“Thanks,” he said. Eying her as she snuggled back under her blankets, he asked, “You’re not having any?”
She shook her head. “Nah, that was the last of it,” she said, laying back against her pile of pillows.
“Oh,” he muttered, looking guiltily down at his bowl. “Well you don’t have to give it to me.”
“Of course I do,” she smirked through a yawn as she curled up around one of her large pillows, closing her eyes. “You’re sad,” she stated. “Ice cream is a necessity.”
Jacob chuckled once at her simple solution. Taking note of her relaxed frame and remembering their earlier conversation about her lack of sleep, he suggested, “I should probably get going, though. Let you get some sleep.”
“Oh,” she said, sitting up and opening her sleepy eyes. “Actually, I just started this movie a few minutes ago,” she said, pointing to her laptop. “I could start it over, if you wanna stay.”
“I don’t know…,” he trailed off, assessing her fatigue.
She smirked at his hesitance. “Jacob, if you leave, I’m not gonna go to sleep. I’m just gonna watch the movie by myself.”
Realizing she was probably right, he surrendered. “Alright, sure.”
She moved over to give him room beside her, unplugging her headphones and setting up the computer between them. She backed the movie up to the opening credits and pressed play, pulling her blankets up to her chest and grabbing one of the many pillows that decorated her bed.
“Where’s Anna?” he asked, glancing at the bed on the other side of the room, neatly made and untouched.
“Marcus,” Jenna replied, confirming his assumption.
Nearly ten minutes into the film, her head fell to rest on his shoulder. At the start of their friendship, her touchiness had made him slightly uncomfortable, but now it was just Jenna. She was a touchy person, and maybe that was good for him. With all the ways Jenna made him feel at ease, there had to be a few ways she challenged him, pushed him outside of his comfort zone.
The movie they were watching was set in New York City, and as a stunning shot of the Brooklyn Bridge came across the screen, a thought occurred to him.
“Hey, have you ever been to New York?” he asked, excited about the possible idea of getting to show her around the city someday. “Jenna?” he asked again when she didn’t respond. Leaning down to meet her gaze, he discovered that she was out like a light, her head laying softly against his arm as she clung tightly to her pillow.
Knowing the difficulty she often had with sleep, he didn’t want to wake her by getting up. He stayed still for a few more minutes, idly watching the movie he didn’t care much about until he was sure she was in a deep slumber. Whispering her name one more time with no reply, he shut down the computer and closed the top, setting it on the desk beside him as he carefully slipped out from under her head, replacing his shoulder with another pillow. She instinctively leaned more firmly into the pillow and wrapped her arm around it. Smiling at her peaceful expression, Jacob turned the light off and locked the door on his way back into the hallway. With a sigh, he retreated to his room.
Lying in bed, his heart started to race when he thought back to his conversation with Callie at the restaurant. No matter how the talk ended, he couldn’t imagine a scenario in which that conversation wouldn’t change the nature of their friendship. And with their project presentation coming up the next morning, he was anxious to see how those changes would affect their professional relationship.
He let out a deep breath, and for a moment he wished he never would have known about her feelings. Things were so much easier before. Now everything between them was messy, awkward, and unknown.
Glancing at the clock, he noted that half an hour had passed since he lay down, and he was getting more stressed with every second that he worried about Callie. He took a centering breath – in for four, hold for four, out for four – and tried to focus his mind on relaxing thoughts.
He thought about dinner with the girls, but that just made him think about Callie again, so he moved on. He thought about the music in Jenna’s car on the way to the restaurant, but Guns N’ Roses wasn’t exactly a lullaby. His thoughts drifted further back as his medication started to kick in. A hazy memory of Jenna in the lobby – red-lipped and dolled up, tugging on his on his flannel shirt with a warm hand on his chest – popped into his mind, and his heart began to race again as sleep finally pulled him under.
JACOB HAD OFFICIALLY MADE it through half of his first semester of college.
It was Friday morning, and he found himself actually looking forward to the bonfire at the pond that evening, a celebration of making it through midterms alive. He knew Jenna would be there, and although things with him and Callie had been a bit awkward for the past few weeks, since he rejected her feelings for him, she had mentioned Monday, after their successful presentation in Psychology, that she and Angela would be making an appearance at the party that weekend as well.
But before all of that, there was the Academic Fair.
Every year, on the Friday after midterms week, the gym was transformed with lines and lines of booths for every major available in the academic catalog. Each booth had information on the subject, like what kinds of jobs you could expect to pursue should you choose to get your degree in said major, and each department put together a twenty-minute introductory class for any students who wanted to go the extra mile in preparing for next semester’s courses.
Jenna was not one of those students. Since she was a Junior, and the Academic Fair was geared toward Freshman, Jacob had asked her about it that morning, to try to get an idea of what to expect.
“I wouldn’t know. I didn’t go,” she had shrugged, stretching her legs before their morning run.
Running with Jenna had become a nearly daily occurrence. Once she had mentioned that he should join her on a run sometime, they had started jogging together. It started out as an occasional thing, but eventually they began running together almost every morning before class. Jacob would have been embarrassed by his lack of athleticism, if it weren’t for the fact that Jenna was always huffing and puffing even more than he was. But whether due to good discipline or plain stubbornness, when Jenna set her mind to something, she stuck with it.
After a few weeks of the routine, Jacob could make it through their entire route around campus with no shin pain and only minimal wheezing, which he considered quite an accomplishment.
“Why didn’t you go?” he asked, watching the way her back arched as she reached toward her toes. “You’re doing that wrong, by the way.”
“What? How do you know?” she asked.
“I watched a YouTube video.”
“Oh, wow, sorry,” she put up her hands in defeat. “I didn’t realize you were an expert.”
“Apology accepted. You’re supposed to keep your back straight,” he explained, reaching down in demonstration. “Like this.”
“What was I doing?” she asked, repeating the same arched stretch as before.
“You’re bending your back too much,” he explained, placing a hand on her lower back, and gently pulling her shoulders up to a straightened position. “Feel the difference?”