In Too Hard (Freshman Roommates Trilogy, Book 3)

by Mara Jacobs

  “Why does that matter?”

  “Because—get this—my father’s going to run for governor of Maryland.”

  Jane’s father had been a presidential candidate years ago, but had dropped out of the race when his mistress (Jane’s mom) had become pregnant (with Jane). He’d been out of politics ever since.

  “Are you shitting me?” I asked.

  “I wish.”

  We talked about her dad and his upcoming election for half an hour. How they wanted Jane to be involved and how she could use that to her advantage.

  If her father was half the bargaining mastermind that Jane was, Maryland might be in good hands with him as governor.

  She never said anything about seeing Montrose at the wedding. And she definitely didn’t say anything about kissing a guy with a ponytail.

  We said our goodbyes. It was Sunday. I had planned to go to Montrose’s for the whole day since I wasn’t working for my admin job. After breakfast at the nearly empty caf, instead of walking on to Snyder Hall, I turned around and went back to my dorm room. The snow was falling, getting my new boots wet. I hadn’t worn a warm enough sweater under my coat and the idea of crawling back into bed and reading the day away was more tempting than spending the day with Rachel/Esme. That realization alone made me admit I needed a break, and indeed went back to the dorm, put on some heavy wool socks, some sweats, another sweater, and bundled up in bed with my comforter around me like a burrito.

  Okay if I take the day off? I texted to Montrose. I really didn’t think he’d care. I just wanted an excuse to start a conversation.

  Of course I don’t mind. I can’t believe you’ve been in that office every day. I’ve told you that you didn’t have to be.

  He had. Several times. And I’d always argued back that I wanted to be there as much as I was. Which was true.

  But today I needed to recharge. And I always did that best with a good book.

  Okay, good. Thanks. I’ll be back there after my admin shift tomorrow.

  Take tomorrow off too, if you want. You’re way ahead of where I thought you’d be.

  Nope. Just need a day to lay in bed and read, you know?

  Oh yeah, I know. I know very well.

  He was a writer, and also a voracious reader. Of course he knew.

  Chapter Ten

  The next day, Monday, I was recharged from a day in bed reading the newest John Irving novel, and couldn’t wait to get back to Montrose’s office. But first I had to get through my shift testing faux grading in the new front end system.

  One of the consultants asked what I was doing for New Year’s Eve. The consultants, most from the firm’s Texas office, were here for the holidays too. They’d flown home for the long Christmas weekend, but apparently they would not be doing the same for New Year’s.

  I told the guy I didn’t know of anything going on.

  “No, that’s not what I meant,” he said. “I was asking if you were doing anything. And if not…would you like to?”

  I stared at him. He was pretty hot and we’d done a little good-natured joking when we’d been working in the same areas. But something made me tell him no.

  Okay, it wasn’t just “something” and I knew it. It was Montrose.

  Which was totally stupid, and also… Yeah, stupid was definitely the best word for it.

  It wasn’t like there was anything between us. And yet, there kind of was.

  It wasn’t like he wouldn’t be out with someone on New Year’s Eve. And yet, I somehow thought he wouldn’t be.

  It wasn’t like I’d be spending it with him. And yet, maybe I would be…at least virtually.

  A girl could—foolishly, completely inappropriately—hope.

  The consultant took the rejection in stride and I got the feeling that he was a co-ed in every port kind of guy.

  When I got to Montrose’s office in the late afternoon I stopped cold as soon as I opened the door.

  He had been here. I knew it, though everything looked the same. It was just—okay, this is really hokey—the air was different.

  I looked at my well-thought-out piles of his notes. They hadn’t been moved or jostled from the precarious perches some of them maintained. But I knew he’d looked through them.

  I circled around the desk and my breath caught as I saw a note right in the center. And definitely not one I’d written.

  Sorry I missed you. I was in Chesney for that wedding so stayed at my place. I didn’t want you to get out of bed (or book) yesterday, so I didn’t mention that I’d be stopping in. The notes are in great shape, organized much better than I could have done. And just seeing them would have sent me off on more note-taking tangents, so it’s great that you were able to do them for me.

  Can’t thank you enough.

  Billy

  I dropped into the creaky, wooden desk chair. Unfuckingbelievable. I’d missed him because I’d wanted to stay in bed and read on a snowy Sunday afternoon. Something I could have done any Sunday—in fact, did most Sundays.

  I looked at the note again, this time noticing the small postscript at the very bottom of the piece of paper.

  I miss you—is that crazy?

  Just as I was thinking how un-crazy that was, my phone rang with his tone. Knowing I couldn’t get my laptop out and booted fast enough, I answered the FaceTime call on my phone.

  “I just got here,” I said, out of breath, like I’d run all the way here from the admin building, when in reality, I was just gasping from the absurdity of our near miss.

  And then chastising myself for feeling that way. I worked for him. Next week I’d be seeing him all the time.

  The thought of seeing him more than just three times a week for a very short hour got my breath going all the more quickly.

  He chuckled a little. “That eager to get to work? That you’d run to the office?” But he seemed to know that it wasn’t physical exertion that had my cheeks red and my chest rising. Not that he’d even see my chest with me holding my phone so closely to my face.

  The better to see you with, my dear.

  I didn’t even bother to explain my out-of-breathness. “You were here?” I said, trying to control my voice. Shit, it almost cracked.

  Get it together, Syd. You are going to see this guy every day, you can’t let him know what he does to you.

  But he knew. And what’s more, he seemed a little flushed too.

  “I actually thought you’d still be at your other job,” he said.

  “Nope. Like I said, I just got here. They had us stop a little early today because they found a bug or glitch or something that they wanted to look at.”

  “Oh,” he said. Nothing else, but he looked slightly embarrassed.

  “Why would you call if you thought I was at the admin job?”

  “Nothing. I mean…” he let out a big sigh, ran his hand over his sexy stubble like he was noting it for the first time. “Did you already see the note—yeah, of course you did.”

  I nodded, not saying anything.

  “I just thought…Christ, I don’t know what I thought. I was just going to tell you to trash it without reading it, but…shit…even saying it out loud sounds stupid. As if you’d not look at something I wrote to you just because I asked you not to.”

  The funny thing was, I probably wouldn’t look. Well, okay, maybe. Yeah, definitely.

  I kept my mouth shut.

  He sighed again. “Well, listen, I have to go. My parents and I are going out for dinner and we ‘simply can’t miss our reservation, darling.’” Thurston Howell had returned.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m just going to organize the last of it tonight and put it in to the order I want to transcribe from. I’ll start that fresh tomorrow, so I probably won’t be here that long tonight.”

  “I most likely won’t have my phone on during dinner, so just text with any questions, and I’ll get to them as soon as I can.”

  “Will do. But I don’t think I’ll have any questions, I’m in the homestretch wi
th this part.”

  “Well…” He looked down, opened his mouth to say something, then shut it. Looking up, he finally said, “I guess…good night.”

  “Okay.” I started to move my thumb to the “end” button, but stopped. “Billy?” I said, I think using only his first name to him for the first time. Maybe I had that first day in his office when he’d hired me. But it was different this time.

  “Yes?”

  “It isn’t crazy,” I said softly. “I miss you, too.”

  He smiled softly, then more widely. “Night, Syd,” he said, and then disconnected.

  Chapter Eleven

  “And then Jason left, and we knew we were destined to end the night in the drunk tank…which we did.”

  I laughed at Montrose’s story of his most wild New Year’s Eve. Fitting, because we were FaceTiming on New Year’s Eve itself. We had given up the pretense of it being about work and I’d just taken his call in my room, snuggled up in bed, the snow falling outside my window, the glow of a strictly forbidden candle illuminating me just enough for him to see.

  The light from my laptop was making him seem almost ethereal in my darkened room.

  “Come on, your turn,” he said for the thirtieth time since we’d started our conversation.

  I was wearing pajama bottoms and a cami, but it was so cool in the room that I had pulled on a baby-blue rag wool sweater that Jane had once left in my room and so I had—naturally—taken possession of it.

  It was both scratchy and soft, looked about fifty years old, and was something I would never wear out of my dorm room (though Jane did, of course), but it had become my go-to sweater if I was just hanging in the room.

  Somehow I felt…braver by wearing it in front of Montrose, even though it was nearly covered up by my comforter and the angle at which my laptop lay, wedged on my raised knees and thighs.

  “No,” I said, also for about the thirtieth time since we’d started. “You tell another one. You’re the storyteller after all.”

  “You don’t have to be a writer to tell a story about past New Year’s Eves. Just pick one.”

  “But you have so many more to choose from than I do.”

  He grinned and—corny as it sounds—my heart literally skipped a beat. “Ooh, was that an old man dig? Need I remind you that I’m still under thirty?”

  “And yet still an old man to me,” I teased, then wished I hadn’t when I saw his grin slowly vanish from his face.

  “Yeah, there is that,” he said.

  I started shaking my head, feeling my hair sliding on the pillow propped beneath me. “I’m kidding. It’s not an issue. At least not for me.”

  He watched me for a long time, like he was looking for a tell or something that I might be lying. “Honestly,” I added.

  It was weird, discussing obstacles to our relationship, when, well, there was no relationship. Not really. Not yet.

  But the more we talked, the more we laughed, the more we looked meaningfully at each other as we said good night… Yeah, there was something there, even if it was undefined at this point, even to us. Especially to us.

  But so there would be no objection that he could obsess about (did guys even obsess like we girls did?), I drove the point home. “I’m nineteen, almost twenty. I was old for my class.” A little lie, but he didn’t need to know I had missed nearly all of eighth grade and needed to repeat it. “And, let’s face it, I’ve probably lived more of a life growing up where I did, than most of these other freshman girls.”

  Reminding him I was a student probably wasn’t the smartest tactic, but after a while he just smiled and said, “So, since you’ve got all this life experience, your turn to share a story. New Year’s Eve or not.” I opened my mouth to argue, but he quickly added, “I feel like I’ve done all the talking.”

  I shook my head. “No. And even if you have, I’ve enjoyed it.”

  Just as I was about to argue more, a roar went up from outside on his end, loud enough for us both to hear. “Jesus, it’s almost midnight already,” he said. The sound now became a discernible countdown. “When did we start chatting?”

  “Around eight,” I said. It had been exactly 8:03, but who was counting?

  He turned his head toward his window, then got out of his chair and picked up his laptop. “You can’t see Times Square from here, but we’ll be able to hear it,” he said walking with his laptop—with me—out onto a terrace that seemed to span the entire length of his parents’ apartment.

  “Wow,” I said, getting a touch of sea sickness as he moved the laptop around, finding the best place to settle, which apparently was a table and chairs set of some type. “You have a terrace door in your bedroom? Soooo Upper East Side.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, it is nice. But you should see my apartment. No terrace. No rooftop pool. None of that shit. It’s totally starving artist.”

  But he wasn’t starving, had never starved, never really struggled. According to “Forbes,” royalties from Folly still topped the mid six figures even five years after publication.

  Yeah, Montrose didn’t know what a true starving artist was.

  It was darker outside, but a light was on further down the terrace behind him. They had reached the final ten seconds by the time he’d sat and had me steady.

  (Like I was ever steady in his presence!)

  “Explain again why you’re here with me and not down there?” I said, meaning Manhattan in general, Times Square in particular.

  “God, the thought,” he said, doing a mock shudder. “You’re from New York, you know what a zoo it is on this night. I guarantee you, ninety percent of the people out there tonight, at least in Times Square, are tourists.”

  “We are not both from New York. At least not the same New York.”

  He waved a hand of dismissal, his white cotton buttoned-down shirt looking ghostly in the dark of the night. “Yeah, yeah, you’re a Queens girl. Whatever. You’ve been to the city.”

  Not often. I was usually saddled with my little brothers and there was no way I was going to lug them into Manhattan. “Yeah, you’re right. Smarter to stay in tonight,” I said, hoping to curb the “my Manhattan/your Manhattan” direction the conversation was headed. He didn’t need to know about my New York.

  I was trying hard to forget. To become a Bribury Basic and let the Queens girl fall away.

  He looked like he was going to pursue it. I felt my lips tighten, like I was preparing to keep my secrets, and he sat back in his chair. The light behind him created a halo effect around him, and the screen’s illumination washed him out, creating this kind of angel-like presence.

  Yeah, I had idolized Montrose since I was fourteen, but even I knew the guy was no angel.

  He laced his fingers together across his chest, resting his elbows on the wrought-iron arms of the chair. I couldn’t see it, but from his movements I could tell that he’d stretched out his legs.

  “So,” he said, “any resolutions? Goals for the new year?”

  I relaxed, my lips untightening. He was going to let it go.

  I was going to tell him about the thing Lily, Jane and I did with the envelope sealing, but I didn’t. For one thing, it kind of felt like I’d be betraying Jane and Lily by telling him about it. Like, it was something that belonged to just the three of us. And, even though I didn’t know what they’d written, even talking about doing it, was somehow spilling a secret.

  Secondly, I didn’t want to put the thought of Jane in his head. Oh, I was past the point of thinking Montrose would succumb to Jane’s flirtations, and it seemed that Jane was beyond Montrose, too, due to the ponytailed guy, and the dance floor kissing. But…still.

  Lastly, I didn’t bring up our envelopes because I didn’t want Montrose to ask what I’d written down and sealed up for a year.

  It had been the night before Montrose had hired me, and my New Year’s statement now seemed childish and…well, freshman-like, even though it had just been two weeks earlier.

  “I guess I hadn
’t really thought about it,” I said. It wasn’t exactly a lie. The thing Lily, Jane and I did wasn’t exactly resolutions.

  In the background I could hear the final countdown, and the roar which meant…yep, I checked the time on my laptop…it was now the new year.

  Montrose’s head tilted in the direction of Times Square, but his eyes stayed on the screen. “Happy New Year, Syd,” he said softly.

  “Happy New Year, Billy.”

  I licked my lips, like I was expecting the lauded kiss at midnight, but that was stupid. What? We were going to each press our lips against our laptop screens? Like an inmate getting a visit in prison and kissing his wife through the glass that separated them?

  There was no way my first kiss with Montrose was going to taste like MacBook Air.

  Not that there would necessarily be a first kiss.

  God, I hoped there would be a first kiss. And a second, and…infinity.

  He sat forward in his chair and I held my breath. He looked at me for a long time, seemingly studying my face as if he would later be asked to describe me for a police sketch artist or something. Opening his mouth to say something, he changed his mind and gave his head a tiny shake, then sat back in the chair.

  “So, back to resolutions. You said you hadn’t thought about it. Now’s your chance. What do you resolve for this next year?”

  “Umm…let me think,” I said, my mind whooshing over thoughts and ideas of things that would be okay to tell him. “Do you have any?” I finally said.

  He waved a hand of dismissal. “That’s easy. Write and finish my next book.”

  “Oh, yeah, of course. That’s a good one. A great one, actually.”

  Another wave, this one smaller, his wrist barely rising above the arm of his chair. “Sure, but it’s been the same resolution for the past five years.”

  “Yeah, but you know what you have now, that you didn’t for the past five years?”

  “Insight? Drive? Maturity? Discipline? Yeah, no. I’m pretty sure I still don’t have any of those.”