Total pages in book: 91
Estimated words: 88490 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 442(@200wpm)___ 354(@250wpm)___ 295(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88490 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 442(@200wpm)___ 354(@250wpm)___ 295(@300wpm)
“Aw, Jessie.” Wes grabs my shoulders and hugs me. “It’s going to be okay. The scary roommate probably has first-day jitters too.”
“You didn’t meet her,” I point out.
“She was a piece of work,” my brother agrees. “But so what? Even if she wins a Nobel Prize by the second week of school, it doesn’t mean you won’t do well.”
“Of course she’ll do well,” Wes scoffs, releasing me from the hug. “She’s a Canning, and Cannings are smart. They’re smart enough to drink a beer with me right now and watch the first Monday Night Football of the season. Your Niners are playing.”
I hesitate. I’d planned to reread the schedule for the first week of school and memorize the campus map. But their apartment is just a few steps away, the semester hasn’t even started yet, and my team is playing.
“All right. I’m in.”
A few minutes later, I’m holding a beer and wondering where to sit. It shouldn’t be a tricky question. Wes and Jamie have claimed opposite ends of the sofa, sitting sideways with their legs casually intertwined. All their focus is on the screen.
The screen I can’t see from the counter stool where I’m perched right now.
“Shit,” my brother groans, pointing his beer at the screen. “Jessie, do you believe this?”
I walk behind the couch to catch the replay of the interception our QB shouldn’t have thrown. Nobody was open, damn it. He should’ve just tossed the ball out of bounds. “Oh man. That is just wrong.”
It’s a good game. My whole family loves football—it’s our thing. I ruffle Jamie’s hair to console him over that awful play.
“Sit down,” my brother says, pointing at the obvious piece of furniture. The one I’ve been avoiding since I crossed their threshold. “The massage chair is awesome,” he adds.
Right.
I approach the chair the way I might approach a bloody crime scene—with both curiosity and discomfort. It still looks brand new, with buttery leather upholstery and a deep seat.
“Something wrong?” Jamie asks. He’s watching me like I’ve lost my mind.
“Not a thing!” I turn and sit on the edge of the chair. Actually, sit isn’t the right word. I perch one butt cheek on the edge of the cushion.
But the memory comes back anyway. I was sleep deprived on that March day and really stressed out. I’d taken the red-eye from San Francisco to Toronto to take care of Jamie the first time he’d been released from the hospital. When I knocked on the apartment door, Blake Riley answered.
He and I clashed immediately, fighting over every little thing—who would get Jamie’s glass of water, what we’d feed him for lunch. And the whole time, I was all too aware of how gorgeous he was and how much space his muscular body took up in the room. It was too distracting, and I didn’t like it. I asked him to leave, but he refused, that dickhead.
After I tucked Jamie into bed to sleep off his illness, things got a little weird.
I sat down on the couch feeling teary. I was worried for Jamie and anxious about a bunch of things in my life. Tammy had just had a new baby. I’d just broken up with my boyfriend. And only a few weeks into my new career, I was already having second thoughts about party planning.
Tired and vulnerable, I sat there trying to disguise my unhappiness, surreptitiously wiping my eyes on the sleeve of my T-shirt.
Blake was onto me, though. And that dude is a lot like a big, drooly dog. Doesn’t matter if he just met you, he wants to lick your face and hump your leg. Three seconds after I started crying, he was clucking over me, bringing me a cup of water and dabbing my face with tissues.
When that didn’t work, he picked me up like I weighed as much as a throw pillow and scooped me into his lap. “Shh,” he said. “J-Bomb is gonna be fine. He’s tough.”
I sniffled and pulled myself together. But the all-nighter I’d pulled to get to Toronto took its toll and made me unusually emotional. I told Blake all my problems. How I’d broken up with Raven because he’d been pushing for us to move in together and I couldn’t see that ever happening. How my career choices were always wrong.
“You are a big ol’ ball of stress, Jessie,” he’d informed me. “I have just the cure.”
“You do?”
“Scotch whiskey.”
As it happened, accepting a single tumbler of single malt was a major tactical error.
I drank and watched a movie with Blake. I got sleepier and even more sentimental. Blake went to check on Jamie, returning to tell me that my brother was sleeping like a baby.
“He was such a cute baby,” I hiccupped into my glass. “I’ll never have babies because I can’t stick with a man for more than ten seconds.” The tears began to leak from my eyes again.