Intermediate Thermodynamics: A Romantic Comedy (Chemistry Lessons Book 2)

by Susannah Nix

  There was a knock on the door.

  Esther leapt off the couch and threw it open, hoping Jinny had come back and she’d have another chance to explain.

  Except it wasn’t Jinny. It was Jonathan.

  “What?” The word came out harsher than she intended.

  He flinched. “I, um…heard you and Jinny fighting.”

  “Oh.” Esther went back to the couch and sank down on it again, leaving the door open.

  He followed her inside and stood at one end of the couch, shifting his weight. “Are you okay?”

  She looked away, swallowing. Unable to stand the pity in his eyes. “Not really.”

  “Is Jinny okay?”

  “No, she’s not okay. She’s pissed at me. And she has every right to be.”

  “Did you tell her about—”

  “I told her everything.”

  “Oh.”

  Esther leaned forward and cradled her head in her hands. “Fuck.”

  He shuffled closer, hovering over her uncertainly. “Is there anything I can do?” He sounded so kind. So concerned about her. He had no idea she was about to break his heart. She squeezed her eyes shut so he wouldn’t see that they were full of tears.

  “Esther?” He moved even nearer.

  She exhaled a long, ragged breath and looked up at him. “Last night was a mistake. It can’t happen ever again.”

  He took a stuttering step back. “What?”

  “You dated my best friend.”

  His eyebrows drew together. “It’s not like I really dated her though.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “Wait,” he said, looking confused. “You mean because I fake-dated Jinny—”

  “It wasn’t fake dating. It was real dating. You liked her, and she liked you.”

  His expression hardened. “Not enough to keep dating me.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You can’t sleep with a guy your best friend dated. That’s Friend Code 101. She gets forever dibs. I never should have let it happen.”

  “Don’t I get a say in who has dibs on me?”

  “No.”

  “Are you serious right now?” He looked pissed.

  “Look, I’m sorry, okay. None of this is fair to you, I realize that.” He hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Collateral damage.

  “So that’s it?” The bitterness in his voice made her stomach churn painfully.

  She looked down at the floor and swallowed. “We can still be friends.” She hated herself for saying it, because it was so obviously a lie. They’d never be able to go back to the way things were.

  “Wow. Really?”

  She glanced up at him and immediately regretted it. He looked like she’d just kicked him in the stomach. “I don’t have a choice.” She wished she could go back in time and erase the last twenty-four hours. Back to when she and Jonathan were just friends, and Jinny was still speaking to her. She’d ruined everything by sleeping with him.

  His eyes narrowed with contempt. “Of course you do.”

  “I don’t! Because of Jinny, you and I—”

  “That’s bullshit. Jinny doesn’t give a crap about me. She never did.”

  “She cares that I lied to her about you.”

  He shook his head. “That doesn’t have anything to do with us. It’s just an excuse. What’s really going on is that you have feelings for me and you’re scared.”

  Esther thrust her jaw out. “That’s not it.”

  “Of course it is. You’re fucking terrified of letting yourself care about someone.”

  A memory of the night before forced its way into her consciousness—the way his hand had trembled when he’d touched her face—and she looked away, unable to meet his eye. “You don’t understand.”

  “I think I understand better than you do.”

  She couldn’t keep debating this with him. He was never going to see her side of it or be okay with her decision. Talking it through more wasn’t going to make either of them feel any better.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, feeling miserable. “But if I have to make a choice between you and Jinny, then I pick Jinny. Every time. She’s my best friend.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  Esther’s stomach did another twist, wringing itself out like a wet washcloth. “Do you understand? Please tell me you understand.”

  His gaze locked on the floor, like he couldn’t even look at her. Just like Jinny hadn’t been able to look at her. “I do,” he said. “I get it.”

  “I don’t blame you for hating me.” She already hated herself. He was entitled to get in on the hating train.

  He pressed his lips together and shook his head. “I don’t hate you. That’s the problem.” His voice was so quiet it was almost a whisper. When his eyes found hers, what she saw in them cut her to the bone. “I feel sorry for you.”

  When the door banged shut behind him, Esther let out a choking sob. She hugged her knees to her chest, and the tears she’d been holding back burst through the floodgate.

  See? She knew it would end in disaster.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Esther stared at her computer screen. The 3-D render of the part she was supposed to be designing looked like one of those Escher paintings that seemed to have an extra dimension.

  It wasn’t a complicated part, she was just having trouble concentrating today. Every time she tried, the lines on the screen would drift in and out of focus until it looked like a bunch of gobbledygook instead of a simple wireframe drawing.

  Jinny hadn’t returned any of the approximately eleventy-hundred texts and voicemails Esther had left since yesterday. Esther had considered seeking her out this morning when she got to the office, but decided work wasn’t the best place to hash out their friendship drama. If Jinny didn’t want to talk to her, forcing a confrontation in front of her coworkers wasn’t likely to win Esther any brownie points.

  On top of that, she couldn’t stop thinking about Jonathan. She honestly wasn’t sure which she felt worse about—hurting Jinny or hurting Jonathan.

  So here she sat, feeling helpless and miserable as she tried fruitlessly to concentrate on work. All she had to do was make two small adjustments to the design. It was a simple fix. It should only take ten minutes.

  She’d been staring at it for an hour, and hadn’t gotten anywhere yet.

  Yemi kicked her chair. “What are you doing?”

  Esther didn’t turn around. “Working on my battery charger.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re staring into space and sighing a lot.”

  “Am I?” She hadn’t realized she’d been sighing. “Sorry, I’ll try to sigh more quietly.”

  “Why are you sighing at all?”

  “I didn’t sleep well last night.” Like, pretty much not at all. She’d tossed and turned with anxiety the whole night, and now she was exhausted and she had a dehydration headache from crying yesterday.

  “I thought you were going to send that to me today for stress testing.”

  “I know. I am.” Esther tried to keep the irritation out of her voice and failed. Which only made her feel worse. Yemi didn’t deserve to be snapped at. He was only trying to help.

  She reached for her headphones and put them on. Maybe it would be easier to concentrate on work if she was listening to music. She had a whole playlist of soothing, unobtrusive songs she liked to listen to when she was working and needed to shut out the distractions of the earthly plane.

  Yemi kicked her chair, and she took off her headphones again. “What?” There she went, sounding irritated again. She turned around and forced a smile to make up for it.

  “What time are we going to lunch?”

  Shit. Lunch. Would Jinny be there? Would she be able to talk to her? Or would she skip lunch entirely to avoid confrontation?

  No way to find out but show up and see what happened. “The usual, I guess. Noon.”

  “Okay,” Yemi said. “That gives you two wh
ole hours to finish those changes. Good luck.” From anyone else, she would have assumed it was sarcasm, but Yemi didn’t have a sarcastic bone in his body. If he wished you good luck, he meant it.

  She could use all the good luck she could get at this point. She put her headphones back on and tried to focus.

  Jinny wasn’t in the cafeteria when Esther and Yemi got there a little after noon. There wasn’t any sign of her by the time they’d gone through the line and sat down with their food either.

  “Where’s Jinny?” Yemi asked after five more minutes had passed with no sign of her.

  “Avoiding me.” Esther stabbed half-heartedly at her Chinese chicken salad. She didn’t have any appetite today. Everything tasted like wet paper in her mouth.

  Yemi’s brow furrowed over his glasses. “Why?”

  “She’s mad at me.”

  “What did you do?”

  Of course he’d assume it was all Esther’s fault. Which it was, but that wasn’t the point.

  She scowled. “I don’t want to talk about it. I did something stupid and now she’s not talking to me. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  “You should apologize.” So much for not talking about it.

  “I did.”

  “You should apologize again. You should keep apologizing until she stops being mad.”

  Esther set down her fork and reached for her Mountain Dew. She didn’t usually indulge in this much caffeine, but today she needed it. She twisted the cap off the bottle and swallowed a mouthful, grimacing at the sweetness. “Doesn’t that just make people more mad, if they want you to leave them alone and you don’t?”

  She’d been trying to decide whether to go to knitting that night. She almost never missed knitting; it was one of the highlights of her week. But Jinny might be there, and Esther wasn’t eager to rehash their fight in front of everyone. The others would almost definitely take Jinny’s side. She could already imagine the looks on their faces when they heard what Esther had done. The judgment. She couldn’t face that right now, on top of everything else.

  Yemi tilted his head. “Sometimes. It depends if they really want you to leave them alone or if they’re just saying that because they want you to work to win them back.”

  “How do you know which is which?”

  “I couldn’t tell you that.” He shrugged. “I tend to get it wrong a lot.”

  Esther sighed and picked up her fork again. Yemi probably wasn’t the best person to turn to for advice. But at least he wasn’t judging her. When she looked at him all she saw in his expression was sympathy. It made her feel a little better. Until his thick-framed glasses and his furrowed brow reminded her of Jonathan, and then she felt miserable all over again.

  “You should try anyway,” Yemi said. “It’s better to try and get it wrong than do nothing.”

  “Is it?” Esther wasn’t so sure. Trying and getting it wrong was what had landed her in this situation to begin with. If she’d done nothing and let Jinny manage her own love life, they wouldn’t be in the middle of a fight right now.

  But then she and Jonathan never would have been friends. The thought made her even more depressed.

  Esther skipped knitting on Monday night. She decided what Jinny needed from her right now was space. It wouldn’t do any good to force a confrontation before she was ready to talk—and listen. Jinny didn’t react well to being pushed, which was what had gotten them in this fight in the first place. It wasn’t about the fact that Esther had slept with Jonathan; Jinny was upset that Esther had tricked her into dating him.

  Jinny’s mother was always trying to control her: pressuring her into dressing a certain way, dating a certain kind of man, being a certain kind of person. Buying her clothes she didn’t want, setting her up on dates she hadn’t agreed to. She’d even gone through Jinny’s purse once and thrown away a bunch of expensive lipsticks she’d pronounced “too slutty.” Esther knew exactly how much Jinny resented it—and yet she’d turned around and done the exact same thing to her. No wonder she was mad.

  The rest of the week went by without a word from her. Wherever Jinny was eating lunch every day, it wasn’t the cafeteria. And since they worked in separate parts of the building on totally different projects, the cafeteria was the only place they were likely to run into each other.

  This was exactly what Jinny had done the last time they’d had a fight. Gone silent for a week until she’d cooled off. Then they’d talked and patched things up. That’s what Esther was hoping for. It might take some time, but hopefully it would blow over eventually.

  Meanwhile, Esther’s mother had started calling to beg for more money. She called on Tuesday and again on Thursday. “It’s just impossible to find anything for that price,” she pleaded. “You don’t understand what the rental market up here is like.”

  Esther understood perfectly. She’d spent time on the internet searching for apartments around Seattle. Putting in different search parameters, trying to find something in her mother’s budget that didn’t look like a crack den. There wasn’t much. For once, her mother wasn’t exaggerating.

  “I’m already giving you as much as I can afford,” Esther said, feeling wretched. That wasn’t strictly true, but she’d made a promise to Eric.

  When she got home from work on Friday, Esther’s eyes lingered on Jonathan’s car in the space beside hers. She hadn’t seen him all week. She kept hoping she’d run into him coming or going, but so far she’d been forced to content herself with gazing longingly at his car.

  She’d thought about texting him, but she couldn’t think of anything to say. Not anything that he’d want to hear, anyway. He’d probably reject any overtures of friendship at this point.

  She went to check her mail, and her heart dropped like a stone when she saw the package waiting for her.

  It was the new drip coffeemaker she’d ordered for herself last week. She’d intended to surprise Jonathan by offering him a decent cup of coffee the next time he came over. She wasn’t ready to commit to a Chemex, but she’d decided it was time to move up to a real coffeemaker. She’d been planning to ask him for coffee recommendations.

  But now she couldn’t. She couldn’t ask him for coffee suggestions, and she couldn’t make him a cup of coffee in her new coffeemaker, because he wasn’t going to be coming over anymore.

  She picked up the box and carried it upstairs to her apartment. She didn’t feel like unpacking it, so she left it on the dining table and went to go change into her pajamas.

  Yes, she was putting on pajamas at six o’clock in the evening. Why not? It wasn’t like anyone was coming over. The only two people who ever came to her apartment weren’t speaking to her currently.

  She sank down on the couch and flipped on the television. Sally jumped up beside her and promptly fell asleep. Rough life that cat had, sleeping all day, followed by an intense bout of evening napping. Must be nice.

  As Esther flipped through the channels, looking for something to watch, the coffeemaker glared at her from the dining table. To the extent that an inanimate cardboard box could glare.

  After a few minutes, she pushed herself to her feet, snatched it off the table, and dumped it on the floor in the coat closet where she wouldn’t have to look at it anymore.

  The stupid thing reminded her too much of Jonathan and how much she missed him.

  What had happened to her? How had her feelings for him changed so much in just a few short months? How had she gone so quickly from hating him to liking him? Depending on him, even.

  She missed the way he used to hang around outside, waiting for her to get home from work. She missed telling him about her day and hearing about his. She missed ordering pizza together and arguing about movies. She missed his sense of humor, and how fussy he was about his coffee. She missed the way he ran his hands through his hair when he was nervous, and the smile he only showed his friends. She’d probably never get to see that smile again.

  She’d liked being his friend, dammit. Knowing he was
right next door if she wanted company.

  She wanted company now, and didn’t have anyone to talk to.

  The weekend loomed ahead of her, bleak and barren. No Jinny, no Jonathan. Not even knitting to look forward to on Monday. Just Esther and her cat.

  She’d never felt like her social circle was small before, but tonight it felt microscopic. Nonexistent, even.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  By the time Monday morning came, Esther was actually glad to be back at work, just to have some human contact again.

  She’d spent the whole weekend alone in her apartment, trying to ignore the sounds of Jonathan moving around next door. Trying not to wonder what he was doing, or whether he was thinking about her. What he was thinking about her.

  Instead of wallowing in self-pity, Esther had distracted herself by tackling a long overdue wardrobe purge. By Sunday night, she had a garbage bag full of old clothes earmarked for donation, and her closet looked like it had been set upon by a pack of obsessive-compulsives, right down to the spectrum of color-sorted shirts. It was so beautiful, she actually considered taking a picture and submitting it to Apartment Therapy.

  But then she heard Jonathan’s coffee grinder fire up next door, and spent the rest of the night on the couch eating cheese until she felt sick.

  Now it was Monday and she was back in the land of the living, sitting at her desk in a form-fitting sheath dress and fancy shoes, feeling like an imposter. As a result of her closet purge, and in an effort to break out of her funk, she’d vowed to start dressing up more for work. Dress for the job you want, like the career counselors advised. One area of her life might be a dumpster fire, but she could at least focus on improving another area. Maybe if she made an effort to dress and act more professionally at work, she’d get more respect.

  Only this form-fitting dress she was wearing had fit her form a lot better two years ago when it was new. Not only was it uncomfortably tight across the bust and hips, but it kept trying to ride up dangerously high on her thighs. It was also itchier than she remembered, which was probably why it had been buried in the back of her closet. Instead of feeling like a confident, grown-up career woman, Esther felt like a squirmy kid chafing in her Sunday best. Total professional dressing fail.