Professor Feelgood (Page 40)

I close my eyes and take a couple of silent breaths.

Okay, I can’t read this stuff when I’m around him. I really can’t.

I want to be immune to how his poems make me feel, but there’s something about him pining over a woman like a lovesick fool that I have zero defense against. And beneath the layers of involuntary arousal and rising self-loathing, there’s another emotion worming its way to the surface. One more odious than anything that’s come before.

Jealousy.

Even giving it a name makes me feel ill.

It’s the type of jealousy that has so many facets, it’s hard to recognize them all. Part of it is Jake finding true love before I have, and part is being jealous of this Ingrid woman. I mean, how amazing must she be to make a man as closed-off as Jake obsess like this? I wonder if any of my ex-boyfriends have boxes full of sex poems about me? Unless they’re writing about how the seemingly confident woman turns into an anxious mess during sex, then I highly doubt it.

Unlike me, Ingrid is a sexual goddess with a magical, hypnotic vagina. Why else would Jake write so much about making love to her?

I pull out handfuls of poems and lay them on the coffee table. I think it would be best to sort and catalog them back at my place, in private. Preferably with a full bottle of wine, a tub of ice cream, and my vibrator on standby.

I breathe shallowly as I sift down to the bottom of the box, urging my blood pressure to return to normal.

Below all the loose poems is a stack of five notebooks, all filled, cover to cover. It doesn’t escape me that they’re the same brand of notebook I’ve been using all these years for my stories.

I hold one up. “Blanco? Really?” When we were kids, we used them every year for school. They were an ugly shade of mustard and had paper so thin you could see through it, but they were the cheapest notebooks around, and that was all we cared about.

Jake shoots me a look as he pours steaming water into the cups. “Why not? They do the job, right?”

I rifle through the pages. “Yeah. They do.” There are so many words, it’s dizzying to see how prolific he is. “When did you start writing? I never knew this was a thing for you.”

“It wasn’t.” After stirring in creamer and sugar, he brings over the mugs and places them on the scratched table.

I look at him in shock. “What? No coaster? But you’ll ruin the finish.”

He narrows his eyes in contempt before sitting beside me. “To be honest, I always thought you’d become a writer, not me. You were the one who wrote plays for us when we were little. I was just the chump who acted in them. I didn’t get into writing until after high school, and once I started …” He shrugs. “I couldn’t stop.”

“You never thought to write a novel?”

He takes a sip of coffee. “My brain doesn’t work that way. I get flashes of scenes, not whole chapters. Snapshots of emotions or thoughts.”

“Well, we’re going to have to work on that. Where’s your computer?”

He stares at me, deadpan. “Oh, my twenty-seven-inch iMac is right over there, next to my butler’s pantry and media room.”

“You don’t own a computer?”

“Look around, princess. I don’t own most things.”

“So, is this you just trying to out-Brooklyn all your friends? Impress everyone with your apocalypse chic?”

“Yes. As usual I’m on the cutting edge of style. Nearly everything I own was found on the street.”

With a shudder of disgust, I look down at the couch upon which we’re sitting. “Oh, my God. This is a dumpster couch?” I can almost feel the bedbugs crawling inside the cushions.

Jake puts his arm up on the back, wearing an expression of amusement. “Chill, woman; I’m joking. I bought all this stuff from a reputable second-hand dealer. Minimal bodily fluids, I can assure you.”

I should be placated by that knowledge, but I’m not. In fact, the longer I stay in this apartment and the closer I am to him, the more uneasy I feel. Being near Jake always makes me tense, but seeing him living like this … There are some things you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. This ‘apartment’ is one of them.

Jake studies me, and it’s clear my concern is showing in my expression. “For the record, I’m happy living like this. I don’t need your pity.”

“I don’t pity you.”

“Sure you do,” he says, his tone becoming hard. “Because you judge others by what you value. You always have.” He grips his coffee cup tighter. “I hate to burst your bubble, princess, but not everyone wants a McMansion in the suburbs with a white picket fence.”

“Who says I want that?”

“Well, when you were five years old you did a whole series of crayon drawings titled, ‘My Huge House in the Suburbs with a White Picket Fence,’ so …”

“Once again, I’ll remind you that I’m not five any more, and my hopes and dreams may have evolved from what I wrote in crayon.” I gesture to the apartment, irritated with his condescension. “So are you telling me this is your dream home, then?”

“It suits me for now.”

“Jake, it’s autumn in New York city, and you don’t even have insulation in here, let alone heating. What the hell are you going to do when winter hits?”

He stares me down. “Well, since I’ll still be working with you in the third level of hell, I’m sure I’ll be toasty warm.”

I glare at him. When we were seven, we each chose a soul animal. Mine was an otter. His was a dragon. Over the years, those animals morphed, and now it feels like we’re both rams, knocking heads out of habit, like the obstinate idiots we are.

With a curl of his lip, he puts his coffee cup on the table and begins sorting loose poems from the box into piles. “I don’t know why you’re so snobby these days. There was a time when you would have thought this place was cool. It’s similar to our loft. Or have you forgotten where we used to spend all our time from the ages of four through ten?”

A prickle of tension crawls up my back. I haven’t thought about the loft area over his dad’s garage for years. It used to feel magical, but it had nothing to do with the decor.

“That was different,” I say, not looking at him.

“No heating there, either, and back then, all our greatest treasures came from other people’s trash.”

I pretend to read something on my screen. “We were kids. We didn’t know any better.”

When he doesn’t say anything, I turn to see him staring at me, wearing an expression that’s half-incredulity, half-nostalgia. “Or maybe we just found more wonder in the mundane back then. When you have nothing, you learn to appreciate everything.”

I turn away and take a long sip of coffee. It’s hotter than I usually like, but I’ll endure third-degree mouth burns if it means avoiding this conversation. I don’t reminisce about my childhood, because I prefer to block out most of it. Being around Jake every day is going to make that more difficult. I need to step up my efforts to subvert and avoid.

“We should get to work.”

“You really hate it, don’t you?”

I grab my notebook and write today’s date at the top of a fresh page. “Hate what?”

“Thinking about how things used to be. You. Me. The old neighborhood.”