tell Jake because I trusted him, and he had always made me feel like he wouldn’t judge me for my faults.

He kept his hand on my knee, and I used the dragon tattoo on his forearm as a focal point to gather my thoughts. “Toward the very end of my brother’s life, I couldn’t bear to watch him waste away. It was just too painful. He was only a year and a half older than me. We were so close. He was nineteen when he died. I was a senior in high school.”

When I started to tear up again, he squeezed my leg harder and said, “It’s okay. Take your time.”

I moved my gaze from the dragon back up to Jake’s eyes and could see my own reflection in them.

“We tried everything. They took my bone marrow because I was a match.”

Jake shut his eyes as if it pained him to hear me say that.

“He had a stem cell transplant, but it wasn’t successful. At first, we had so much hope. Then, it was destroyed and there was just nothing left. He was sick for about two full years before we lost him.”

Silently willing me to continue, he squeezed my knee again.

“When he was in the hospital, we would play that game, Yahtzee. That was during the period about six months before he died. The last month or so, he had gotten so sick, so emaciated; I couldn’t bear to watch it…couldn’t handle seeing him like that.” I paused to catch my breath. “I stopped seeing him, Jake. I just stopped visiting my brother. I wasn’t even there when he died.” The tears started to pour out again as I recalled the most painful time of my life, no longer able to speak coherently.

He wrapped his arm around me, pulling me into him. I closed my eyes and sunk my head into the heat of his chest as I cried.

He spoke softly into my ear. “He knows you loved him, Nina. You loved him so much that you couldn’t bear to see him in pain. He knows. If he didn’t know then, wherever he is—wherever it is that we go—he knows now.”

I looked up at him. “You believe that?”

“Yes, I do. I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t believe it.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I can’t be 100-percent sure, but you have to have blind faith. You have to believe it in your gut. The fact is, it’s more likely than not that there is a purpose to this f**ked up thing we call life. Your brother…he had a purpose. He just fulfilled it faster than you or me.”

“I want to believe that,” I said.

He let go of me suddenly and walked over to his closet, taking out the sketchpads I had looked through the night I snuck into his room. Flipping to one of the pictures of the man on the motorcycle, he sat back down on the bed next to me and stared at it for a bit before speaking.

“That’s my Dad,” he said with his eyes still focused on the drawing.

It blew me away that the haunting image that stuck out at me the most amongst his sketches was actually of his father. He had an impassioned look in his eyes as he continued to stare at the image without saying anything.

“That one was my favorite. The one of him looking back,” I said.

After another long pause, he finally spoke. “This was the last memory I have of him. He died that night in a motorcycle accident. I was only five, but I remember this moment in the drawing very clearly. He was going out to meet some friends. He told me to be a good boy for my mother and that he would take me out to my favorite diner for breakfast the next morning. For some reason, he looked back at me one last time before he took off, and it always stuck with me.”

This was breaking my heart.

“I don’t know which is worse: never getting to say goodbye to someone or watching them suffer first,” I said.

He put the sketch aside and turned to me. “Both scenarios suck. My point is, as painful as it was to lose my father that way, I never want to forget him. Ever. I do everything in my power to remember him, to remember the little things he taught me, even at that age.”

I took a deep breath in and nodded, thinking about what he said as it related to Jimmy. I had been trying so hard to push away thoughts of my brother’s illness, that all of the good memories were getting pushed away too, so there was nothing left of him.

Some random funny memories came to mind suddenly because I allowed them in. “My brother was such a jokester. Kind of like you.”

He smiled. “Yeah?”

“Jimmy was shameless. Once, he brought a whoopee cushion to church and put it under this old lady in the pew in front of us. My parents grounded him for like three weeks after that.” I shook my head remembering that day. “Whenever we got into fights, and I tried to stay mad at him, he would hold me down and tickle my feet until I begged his forgiveness. He knew that drove me crazy. Sometimes, he would get Ryan to grab the other foot. They would gang up on me.”