I hated math, plain and simple. My brain just wasn’t wired to understand numbers. But so much rode on this class, and I was determined to find a way to get through it. My parents were certainly not going to continue to pay for nursing school if I couldn’t pass my classes. I owed it to them to try as hard as I could, despite the current lack of faith in myself.

Feeling defeated, I walked home from the university in the rain. I was already stressed about the small amount of homework I had received for tonight and a math test scheduled for Wednesday.

I was one block away from the apartment when a van drove right into a puddle next to me, causing what seemed like a tidal wave of water to hit me. I was now drenched and looking like a drowned rat.

Arriving at our front steps, I noticed the woman who lived on the second floor peeking out of her window watching me approach the building. She looked to be in her sixties.

Still standing on the sidewalk below, I waved. “Hi, I’m Nina Kennedy. I just moved upstairs.”

The woman looked at me and said nothing. She wore a scarf wrapped around her head and didn’t look happy at all.

It was awkward, but I gave it one more try. “You live on the second floor?”

The woman squinted her eyes and looked angrier by the second. Finally, she leaned a bit more out of the window and in a strong Jamaican accent said, “Go f**k yourself!”

My heart started beating fast. “Come again?”

“Go f**k yourself!” she repeated and then abruptly shut the window.

I stood there in the rain stunned, not knowing whether to run into the building or away from it. This was definitely not my day. I opened the door and was panting as I ran up the stairs past her apartment to the third floor.

What was wrong with her? Why did she say that to me? What did I do?

I entered our apartment and slammed the door behind me, leaning against it breathing in and out heavily. That encounter shocked me so much that it took me a few seconds to notice Jake standing in front of me eating a banana.

“What the hell happened to you?” he asked.

I kept panting and then said between breaths, “I was attacked…verbally…by the woman on the second floor.”

He nearly choked as he began to double over. He was laughing so hard that no sound came out of his mouth.

He stopped just long enough to ask, “Did she try to drown you too?”

I rolled my eyes. “No, that was something else.”

Jake continued to laugh uncontrollably. He gripped his abs as if in pain and smacked the counter, then said “Now, you are officially part of this household.”

“What?”

“You’ve just been Ballsworthied.”

“Balls, what? Excuse me?”

My reaction seemed to make him laugh even harder now. My body stiffened when he walked over and pulled me into a quick friendly hug then patted me on the back. It sounded the alarm to the butterflies in my stomach. “It’s okay. You’re good. She’s harmless.”

I shivered. “What the heck is wrong with her?”

“That’s Mrs. Ballsworthy. No one knows why the f**k she is the way she is. Some days she’ll tell us to go f**k ourselves, and other days, she’s perfectly fine. One time, I shit you not, she baked us a chocolate cake. It said ‘Fuck You All’ on top. It was the most delicious fuckin’ cake I have ever eaten. She could have put shit in it. I still would have taken another bite. That’s how good it was.”

That story broke my funk, and I started to laugh at the absurdity of it all. I wiped my eyes. “Are you pulling my leg again?”

“No, actually. Even I couldn’t make that shit up if I tried.”

He and I both cracked up simultaneously, and when our laughter dissipated, I stared into his emerald eyes for a few seconds. His eyes then moved from mine to my mouth and back up to my eyes again.

“Seriously, you look like you had a tough day,” he said.

I shook my head. “You have no idea.”

Jake walked over to the fridge, popped open a beer, took a swig and handed the bottle to me. “Enlighten me.”

I took a long sip, and the fact that my mouth was now where his had just been was not lost on me. “Thanks.”

He pulled up a chair, sat on it backwards and listened as I vented.

“I am just really up shit’s creek in school. There is this finite math class I have to get at least a C in, since it’s a requirement for the nursing program, and I have never been able to understand math. It’s like a brain deficiency I have.”

He squinted his eyes in disagreement. “Bullshit. No such thing. You just need the right teacher.”

“Well, the teacher, Professor Hernandez, is not a happy person to begin with, and as far as his teaching style, he might as well be talking Chinese to me. He just reads out of the book and doesn’t explain anything.”

Jake grabbed the beer from my hand, took a sip, handed it back, and stared into my eyes. “Like I said, you need the right teacher.”

“But my teacher sucks!”

He let out a slight burp. “No, he doesn’t. He is awesome.”

“What do you mean? Have you not heard anything I have said?”

“I mean…he is awesome. Because…he…is me.”

“You?”

“Yeah. I’ll be your teacher. I’ll tutor you. Math is easy as balls for me.”

“You…tutor me…”

His eyes widened, and he gave me a menacing look. “Yes. Unless you want to fail,” he said firmly.

“No. No, I don’t.”

“Okay, then.”

I scratched my head. “When is this gonna happen?”

“We’ll do it a couple of nights a week, set up a schedule.”

“Why would you want to do this for me? What’s the catch?”

I was about to take a sip of the beer when he yanked it from my hands and downed the rest of it. My eyes fixated on his lips wrapped around the bottle before he slammed it down. “What…people can’t do things for other people without there being an ulterior motive?”

“I guess. But seriously, you don’t have to.”

“I don’t have to. You’re right. I want to. I wouldn’t have offered otherwise. I told you, math is easy for me. The hard part is gonna be getting you motivated.”

“Motivated?”

“Yeah. See, people are capable of amazing things when they’re motivated.”

“Isn’t not getting kicked out of nursing school motivation enough?”

He smirked and shook his head in disagreement. “No, it’s not. I can tell that’s not enough for you. You need something that will really make you want to pass, like your life depends on it.

I rubbed my temples. “I am not following you.”

“I’ll explain then. Okay, so…I’m gonna tutor you, right? If you get an A on every exam, fanfuckingtastic! I’m doing my job because you should be getting an A on every exam. If you get lower than an A, then there should be consequences.”

“Consequences?”

He nodded slowly with a mischievous grin. “Consequences.”

“Like?”

“Like…when I first met you, you said you were afraid of a lot of things. And from the look on your face, I could tell it was more than just a slight fear. You need to get over that, Nina.”

I shuddered at the seriousness of his tone and the fact that for the first time, he said my name.

“I am not following you,” I said.

“Let me explain. I tutor you. But for every exam grade lower than an A, you will have to face one of your fears.”

I felt a rush of panic creeping in, and my heart started to pound. Without saying anything for several seconds, I just stared at him before asking, “Can you be more specific?”

“Don’t get all freaked out on me. I’ll be there with you. We’ll do something that scares you, that you’ve been avoiding, but you won’t know what it is until we get there. It’s better that way, so that you are not building up anxiety anticipating it. We’ll expose you to it, until it doesn’t scare you anymore. See, from what I can tell from your body language, I am making you really f**king nervous right now. And that’s a good thing, because it means you are going to work your ass off to ace those tests. But either way, you win. You just might not see it that way.”

He had to be kidding me. I barely knew this guy, but he could read me like a book.

“What if I don’t want to participate in this bet?”

Jake got up and threw the bottle in the recycle bin. “Then, you’re on your own, chica.”

I felt like throwing up, not because I was about to fail math but because I knew I was about to agree to his terms. It scared the living hell out of me, but at the same time, I felt a bittersweet excitement like never before.

He stuck out his hand. “Deal?”

I hesitated then shook his hand as he squeezed mine tightly. “Deal.”

Gosh, if my body reacted like this to just the touch of his hand, I couldn’t imagine what it would do if he were to—

“You want to start tomorrow night?” he asked.

“Okay.”

“Give me your phone,” he said.

I looked at him strangely.

“Give me your phone,” he demanded again.

I didn’t ask why and just handed it to him. To be honest, with the way I have been reacting to this guy, I probably would have done anything he asked me to at this point.

“Stay here,” he said.

He walked away down the hall to his room with it, and that made me extremely nervous. I didn’t want him looking at my browsing history or text messages, even though there was really nothing incriminating.

I shouted. “What are you doing with my phone?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I heard him yell from his room.

“Can I have it back please?” Why was I listening to him and staying here in the kitchen like an idiot?

A few minutes later, he came back down the hall and handed it back to me. “I programmed my number in. So, if for some reason, you have to reach me for anything, you have it. I’ll also call you if I am running late from work tomorrow night before we study.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“Don’t be scared. You’re gonna do fine.”

I nodded silently, wondering how I got myself into this.

Jake grabbed a banana, then his jacket and laptop from the couch. “I have to get back to work. I just came home because I forgot my laptop. I’ll catch you later.”

“Okay. Catch you later. Oh, wait…Jake?”

He turned around. “What’s up?”

“I never thanked you for my bat.”

He said nothing, just smiled, winked and stuck out his tongue in jest. For the first time, I noticed it was pierced too.

Damn.

When the door slammed shut, I closed my eyes and sighed.

Oh yeah, I was in deep doo doo…in more ways than one.

From the street, I could hear Jake in the distance. “Fuck you too, Mrs. Ballsworthy!”

I covered my mouth in laughter. My new home was a bizarre place, but there was nowhere else I wanted to be at that moment.

Then, I looked down at my phone and noticed he had changed the wallpaper on the screen. It was one of those “Keep Calm and Carry On” sayings that pretty much summed up my day, in honor of my encounter with our lovely neighbor:

Keep Calm and Go Fuck Yourself.

CHAPTER 5

Tuesday was my day off from classes, and I spent the day doing laundry and nervously anticipating my tutoring session with Jake that night. I was 22-years old, but the level of obsession I was experiencing made me feel like I was sixteen.

I still could not believe I had agreed to the terms of his bet. Truthfully, I knew I wasn’t going to get A’s on my tests no matter how hard I studied, so I could pretty much start mentally preparing myself for the worst. Even though what Jake proposed terrified me, I really didn’t ever consider telling him no.

He was like no other guy I had ever known. It wasn’t just that he looked different (in a very good way). He had a self-assurance and commanding way about him that was hard to resist, but that oddly, also made me feel safe.

Growing up in my small town, the guys I had met from the time I was a teenager up until I moved here were cookie cutter. I had yet to meet someone like Jake: dark and dangerous on the outside but smart and clever on the inside; someone who owned a room the second he stepped into it.

My last serious boyfriend, Spencer, could not have been more different from Jake. He was a clean-cut, church-going kind of guy, who my parents and everyone else just loved. He was a few years older and sold insurance for a living, but looking back, if you ask me, the only thing he was ever really good at selling was a false impression of himself. What my family didn’t realize was that behind that squeaky-clean exterior, was a man that constantly tried to berate me with critiques and put-downs. And ultimately, he cheated on me. I felt like I wasted three years and got nothing out of it, except a certificate of completion in Asshole 101. He was the only guy I ever slept with. What a waste.

I shook my head to rid my mind from thoughts of Spencer as I continued to fold shirts in the basement laundry room. Then, my cell phone rang, and I saw it was my father.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Hi, sweetie. I am just checking in. How are things going at the new place?”

I can’t stop obsessing over my roommate.

“Pretty good so far.”

“How’s Ryan?”

Who?

“He’s great. Turns out he’s actually dating my other roommate, Tarah.”