When they pulled back, Scott raised the bottle, saluting them both.
“Here’s to a new beginning, bro,” Scott said. Jake nodded, waiting for Scott to take a sip before taking the bottle back and swallowing down a decent mouthful.
“Hmm,” Scott said, mumbling through another piece of pizza. “How did it go with that girl?”
Jake sighed. “That’s exactly why I’m here. I don’t know what to do. It’s great when we’re together, but she’s so flighty. She keeps breaking up with me.”
Scott laughed softly. “But she can’t get enough of old Jake, huh? She keeps coming back for more.”
“She does,” Jake admitted. “But we are mates. I know it. Last night I told her I loved her, and she sent me a breakup text a few hours later. I know we’re meant to be together. I’m not giving up on her…I’ll fight to the end. But what do I do next?”
Scott thought for a moment, eating pizza slowly. Jake took a few more sips of moonshine. It was getting late now, and he’d probably end up crashing here. He was already too drunk to move.
“What about just ignoring the message?” Scott said.
Jake laughed, surprised. “What?”
“You said she keeps coming back, right? Well, just pretend she never sent the message. It seems to be her default pattern, yeah? So, like, don’t show up on her doorstep with a million roses or whatever. Just be totally chill. Act like nothing even happened.”
Jake thought the idea sounded ridiculous, but it made a crazy kind of sense. The more he thought about it, the more he thought it sounded like very good advice.
That could be the moonshine talking.
The idea had a lot of appeal to it, and it was less confrontational than a grand gesture. There was plenty of time for an impressive event later…when he knew for sure that she wasn’t mad at him.
“I know that look,” Scott said, grinning. “You’re thinking this is a brilliant plan.”
“I don’t know aboutbrilliant,” he said, laughing. “But it just might work.”
“At least you’ll see where her head’s at.”
“Hopefully,” Jake replied. “She could have blocked me already.”
Jake fumbled around until he found his phone. His fingers were a bit numb, and he stared hard at the screen until it came into proper focus. The last thing he wanted to do was make an ass of himself by sending her a pile of drunken gibberish.
“What are you going to say?” Scott prompted. “You know, the phone won’t write a message for you. It’s not an oracle.”
“It would if I was using the right app,” Jake answered. He was pretty sure a quick search would yield dozens of ideas for a post-break-up message. He didn’t want to come on too strong, though.
“Just keep it simple,” Scott said. “The fewer words, the better. Unless you want to let the moonshine write the text.”
Jake laughed softly. “In a few more hours, that’s exactly what I’d be doing. So, I better do it now before we get too drunk.”
He decided that there was only one thing he wanted to know, and that was if she still intended to honor their date. She had agreed to go out at least one more time. He didn’t want to send tons of angsty words begging her to be chill about him saying the L-word. It wasn’t like he’d proposed.
Although, I’d love to.
Don’t.
“Dude. While we’re young,” Scott said, jabbing him in the shoulder.
“Okay, okay,” Jake said, laughing.
Hey, Casey. Want to go out tomorrow night? Start over?
He hit send before he could embellish or totally chicken out. Then he sat with his phone in his lap, staring at it as if it were a sleeping cobra. At any moment, it could wake, flooding him with burning poison that destroyed him from the inside out.
Now that is the moonshine talking.