Professor Feelgood (Page 59)

“Surely, you can’t be serious.”

“I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley.” It’s an old joke but one that always made us laugh. I have no idea what’s going to happen when we open up the floodgates to our rocky past, so I figure easing into it is the best tactic.

I take a step toward him. “Dance with me.”

His expression makes it seem like I just asked him to strip naked and sprint down Fifth Avenue.

“You know I’m not much of a dancer.”

“Me, neither. Let’s suck together.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Careful, Princess. You’re turning me on.”

“Roll with it.”

I tentatively put my hand on his shoulder. He glances at it then steps forward and slides his arm around my waist. “Okay, but know that if you succumb to some kind of twirling incident, I’m absolved of all responsibility.”

I put my hand in his, and he pulls me close. When the front of our bodies connect, I feel the warmth of him in every cell. The sensation is so overwhelming, I take a step back. Keeping a little air between us will help me concentrate.

When I look up at Jake, he’s clenching his jaw. “This is closer than we’ve been in a long time.”

“That’s the idea.”

Touching him is filling me with so many emotions, I can’t sort the good from the bad.

“Jake …” God this is difficult. Breaking something is easy. Putting it back together is infinitely harder. “I don’t …” I blow out a breath. Come on, courage. Come at me. “I don’t want to lose you.”

He frowns. “As an author?”

“Yes, but also …” Damn, every word catches in my throat. It’s like I’ve stopped myself from saying them so many times, they fear the open air. “I miss … what we used to have. I know you think we can’t work together, but … we used to be an amazing team. I have no idea if any part of what we had is worth saving, but if there is … I want to try.”

I feel so exposed by everything I just said, my instinct is to shut the whole thing down. But avoiding this conversation isn’t an option anymore. It’s time.

We move to the music in the most basic way, but none of the couples around us are doing much more. Jake’s shoulder is tense beneath my palm, and his other hand is squeezing mine in a vague, erratic pattern.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asks.

“What do we have to lose?”

The concern in his expression implies he thinks we have farther to fall, but I don’t see how that’s possible.

“Okay.” He stares off into space for a few seconds, as if he’s rehearsed what he’d say in this situation hundreds of times and is trying to figure out which thread to pull first.

“Did you ever wonder why I call you princess?” he asks at last.

“Because you knew it annoyed me?”

He looks guilty, which tells me I’m partly right.

“It’s because you were obsessed with princesses when you were a kid. Don’t you remember all those times you play-acted that you were Cinderella, or Jasmine, or Snow White? One of the only fights we had was when you were pretending you were Sleeping Beauty. You were lying there, begging me to kiss you awake, and I refused. Man, you chewed me out over that.”

I remember everything about that day. “Well, you acted like I’d just asked you to ingest raw sewerage. No girl wants to feel like she grosses a boy out.”

“We were seven. Like most boys that age, I was allergic to kissing stuff. Plus, your sister was watching, and you can bet that she would have given us hell if I’d done it.”

“What’s your point?”

He slides his hand up to the middle of my back. “As you grew older, your favorite books were comics, and you wanted to be Wonder Woman. And yet, you clung to those princess fantasies for years, and on some level, I understood.”

“And what’s that?”

“It wasn’t about finding your true love. It was about someone coming to save you from your life. And I got it, because having someone save me from mine sounded pretty freaking cool to me, too.” He looks down. “Some nights when dad was drunk and raging, all I wanted was to run out that front door and never look back. Leave that whole shitty neighborhood and start over. But I never did, because that would have meant leaving my best friend behind.”

There’s an accusation buried in his words. “Is that what you think I did? Left you behind?”

“As soon as you started hanging out with Jeremy and his friends, you became a different person.”

“That was the point.” I stare at the buttons on his shirt. The hardest things to say are those truths you’ve always known but refused to admit. “High school was a chance for a fresh start, and for once, I didn’t want to be the poor girl everyone pitied. The one who had a dead mother and an absent father. The one who’d spent her entire life wearing her big sister’s hand-me-downs and cutting her own hair. I wanted to see what it felt like just being a regular kid for once. To brush my problems into the background.”

He furrows his brows. “And I was one of those problems?”

“Of course not. You were the only thing I wanted to keep. I wanted you to come with me, but no matter how many times I tried to include you … invited you to parties, asked you to hang out with us … you wouldn’t even try. As soon as I started dating Jeremy, you took the nuclear option and declared war on both of us.”

“Can you blame me? Dammit, Asha, you could have dated any of the boys from the neighborhood who were in love with you.”

“And that would have been okay with you?”

“Of course not, because they were all fucking animals, but at least they weren’t my goddamn step-brother. How the hell did you expect me to react? From the moment Jeremy and I met, that asshole tortured me every day for years. You knew that … you witnessed it. You were supposed to be on my side.”

“I was on your side! I defended you all the time.”

He looks across the room, away from me. “But then he started flirting with you, and it was like you forgot everything he did to me. You found someone to pin your princess fantasy onto, and I faded into the background. And then, to have to watch you mooning over him like he was your dream guy …” He shakes his head. “I couldn’t be around that. And I was pissed that you expected me to be. Did it never occur to you that Jeremy knew dating you would destroy our friendship, and that’s why he did it? That asshole had a million friends. I had one. Of course he had to take you away from me.”

A sharp pang of guilt twists inside me. Was I so wrapped up in my stupid adolescent fantasy, I failed to see what Jeremy was doing? If his ultimate goal was to hurt Jake, then of course I would be the most effective weapon. I thought that when he slept with Shelley on prom night, he was a selfish ass who wasn’t man enough to be faithful to me. But what if it wasn’t about me at all? What if his only goal was to hurt Jake?

“I … I didn’t realize.”

He gives me a contemptuous look. “Yeah, you did. Jeremy never hid who he was, but you were blind to that side of him. It was like you saw us through completely different lenses. When you looked at me all you saw were my mistakes, and with him, you saw the person you wanted him to be.”