Jessica Day was constantly in a bad mood lately.
She had no idea why.
Coffee was never good.
People were the worst.
Waking up was just too hard.
"God, another Nick Miller in the apartment."She said while looking at herself in the mirror of the bathroom. She knew she had no real reason to be this grumpy, and yet there was a voice in the back of her mind telling her that something was not quite right.
After getting ready for work, she got out of the bathroom, hoping that maybe, just maybe, today her coffee would be decent. And then, before she could even get to the living room, she heard the door shut closed.
At first she didn't even pay attention to that, because she'd become accustomed to it, but then...
"Morning, Jess."
She snapped out of her thoughts before she could get the answer to the question she had been asking herself so much lately: "Why am I so miserable?". Schmidt was sitting on a stool at the kitchen island and was greeting her with a mug in one hand and a newspaper in the other, while Winston was too busy trying not to fall asleep on the counter to say something.
"Morning, guys!" She tried to be as cheerful as she could, but that was simply not working. At all.
She went straight to the kitchen, ready for what she knew was going to be a terrible coffee. It was then that she saw a paper on the fridge and read what was written on it:
Nick 1 – Schmidt 0
"How's the bet going?" She asked Schmidt right away, a smile faintly appearing on her face after remembering that stupid bet.
Schmidt was so interested in the subject that he put both the mug and the newspaper down. "The guy's going strong: one entire week without touching chocolate. I gotta be honest, I didn't think he would last that long! But I'm sure he's going to break down very soon, he just hasn't got it in him. He can't stay away from chocolate."
He was totally sure of that: Nick Miller was one true fan of chocolate. He would eat it in the morning, in the afternoon, at night, at any time of the day actually, and he never got tired of it. Yet, he had agreed to bet that he would be able to stay away from it for at least five weeks straight, God knows why.
"Is he already gone?" She ignored the bet stuff and just went straight to what was bothering her the most.
Schmidt looked up at her, slightly disappointed that the talk about the bet had already ended and that he could not go on and on about how much Nick needed to stop eating chocolate and start losing weight.
"Yeah", he answered, "just moments ago, when you were still in the bathroom. He said he had some really important stuff to do, and that later he'd have to work some extra hours, so I guess he won't be around much today either."
Of course, she thought.
Jess didn't say anything, she just nodded, smiled as sweetly as she could and took a sip of her freshly made coffee.
She stared blankly ahead and kept smiling for a few moments, and then kept smiling, and then that smile disappeared. She raised an eyebrow, looked down at her coffee and tried to stay as calm as possible. But, well...
"Damn, this coffee tastes really, really bad. WHO BOUGHT IT?" She looked at her roommates, who'd gotten a little scared, before adding: "JUST DON'T BUY IT ANYMORE, OK? I'M TIRED OF HAVING TO START EVERY DAY WITH SUCH A BAD TASTE IN MY MOUTH!"
She took all the coffee, stared at it for a moment with a despising look mixed with a turtle face and then threw it all away.
Before anyone could speak, she was already storming out of the room. Furious.
Winston was totally freaked out by the way she'd started yelling out of nowhere, and now he'd truly woken up. He looked towards his other roommate, Schmidt, who had instead his eyes wide open, as well as his mouth.
After a moment, a knowing look graced both their faces. They totally knew what the problem was and they knew there was nothing to do about it:
"She must be PMSing."
But Jessica Day was not PMSing.
She knew what was going on.
She knew because every coffee in the city tasted bad and she was pretty sure that could not be possible. So yes, she knew exactly what was going on...
"I have a bad... disease... in my mouth, I guess. I'm pretty sure it can be cured, I don't know yet. I'll just speak to the doctor soon.." were her words to one of her students, Tessa, who actually just wanted to ask some questions about the classifications of conflict in literature. Tessa'd gotten all the answers she wanted, but then the conversation had moved to another subject and she didn't know why.
She just didn't care.
After finishing the office hours, Jessica Day went home, where she found no one waiting for her. That made her sad and mad at the same time, she needed someone to talk to about her imaginary disease and cry a little about it. But no one was there, and even though she knew that Nick Miller wouldn't be happy about it, she decided to take a melon and draw his face on it.
But her day could not get any worse: "Why are there no melons in this house? UGH!"
She was so angered that she decided to take all the oranges she had and draw a million of Nick Miller faces.
She didn't have a million of oranges though, but after drawing on twenty-four of them she felt satisfied, she felt a little less lonely and also a little less angry. Just a little bit.
Besides, she felt like being a little bit more honest, too. Honest with herself, of course, as she finally conceded that she didn't have any disease, at least not in her mouth.
However, she kind of had a disease, one that was making her the grumpiest woman alive, one that had to do with the feeling of missing someone, and that someone was definitely the man whose face now appeared on twenty-four oranges on the table of the living room.
In fact, even though they lived together, lately they had not seen each other a lot. Actually, at all. He was always in his room or leaving before she could even get out of the bathroom in the morning.
All this had been going on for some time now. At first she thought it was only normal, that he had stuff to do, that he had to work, that he had reasons, good ones, not to spend time with her as he used to. But now she couldn't help but feel angry about his behaviour, because she... she needed him.
As a friend, of course.
And now she was boiling with anger again. She got up from the sofa, where she'd been standing for quite a while now, and ran straight to the fridge. There it was, that stupid paper.
"I'm so going to make you lose that bet, Miller!" She shouted as she started taking out all the ingredients she needed for her plan: she was going to bake a chocolate cake for him. A perfect, tasty, chocolatey chocolate cake.
I'm so going to win that bet, he thought.
He was feeling pretty determined, even though it looked like lately chocolate was popping out of everywhere.
He had to win that bet though, not only to prove Schmidt that there was more to him than just a chubby figure, but also to prove himself that he did have a really good will power.
And, actually, he needed that will power for something else in his life, too.
Especially now: it was a Monday and he only had to work until 10.30 P.M. He could go straight home after that and just relax for the rest of the night, maybe watch TV. But would he? He didn't want to go home. He couldn't.
It had been exactly two weeks and three days since he'd decided to do something about the monsters fighting in his stomach every time he saw a certain someone's smile.
Actually, no. Those monsters would fight even when she only walked into the room, or when she just casually brushed her arm against his during a movie night. Hell, he felt like those monsters were going to tear him apart from the inside even when she said something meaningless, mean, or stupid.
"Do you think we're gonna poop weird tonight, after eating all this?" Would be an example.
To be more precise, that was the line that made him realize something had to be done. In fact, if something like this could get his stomach monsters acting up things were already pretty bad.
And those monsters, well, most people would call them butterflies, but that was just too romantic for him and he wasn't in love. No, sir. Nope.
So he had to make all of this stop, before it got worse. That's why he decided to ignore the monsters, ignore the girl, and just wait for all of this stuff to disappear as if it was just some cold he'd caught.
The reasons were pretty simple:
-She probably didn't see him as anything more than a friend;
-He was too afraid to even try;
-If things didn't work between them, the loft dynamic would be ruined;
-Again, he was too afraid to even try.
Needless to say, his plan wasn't working: the monsters would still make him feel sick just at the thought of her. And he thought about her, a lot.
In the end, he felt like he didn't have that great of a will power, so he decided that he would go home and see her, just this one time.
It was 11 P.M. and Jessica Day had fallen asleep on the table with a chocolate cake in front of her.
Only a half, actually: she'd felt the need to use chocolate to make the pain in her chest go away and she'd gone a little overboard.
The loft door opened and Jess almost woke up immediately, as if she'd been waiting for the sound of that door in her sleep. She looked at it and saw Nick Miller's face appear. Finally: it was not an orange, nor a melon.
She tried her best not to show how happy she was to see him and how angry she was at the same time and he pretended he didn't feel like someone had just punched him in the stomach just at the sight of her.
Then he looked at the table and frowned.
"Is that a chocolate cake? Seriously, Jess?"
"Hi, Nick! It's good to see you. And yeah, seriously. Why?" she pretended not to know why he wouldn't appreciate that.
"Why?" He went straight to the fridge and took the paper with his and Schmidt's score. "THAT'S why! I'm trying to stay away from chocolate, you know that! Are you trying to sabotage me?"
"Ohhhh, I see. I'm sorry. Of course I'm not trying to sabotage you!" She faked a smile and did her best to sound genuine, but she was definitely not good at lying.
"I'm really sorry, I didn't even think you were going to see it anyway, I didn't think I was going to see you tonight either, to be honest." She added, her fake smile now gone and replaced by a really sad face.
Nick was taken aback by that comment for a moment, did she miss him? Or was he just imagining it? But then he got distracted: what were those oranges on the table?
"Is th- are those oranges? Are those ME?" he asked horrified, "Jessica, I thought we'd already talked about this! Why would you draw my face on all of those oranges?"
"It's not your face!" She yelled, but then her voice suddenly got calmer, as if she didn't want to show any strong emotion: "I don't care about your face, those are... characters."
"Characters." Nick raised his eyebrows, not believing that at all, "characters of what?"
"They're like... models? And-and I need them tomorrow for a lesson. We're just going to use the oranges as... as dolls, in order to enact scenes from the stories of my students and see how they work with the oranges' acting."
That didn't make any sense.
She knew it.
He knew it.
He loved it.
He loved how she was able to make up a ridiculous story just not to let him know that she actually missed him. Because he knew she did. But that was just how they worked: there were times when they would tell each other the most beautiful words, and times when they would just yell at each other or just pretend they didn't care.
"I hope you know that sounds really stupid." He said quietly while smiling wholeheartedly.
She didn't say anything, she had no idea how to defend herself. She just laughed and looked down, feeling something really weird in her chest that she didn't nor want to understand at that moment.
Seeing her smiling like this made him feel weak in the knees, sweaty in his hands, dizzy in his head.
Will power? Yeah, right.
He looked at the score paper from the fridge, grabbed a pen and added a "1" under his friend's name: Nick had lost this round, because he was definitely going to eat that damn cake, and a lot of it.
That night, Jessica Day and Nick Miller found a way to finally spend some time together and make it look like it wasn't that big of a deal, while it actually was, for both of them.
She told him all she'd wanted to tell him during those two weeks and three days and so did he.
But, most importantly, Nick ate all of the remaining cake.
As he stuffed himself with all that chocolate he'd deprived himself of for a week, he realized that the bet made no sense: he loved chocolate, all of it and in all its forms. He loved hot chocolate, cold chocolate, solid and liquid chocolate. He loved it brown and loved it white. He just loved it and he definitely couldn't stay away from it, so why even try?
Yes, of course it was fattening, but he could live with that, as long as it tasted that good.
However, it was only at the end of their night together, when she fell asleep next to him on the couch, that these thoughts began to get confused and messy and, just before falling asleep, he realized it: she was just like chocolate.
And he loved her in every single way.
He loved angry Jess, sweet Jess, awake and sleeping Jess. He loved her smiling and loved her whining and he didn't want to stay away from her. So he was not going to try anymore.
Yes, of course it hurt, but he could live with that, as long as she made him feel that good, too.
Jessica Day was in a great mood the days following that Monday.
She perfectly knew why.
Waking up was just a joy.
People were simply amazing.
And coffee was always perfect.