From Beginning to End

Chapter 3

"Out. I win again."

I groaned in frustration, slapping my last few cards down on the glass surface of the coffee table I was currently sitting crossed legged on. "It's not fair. You have faster reflexes than me," I complained, sweeping up all of the cards and beginning to shuffle them. Jake shrugged, amusement in his eyes. He leaned back on the couch flexing his fingers theatrically.

"Sorry, Crys." I could tell he wasn't really sorry. I narrowed my eyes at him. He laughed; as he had done the past eight times he'd beat me. We had played almost every card game I could think of, even the ones that I usually had some sort of advantage in. And in every single one, I had failed miserably. I was hoping that I could use my raging headache as an excuse, but he could tell that I was feeling much better and he wasn't buying my pain-filled groans. Still, I refused to give up.

As promised, he had shown up back at my house around seven. Of course I hadn't croaked or burned the house down, but I hadn't eaten either. He wasn't pleased when he found out.

"Really, Crystal," he scolded. "I didn't stay up all night watching to make sure you didn't choke on your own vomit just to for you to die of starvation."

I had shrugged carelessly at him. He sounded way too much like my mother. "I wasn't hungry." It was true; the last thing that had been on my mind for the entire day was trying to eat anything. As a matter of fact, right after I left his job I came back home, crawled into the dark recesses of my bed and simply laid there, wallowing in feeling shitty for the entire day. I may have looked composed and active when he saw me, but the truth was that when the doorbell rang, it startled the crap out of me.

Even though he had promised to come by, for some reason I didn't take it all that seriously. I figured that he had done his duty by me by rescuing me in the first place, not even mentioning bringing me home and watching me through the night to make sure I didn't have alcohol poisoning or something.

That was still hard pill to swallow in itself. Why did he come and get me? How did he even know that I needed saving? I had been tempted to ask him, but I didn't want to push my luck too far. I just wanted to chalk it up to some sort of divine intervention and leave it at that. In all honesty, I didn't want to have to think about it anymore anyway. I could tell that Jake would be someone who would take a conversation like that very seriously, as I probably should, but I just wasn't up for it.

So when he actually did show up, I had to whip myself into some semblance of normalcy so that he wouldn't know that I had spent the entire day lying in bed being a worthless, lazy sap.

"I wasn't hungry," he mimicked in a high-pitch voice that sounded absolutely nothing like me. "It's seven o clock. You have to eat more than bread in the duration of a day." When I simply stared at him silently, he sighed in resignation. "Where's the kitchen?"

He had made me a very appetizing dinner of chicken noodle soup with a jelly sandwich and scrambled an egg just for good measure. Something about protein and hangovers, I think. He still didn't understand that what I had wasn't your average everyday hangover, but at least he was trying.

While he watched me like a hawk, making sure that I ate every last bit of the delicious meal he prepared, we talked. I told him that last night was a stupid move on my part. He told me that he didn't even know why he was there. Apparently, he didn't like to drink and never did, and he didn't like parties all that much either.

It sounded to me like he picked the wrong place to hang out on a Friday night if that was the case.

I told him that getting caught up with those two guys was my fault. He got mad at me. He told me that those guys were dicks and that they shouldn't have tried to take advantage of me. I told him that I had never been drinking as heavily as I had that night. As a matter of fact, I never really drank in general. A glass of wine here and there maybe, but nothing like whatever craziness was in the three…four….five cups I had downed. He said that wasn't an excuse for what happened. I begged to differ, but it was pretty clear that it didn't matter what I thought and rather than upset him any further, I stayed silent.