From Beginning to End

Chapter 4

Over the next couple of weeks, that became the norm. At first I saw Jake maybe three times, but by the second week I saw him almost every day even if it was for brief snatches. If he was working, I would conveniently show up there and annoy him while he was trying to get things done. He probably should've gotten in some sort of trouble, but the guys he worked with liked me coming in so much that they wouldn't say anything about it. I would even brave all the guys in the shop leering at me and insinuating things about our relationship.

Not that there was a relationship. At least, not as far as I knew. I wanted to say that we had a very tentative friendship.In my opinion, that was the best description that I could come up with and it seemed to work well enough. I wasn't sure how Jake felt about us spending so much time together, but that wasn't one of those things you could just ask someone about.

He always seemed to be working too. "How come you don't do normal, teenager stuff during the summer?" I asked him one day over a shared homemade sundae. We were sitting at my dinner table on one of our many hang out days. Ice cream was deemed necessary, but neither of us wanted to go anywhere because it was so hot. And my parents had left me a ton of money for their little vacation that was spanning the entirety of my summer, it seemed, even though they promised to only be gone for a couple of weeks.

One might ask why an eighteen year old freshly graduated from high school would decide not to go on a cruise that was supposed to last for almost a month. The answer is simple; as an eighteen year old freshly graduated from high school, I thought that there was no greater torture to be placed on me than to be forced to go on a cruise with my parents who would spend the entire time telling everyone that I had just graduated while simultaneously crying over the fact that I was now college bound. When they gave me the choice to stay home, I eagerly took it. I hated to hurt their feelings, but my life was at stake because at some point during that cruise, I would have surely killed myself.

So here I sat, instead of rocking on a boat somewhere in an ocean that I didn't care enough to remember the name of, eating the coolest, most delicious ice cream sundae with my new, hot friend.

Jake smiled with amusement, "What do you mean?"

I shrugged, "You work all the time. You don't go to the beach or go to parties…or go on dates or anything. You just work."

His spoon stabbed a piece of banana as he scooped up some ice cream, "I like working."

"All the time though? Don't you have anything better to do?" He didn't say anything, but he seemed to be thinking. Still I pressed on, "Any friends?"

"I have no friends," he asserted.

"Bull," I said calmly and he laughed knowing that I was right. "Any hot women to spend time with?"

He smiled and looked at me and I noticed that his eyes were hazel today. "I'm sitting here with you, aren't I?" he said in a voice that had deepened almost imperceptibly. I grinned and shoved him in the shoulder and he laughed again. "Seriously, I like to work. I like cars and it's a stress reliever."

I snorted, "From what stress? It's summer time. You're already solid in school, aren't you? Didn't you get a full ride?"

He nodded, "Yeah, but I don't know how that's going to work out."

"Why?"

To my surprise he looked a little embarrassed for a minute. "Well, because…" When he didn't say anything else, I nudged him, silently urging him to continue. He took a deep breath, "Because I've got job offers up in New York."

I choked on a clump of vanilla ice cream. "Are you serious?" I finally managed to get out. He laughed and looked down, into the bowl. "To do what?"