Page 107 of The Jerk in Apartment 1B

He shrugs. “I’m tired of doing this. I want to finish it.”

“I thought you liked doing this.”

“I did, but I’m ready for it to be over. We’ve been doing this for weeks.”

It feels like he’s talking about us, not the storage room. Is that why he’s getting angry? Because he’s ready to end this?

“What is this really about?” I ask, a knot forming in my stomach.

He turns to me. “Why are you turning this into something? I just want to finish the storage room. It doesn’t mean anything.”

It feels like it does, but I decide to let it go. Maybe he’s just in a bad mood or stressed about something.

“So when we’re done here,” I say, “we’ll start on the storage room upstairs?”

“No. We’re not doing that one.”

“Why not? I thought you said—”

“I changed my mind. It’s just some furniture and stuff from my old house. I’ll go through it myself when I have time.”

“I don’t mind helping you.”

He looks at me. “I said I’ll do it myself.”

“Okay,” I mutter, going back to labeling boxes.

Something’s bothering him, but he won’t tell me what. I feel like I should leave and let him finish this himself, but I decide to stay and just not talk to him.

An hour later, he leaves the room to take a phone call, then comes back. “I need to go meet with a client. We’ll finish this later.”

“I can stay and keep working.”

He glances around the room, seeing what’s left to do. “Okay, but just label the boxes. Don’t do anything else.”

“Yeah, got it.”

He doesn’t say goodbye. Doesn’t give me a kiss. He just leaves.

What happened? Everything was great, and now he’s acting like he wants nothing to do with me.

Is this the end? Did he decide this is getting too serious and he needs to move on? If so, he should tell me that.

I sink to the floor, tears threatening to fall.

Why did I do this to myself? I knew this would happen. I knew I couldn’t keep things casual with Scott. And I knew when it ended, I’d feel sad and hurt, like I’m feeling right now.

So why did I do it? Why did I ever get involved with Scott?

CHAPTER THIRTY

Scott

“I’ll have the paperwork sent over in the morning,” I say to James, a friend of mine who’s also a client. He hired me to do some legal work for his company. He called when I was in the storage room with Trina and asked if I could come to his office to go over changes to the documents we’ve been working on. I could’ve met with him later this week, but I did it today so I’d have an excuse to get away from Trina.

I couldn’t be around her. I was angry and taking it out on her. It was wrong and I shouldn’t have done it, but when I see something that reminds me of Megan, I can’t think straight. My emotions take over, and I feel this anger rising inside me. Anger over losing the girl I loved and the life we were supposed to have.

It was the sketches that set me off. Megan did them back when we were in college. I kept telling her my idea for inflatable furniture would never make any money. It’d already been done by companies that were bigger and had more experience. But Megan was certain I could make my idea work. She thought if she sketched out the designs for the products I wanted to make, my idea would feel more real, which would motivate me to keep going.

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