The man chuckled again. He looked Jacob over, possibly appraising his physique to weigh his chances of winning this battle. He seemed to like his odds, but when his eyes traveled back up to Jacob’s face and their gaze met, his confident smirk wavered. He quickly cleared his throat and replaced it with a new, fake grin, all the playfulness gone from his eyes.
He shook his head. “Look, dude, if she means that much to you, she’s all yours,” he raised his hands in surrender. “Sloppy bitch ain’t worth the trouble anyway,” he added for good measure, and it took another deep breath and miraculous burst of superhuman self-control for Jacob to simply step around him and offer Jenna an arm.
“Shall we?” he asked her with a forced smile through clenched teeth.
She looked up at him through hazy eyes and took his arm with a snort. “Why, yes we shall, good sir,” she replied in her own inebriated interpretation of a British accent, making herself laugh.
With her lips momentarily away from her drink, Jacob took the opportunity to slip the cup out of her hand and set it down on a nearby coffee table. On their way to the door, he glanced back at the man they left behind, but he had slithered away into the crowd. Probably already prowling for his next conquest. The thought made Jacob’s jaw clench tight again.
The whole walk back to the Morgan-Sharpe residency hall, he had to fight the incessant urge to stride back into that party, grab that low-life by his stupid, greased-up hair and bash his head into the wall until the force of the blows would wipe that smug grin off his face. Halfway to their building, he could still feel the rapid pounding of his heart racing in his chest, and he knew the feeling was close to overtaking him. It had been a long time since he felt this familiar rush, and if he never felt it again, it would be too soon.
His breath was coming in short spurts, and when his vision began to darken into narrow tunnels, he stopped short in the doorway of their building, grabbing onto the doorframe for balance. Jenna – who had previously been trudging along willingly beside him, allowing him to shoulder a majority of her weight as she dragged her sluggish feet – perked up and squinted her eyes at him in an attempt to clear her own vision enough to read his face.
“Er, y’okay?” she slurred.
Jacob took in a deep, steadying breath, in for four seconds, holding for four, and letting out for four – an old trick from Doctor Yang.
“Yeah,” he answered, standing up straight once his vision cleared and his heartrate began to slow a bit.
He looked back at the girl, her tired eyes struggling to stay open, and willed himself to get it together and get her back to her room safely before doing anything reckless.
“What’s your room number?” he asked, pushing through the door and heading for the stairs. He remembered she said she was above him, but he didn’t know if that meant the second or third floor.
“Erm, I… that’s… I don’t…,” she mumbled, leaning a bit more of her weight into Jacob as her head bobbed back.
“Jenna?” he said loudly, but her eyes just fluttered a bit and she winced at the sound.
Jacob let out an aggravated sigh, and the irritation of the chore ahead of him, coupled with the increasing thoughts of whatever misogynistic terrors that douche bag might be inflicting on some other girl provoked his irritation again. Reacting to yet another drastic spike in his heartrate that night, he made a snap decision and ducked into his dorm room by the stairwell.
He closed the door and let the girl fall onto the bed, the anxiety in his chest too strong now to care about whether or not she made it there or slinked onto the floor in a heap. He headed for the bathroom, slamming the door and locking it behind him. He huffed out a few breaths, grasping firmly to the counter as he breathed deeply and with purpose, clearing the darkness from his eyes. Once he was confident he could move without passing out, he opened the medicine cabinet, quickly located his nighttime pill box and downed its contents, washing it down with water from the tap. He splashed some of the cool liquid on his face, too, and grabbed onto the counter again, closing his eyes and clearing his mind as he focused only on the sound of his breath rising and falling.
It took several minutes, but eventually the calm began to fall over him. Whether it was the pills taking effect or merely a placebo, he didn’t care, so long as he could think clearly again. He stood up straight, popped one more sedative, just in case, and headed back to the bedroom.
“Alright,” he shuffled over to the bed where the girl was sprawled out on her stomach, her jacket and purse dropped onto the floor beneath her. “What’s your room number?” he asked again.
No response.
“Come on, Jenna,” he said, his voice weary with impatience as he kicked at the bed, shaking her in the process.
She didn’t move.
He let out something between a sigh and a groan, rubbing his tired eyes with his hands. If he knew her room number, he could probably carry her. But the idea of carrying a near-stranger, passed-out drunk in his arms, aimlessly wandering the upper floors of the building, searching for a name plate on a door that said “Jenna” and hoping it was the right one, did not sound like an appealing task.
The sleeping pills were kicking in, now, not that he really needed them. Now that his anxiety had relaxed, he was met with the strong force of his utter exhaustion. After everything he had been through that day, emotionally and otherwise, all he wanted to do was sleep, and he realized that he didn’t much care where, either.
He gave Jenna one last firm shake, to no avail, before resigning himself to the floor. Without a blanket or pillow, however – both pinned securely beneath the zonked-out girl on his bed – it became clear pretty quickly that sleeping on the near-concrete floor, covered by the thinnest carpet he had ever felt, wasn’t going to happen. It might have been possible to fall asleep there, in his current state, but he was sure his back would regret that decision in the morning.
So, with another impatient exhalation, he pulled himself up from the floor and appraised the amount of space left on the bed. It wasn’t a large bed to begin with, and the girl took up most of it with her arms and legs carelessly sprawled out. Aside from the outstretched limbs, however, her small frame was fairly contained to one half of the mattress, so he pushed her arm and leg aside and lay down beside her, not bothering to fight for space for his head on the pillow.
He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Why do people do this?” he muttered to himself.
“Because they’re sad,” Jenna murmured softly in response. “Or lonely.”
Oh, now you decide to talk, Jacob rolled his eyes. But then her words hit him, and he turned to look at her. She hadn’t moved an inch, and in the silence that followed her whispered admission it was almost as if she hadn’t spoken at all.
“Which one are you?” he asked, but it was too late. She was already snoring softly by his side.
“ALRIGHT,” DOCTOR SUMMERS SAID, picking up her cup of tea and leaning back more casually in her chair. “Anything new?”
It was her usual question, the way all of their sessions started. He never had a significant answer for this question, and he always felt bad for leaving her to prod him with follow-up inquiries, but this time was different.
“Um… well, actually, I think I kind of had a break-through or whatever,” he said with implied quotation marks.