Jess barely sleeps that night. She spends it tossing and turning in her bed as she fruitlessly tries to control her spiraling thoughts. This isn't how today was supposed to go. She had tried to be easygoing and adjust to the sudden curveball of her dad's arrival, but all day she'd counted down the hours until she and Nick could be alone again. She'd been distracted from her grading by daydreaming of him sneaking into her room tonight. He'd slip underneath her blankets, his body warm as he curled up beside her and his open mouth soft and pliant as he kissed her, the faint taste of his toothpaste lingering on his breath.
Instead, she spent the night alone in her suddenly too-big bed. There was some part of her that hoped Nick would throw caution to the wind and join her anyway. Maybe then she would've finally been able to get some sleep. But instead she wakes up alone, her head aching, eyes gritty from crying and neither rested nor satisfied in the way she knew she would have been if Nick had been there next to her.
Her dad is unreasonably chipper for the early hour, especially considering everything he said last night. She thinks this is his way of making her feel better, by being extra nice and acting like the whole thing never even happened. He compliments her dress and helps load up his suitcase into the back of her car. He pointedly doesn't comment on the flames painted on the sides, a byproduct of buying it from a sketchy but cheap used car lot.
The ride to the airport is oddly quiet, but Jess doesn't really know what her dad expects her to say to him. She keeps waiting for him to apologize or take back his words from last night, giving Nick his retroactive approval. But it doesn't look like he'll be doing that any time soon. Jess inherited all her stubbornness directly from him.
She can feel that familiar stubbornness dig its heels in even now, overriding her sadness at her father's disapproval. She's a grown woman. She doesn't need to earn her father's permission to date someone. It just rubs her the wrong way to know that someone doesn't like her or the choices she's making, and it's always worse when that person is someone whose opinion she really values, like her dad. She'd hoped that he and Nick would get along since they have such similar personalities, but apparently not.
"Did you want me to put on some music?" Jess asks after fifteen minutes of dead silence.
Her dad seems to take this as permission to change the topic entirely. "You know, honey, I've been thinking about Nick-"
"Dad," she cuts him off quickly, not even bothering to hide the bitter edge to her tone. "I really don't want to talk about this with you."
"I know you're upset with me," he says tentatively. "But I just want what's best for you."
"How do you know what's best for me?" Jess counters. She sees him in person maybe three times a year. They'd been drifting apart since he moved out after the divorce, and they haven't been close after she left for college. "That's just your opinion."
"Alright, alright, I'll leave it alone."
A few more moments of silence pass. Jess clenches her jaw as she stares out the front windshield, fighting the urge to let him know exactly what she thinks of his opinions.
"Do you remember that girl I dated right after your mother and I separated?"
"Dad..."
"I'm just asking if you remember!"
Jess sighs. "Which one?"
"Exactly my point," her dad says, and Jess rolls her eyes. "Those girls, they didn't last. Things seemed great, but then two weeks later the chemistry disappeared, and after I cancelled my credit cards I never heard from them again."
"No offense, Dad, but I'm not like your post-divorce girlfriends." Jess switches on her turn signal with a little unnecessary force. "I never pretended to be paraplegic."
"I didn't say that! But you know how I wasn't in the place to hold down a serious relationship right after I moved out." He pauses for a moment to let his words sink in. "And I don't think Nick is either."
"It's been months since he and Caroline separated. Things are different," Jess says defensively as she grips the steering wheel. This is ridiculous. She shouldn't have to explain her relationship to her dad. "Besides, Nick's moved on. All that stuff in his past doesn't matter."
Her dad hums, seemingly unimpressed. "So his ex-wife is totally okay with you two being together?"
"Well..." Jess frowns as the car rolls up to a red light. "I mean things with Caroline have always been complicated."
"So she isn't okay with it?" her dad says, an unnecessary smugness to his tone.
"I don't know how she actually feels about it," Jess counters. "We haven't told her."
"You're keeping it secret from her?" Her dad shakes his head. "That's not a good sign."
"It's not like that-" she cuts off with a groan. The light changes, and she channels her frustration into accelerating the car up to the speed limit. "We haven't told anyone. It's not like we're afraid of what she thinks."
Her dad lifts a skeptical eyebrow. "You're not?"
"No," Jess insists.
There's another long pause. Jess stews in her thoughts while her Dad stares out at the scenery through the window. She can't believe this. The last thing she needs is her dad attempting to meddle with her love life.
What does he know, anyway? It's not like his track record is scratch-free. Jess thinks through his long series of odd flings and failed girlfriends, and there wasn't a single one that managed to impress her. She's not like those women. They were crazy and only wanted to take advantage of her dad's vulnerability. Jess likes Nick for who he is. So what if he's got a little extra baggage? It's nothing that they can't handle together.
"And he's got a kid, too," her dad interjects.
Jess has to resist the urge to scream. "Dad."
"She's in your class, right? That must be tough," he continues, completely ignoring the glare she gives him. "I can't imagine what the other parents will think of that. I don't think they'll be too happy about some other kid getting preferential treatment because the dad is shacking up with teacher."
"That's not-"
Her dad pretends not to hear her and keeps going, "I mean, it'd be tough for me to try and keep the two separate-"
"It isn't-"
"And you have to think about how his daughter feels about the whole thing. First her parents won't stop fighting, then they get a divorce, and now her teacher is dating her dad. That can't be easy for a middle schooler-"
"Dad." Jess cuts him off harshly in her no-nonsense teacher voice. "That's enough."
"Alright, alright!" her dad raises his hands in mock-innocence. "I didn't know it was bothering you. I'll stop."
Jess gives him one final glare before letting it go. Things are uncomfortably quiet for a few more minutes before her dad starts talking about the weather, and Jess lets out a big sigh of relief and goes along with it. They manage to gloss over the whole argument in the last few minutes of the drive, and things between them are tentatively amicable when she finally pulls into the airport drop-off lane.
Her dad hugs her before he leaves. "I just want what's best for you," he says.
"I know, Dad." Jess sighs and lets him go. "Have a good flight."
"Bye, sweetheart." He gives her one last wave before disappearing into the building.
Jess' thoughts are a mess the whole ride to school. She hates to admit it, but her dad might have gotten into her head a little bit. He's got her thoughts all twisted around, and she can't make sense of things. But she doesn't have time to deal with this now. She has to focus on her students. That'll help her clear her head. Then later tonight, she can talk to Nick about all this. He always helps her make sense of things.
Unfortunately, her students don't seem to get the memo that she's having a really shitty couple of days because they're absolute monsters. She hasn't seen them act this poorly in her entire time teaching here. Maybe it was having yesterday off without homework, or recess getting rained out, or the baking soda volcanos they did in science class, or likely some unholy combination of the three. She feels more like a babysitter than a teacher today, yelling at kids to behave and threatening to revoke international penpal privileges.
Not even having Abbi in third block helps. Seeing her makes Jess think of Nick, which is nice, but then that train of thought leads back to her dad and his disapproval, which kicks up this gross, guilty feeling in the pit of her stomach. She knows that he's wrong about their relationship, but that doesn't do anything about how she feels about the whole mess.
Abbi asks her if anything's wrong, and Jess has to lie and tell her that everything is fine. It only makes the feeling worse.
Eventually she makes it through the day, and she's counting down the minutes until her office hours end, so she can finally leave and enjoy her weekend with Nick. She's on her fourth attempted read-through of her rubric for the midterm writing project when someone knocks on the door to her classroom. Jess looks up, and her heart leaps when she recognizes Nick. She lets out a long exhale, and all the tension of the day relaxes from her tight shoulders.
"Can I come in, Miss Day?" he asks with a teasing smirk.
Jess laughs and waves for him to come in. "What are you doing here?" she asks as she stands up from her desk.
"I've got Abbi for the weekend, so I'm here to pick her up from her violin lesson," Nick explains. He steps up to Jess and casually rests his hands on her hips. "And I wanted to surprise you."
She smiles, and Nick pulls her in for a kiss. It feels like a drink of water on a hot afternoon. His hands hold her steady as his mouth glides over hers, and it's exactly what she needed after this absolute disaster of a day. Jess sighs into the kiss before reluctantly pulling away to lean against the edge of her desk.
Nick grins and gives her another quick kiss before stepping away to sit on top of one of the desks in the front row. "How was your day?"
"Awful," Jess groans. "My students were crazy and wouldn't listen to a word I said."
"Kids are the worst," he says with a laugh. Jess rolls her eyes and gives him a light smack on the arm. "Well at least you've got two whole days to recover."
"Thank God. I wanna sleep for, like, twenty-four straight hours."
"Yeah, I think you earned it." Nick chuckles at her joke as he stands back up from the desk, slowly drifting back towards her.
His gaze drops down to her lips, and Jess giggles a little, just because being with him seems to make everything a little less serious. Nick reaches out for her again, his arm wraps around her waist to pull her tight against his chest while his hand spans across her back. Jess smiles before kissing him, her arms wrap around his neck as she lifts up on her tiptoes to reach him. It's weird, but she always seems to forget how tall Nick is. She likes it. He has broad shoulders and big hands, and she just wants to curl up against him and forget all the complications that her dad keeps trying to remind her of.
"Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt but— Nick?!"
Jess quickly breaks off the kiss, her head whipping over towards the hallway to see Caroline peering into the doorway with a purple duffle bag on her arm. Nick quickly lets go of Jess, clearing his throat as he puts a good bit of distance between them. "Hi, Caroline."
"Were you here for office hours?" Jess asks politely, trying her best to recover from being caught mid-kiss.
"Yeah, I just need to drop off a few of Abbi's things and—" she sets the bag down on the ground and then hesitates, looking between Nick and Jess with a guarded expression. "I'm sorry, but I just really can't get past..." she gestures vaguely. "This."
Jess laughs nervously. She thinks that was a joke, but Caroline's always been nearly impossible to read, even worse than Nick. He glances over at her with a slightly panicked expression.
"So you two are dating?" Caroline asks, a forced pleasantness to her tone.
"Well..." Jess falters. They haven't talked about this at all. What if they're not on the same page? What if Nick just wanted a hookup? She thinks this is more than that, but they haven't clarified anything, and she's terrified to mess this all up. "I don't know if I'd really call it that."
Caroline blinks, confused. "You two were just kissing. Or is this like at the restaurant? The not-date?"
"No, um..." Nick clears his throat again. "We're together. It's just... new." He looks over at Jess with a sheepish grin. She smiles back and reaches out to grab his hand reassuringly.
"That's nice." Caroline looks between the two of them, clearly uncomfortable but still trying to force her way through the discomfort in the name of social convention. "So when did you two..."
"Just a few days ago," Jess answers with a polite smile.
Nick turns to look at her, his eyes warm with affection, and she gives his hand another squeeze. "But you know, it had been building for a long time."
"A long time?" Caroline repeats. She has an iron-tight grip on the strap of her handbag. "When exactly did this start?"
"Um..." Jess looks over to Nick. They should lie, right? But they didn't do anything wrong.
"Well," Nick starts hesitantly. "We really only got together a few days ago, but we'd kissed a couple of times before that, sort of an off-and-on, will-they won't-they kind of thing."
"I wasn't trying to steal him from you or anything." Jess laughs nervously, hoping it'll break the sudden tension in the room, but her attempt at a joke falls painfully flat.
"I want a timeline." Caroline's voice is deadly serious. "Now."
Jess clears her throat nervously, trying to remember. "Well, there was us getting together this week. And then the kiss in September after you broke up with Julia."
"Who I didn't start seeing until after I got the final divorce paperwork," Nick adds in quickly.
"But the first kiss was... June?" Jess says hesitantly. "But I turned you down."
Nick frowns in consideration. "Well, the first first kiss was after the wedding-"
"The wedding?" Caroline repeats, not even trying to hide that she's upset.
Shit. Shit shit shit.
"No! It wasn't- Nick was drunk," Jess tries to explain, but Caroline just glares at her.
Caroline looks pissed. "So you took advantage of him?"
"No!"
"It wasn't Jess," Nick chimes in. "It was me. I was plastered and miserable. You'd given me your ring, and I thought things between us were over."
"So you just abandoned me the first chance you got?" Caroline bites back, and even through the anger Jess can hear the hurt in her words. "I asked if you two were... and you told me there was nothing. That you were just friends."
"And we were," Jess says quickly. "That was just a drunken mistake, and Nick didn't mean anything by it. He didn't even remember the kiss the next day." Caroline still doesn't look convinced. "I swear. It was like nothing even happened."
"But it did." Her voice is cold and accusatory.
"Look, Caroline," Nick says softly. He glances at Jess out of the corner of his eye before turning back to face Caroline, his face serious. "I never cheated on you. But I might as well have because I fell in love with Jess the moment I met her."
There's a loaded pause as he briefly looks over to Jess before smiling apologetically at his ex-wife.
Caroline slaps him.
Hard.
The sound echoes in the empty classroom. Nick's hand comes up to rest on his reddening cheek, his face a complicated storm of shock and hurt and anger. Caroline almost looks equally surprised, like she hadn't planned to actually hit him, and the action caught her off-guard. Jess just stands frozen in place, her head reeling with the severity of what had just happened.
A deafening silence settles in the air, and the tension between the three of them is thick enough to slice. Jess has been in her fair share of uncomfortable and awkward situations, but this is on a whole new level. Usually her mishaps are just simple misunderstandings or her overthinking things, like the time she went to a wedding and accidentally stepped into the spotlight that was meant for the introduction of the newly-married couple and then ended up announcing their way to the dance floor. That was painfully weird and uncomfortable, but she managed to stumble her way through it.
This couldn't be any more different. This is serious and not the least bit funny. Jess knows what it's like to be cheated on. It's horrible and heartbreaking, and she wouldn't wish it on anyone. But what happened with her and Nick, that's different. Caroline had made it clear that she and Nick were over, and if she felt otherwise then she should've told him so. It's not fair for her to expect Nick to read her mind when she doesn't give him the slightest idea of what she's feeling.
"I'm taking Abbi home," Caroline finally says. Her jaw is tense as she scoops up Abbi's things before storming out of the classroom.
Nick's eyes widen, and he immediately chases Caroline out the door. He doesn't even give Jess a spare glance on his way out.
Jess is still stuck where she is. Her feet suddenly feel like they're weighted to the ground, and she's not sure if she has the energy to move. What feels like an eternity passes, her head empty except for the pounding of her heart, and Caroline's final words echoing in her ears. She glances out the window of her classroom, and she can see Nick and Caroline animatedly having a conversation on the sidewalk in front of her minivan.
She gathers her things up in a trance, hoping that she has everything that she needs. She doesn't have the capacity to focus on anything right now except for the panic rising in her chest. Every few seconds she'll glance out the window, but she's not really sure what she's expecting. Best case scenario is Nick and Caroline hugging, finally coming to terms with where they are. More realistically, it's Nick sitting abandoned on the sidewalk.
As she walks out the front doors of the school, she quickly spots the two, still right in the middle of their screaming match. Jess hates it when people are mad at her, and her every instinct is telling her to go and apologize to Caroline, to try and reason with her and make her understand that what happened was a mistake and that Nick would never, ever cheat on anyone. But she knows that getting involved is only going to make things worse, and she can't do that to Nick. Not when she's already done so much to ruin things already. So she lingers a few feet away, just in case things settle down and she can step in.
"You can't do this to me!" Nick yells. "Not again. You can't keep Abbi from me because you're upset. That's not fair."
"It's not fair?!" Caroline shrieks. "You lied to me for months. I'm sorry; I can't trust you anymore."
Nick scoffs. "Oh that's bullshit."
"Is it?!" Caroline counters. "What else have you been keeping from me? How do I know that you and Jess haven't been sleeping together this whole time? How am I supposed to believe anything you tell me?"
"You can't use my daughter as a fucking bargaining chip."
"She's my daughter, too, you asshole." Caroline fumes. "And I'm the one who's been with her this whole time while you were off falling in love with your doe-eyed roommate."
"Don't bring Jess into this," Nick seethes. "It's not about her. It's about me having rights to my own daughter."
"They're not rights; they're privileges." Caroline crosses her arms over her chest. "And I don't know what the court would give to a fucking cheater."
Jess cringes. That's a low blow, and Caroline likely knows it.
"You wouldn't dare."
"You wouldn't dare cheat on me," Caroline bites back. "That's what you told me. All the while you were jumping at your first chance to get your dick wet."
"Don't talk about Jess like that." Nick's tone is restrained, but this is the most furious that Jess has ever seen him.
Caroline backs down as she realizes she's crossed a line. Nick also relaxes slightly as the fight comes to an impasse. Jess wonders if this is her chance to step in, but they're arguing about her. It's like when she was eavesdropping at the wedding, only a thousand times worse. Nick had been telling the truth then; there hadn't been anything going on between the two of them then. But now it's different and messy, and Jess doesn't know what to do.
A long pause passes, and Jess wonders if this is the end of the fight, now that they've both blown off their steam. Maybe that's all they needed, to air out the initial hurt and anger, so they could move on to forgiveness and understanding. Or maybe she's just being naive.
There are tears running down Caroline's face. "It could've been anyone. Anyone. Some woman from work or a faceless stranger that you met online or at a bar. But instead, it's her."
"Caroline..." Nick says tentatively, reaching out for her arm.
She yanks her shoulder away from him. "Don't. Don't think you can make this better. I trusted you."
"I didn't mean to hurt you. I swear. I wasn't thinking."
Caroline wipes at her face with the back of her hand. "I know you weren't."
This is too much. Jess shouldn't be listening to this. She can see Abbi in the backseat of the van, her nose buried in the chapter book Jess recommended to her just last week. She wonders if she can hear her parents from inside the car, if she's just pretending that everything's fine and trying not to think too much about how she was supposed to spend the weekend with her dad.
Jess can vividly remember being in her shoes when her parents were in the process of splitting up, when she did her best to act like it would all blow over, and they would be a happy family again. It wasn't even until two years ago that she finally gave up on trying to pull a 'Parent Trap' to get them back together.
It makes her heart ache, but she shifts her grip on the stack of papers in her arms and walks towards her car, leaving Nick and his family behind. Jess slides into the front seat and drops her forehead onto the steering wheel, blinking back the tears. She's a homewrecker. She wrecked someone's home. Some part of her knows that's not true, that Nick and Caroline's relationship had been on shaky ground from the start. Nick was a workaholic who lost sight of his priorities before he met her. He wasn't in love with her when Caroline kicked him out.
But then again, he said that he fell in love with her the first time they met. The thought of it makes her stomach twist up in knots, a combination of guilt and anxiety and worry. Is that how he really feels about her? Does he really love her? Is Nick in love with her?
It's too much. All of it. Nick's confession, him fighting with Caroline, seeing Abbi in the car, knowing that her dad might be right about this, all of it. Her head is a jumbled mess, and she doesn't know what to do, so she starts her car and starts driving. She gets to the stop sign at the end of the school parking lot, and she knows that she needs to turn left. But then she spots the tiny shapes of Nick and Caroline in her rearview mirror, still standing out in front of the school.
She switches on her blinker and turns right.
Jess drives and drives. The sun goes down, and she keeps driving, scanning through the radio at random and trying to think of anything but Nick and Caroline screaming at each other. She drives until she just can't sit in the same position for a moment longer, and then pulls into the first fast food place she sees, a rundown Del Taco that's somehow still open. Her phone buzzes over and over with a flood of notifications, likely her friends trying to figure out where she's disappeared to, and she knows she should probably answer at least one of them, just to let them know she's still alive. But she ignores all of it, flips her phone upside down on the slightly sticky table so she' not tempted to read through the alerts on her phone as she finishes her tacos and fries.
She gets back in the car and keeps driving. She eventually realizes that it's getting really late, and she really does have to go home. Her thoughts are somewhat clearer, her head is aching, and her eyes are itchy from crying at every sad song that came on the radio. The street is quiet when she pulls up to the loft, and even Outside Dave has mysteriously vanished. Jess lingers in the lobby, reads over all the flyers tacked up on the bulletin board two times through before she finally gives in to the inevitability of responsibility and takes the elevator up to the loft.
Nick is sitting at the kitchen island with a beer. There are three other empty bottles in front of him, and he looks awful. A dark storm cloud of misery has reappeared over his head, and it's almost exactly like stepping back in time to when he first came to the loft. He's away from his daughter, he's in the middle of a huge, messy fight with Caroline, and he's stuck in the loft, drinking to forget.
There's a sick feeling in Jess' stomach at the sight. She did this. It's entirely her fault.
"Abbi's staying with Caroline this weekend," Nick explains before taking a long draw of his beer, emptying nearly half the bottle. "I called her at bedtime like I always do. But she told me she didn't want to talk to me because I 'made Mom upset.'" He sighs and rubs his free hand over his bloodshot eyes. "I wanna say that Caroline told her to say that, but I don't think she'd stoop that low."
"I'm sorry," Jess whispers.
Nick lets out a long exhale. "It's not your fault. I should've handled this better."
Jess frowns. "We both should have."
"I just—" He takes another long drink. "That was obviously the wrong way to do it. But I've been sitting here and thinking and thinking, and I can't think of the right way."
"I'm sorry," she whispers again, and Nick doesn't say anything.
They're silent for a while. Jess picks at the label of one of Nick's empty bottles to give her restless hands something to do. Nick finishes his beer, and then starts another but drinks it slower than the last one.
"Are you really in love with me?" Jess blurts out after a few minutes. She's been mulling over it all night, and the fact that it might be true still terrifies her.
Nick looks at her, his eyes serious as he considers the question. "Yeah. I love you, Jess."
She doesn't say it back. Some part of her has the impulse to thank him or do finger guns or make a lasso or something, anything, to break the tense silence that follows his confession.
"Jess," Nick sighs again, rolling his beer bottle between his palms. "I know we've only just gotten together, and that this is probably moving way too fast, but I'm all in. I love you."
"Oh," Jess breathes. "Nick..."
That suffocating feeling from yesterday starts to set in again. She's not ready for this. She's not the kind of girl who can handle a long-term relationship. All her past boyfriends have eventually crashed and burned. Spencer was the only guy she managed to hold on to for more than a year, and she really thought that he was going to be The One. She put up with six years of dealing with every curveball he threw at her: the failed home brewery, the cross-state bike trip, the long-term stretches of unemployment. But he still cheated on her. And yeah, she found the loft with Schmidt and Winston and Nick, but maybe her next failure and Craigslist gamble won't be so lucky.
"Look, I know it's crazy." Nick reaches out and takes her hand in his. "But I want this with you. I want a future together. There's a lot of things that I don't know, but the one thing I'm sure of is that I love you, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you."
She likes Nick. She really, really likes him. And that could be love one day. It's already pretty damn close. But she doesn't want to be Nick's next Caroline. She doesn't want to rush into a marriage that they'll eventually grow out of. She doesn't want to fight all the time and stubbornly ignore the fact that things fundamentally don't work between them. She doesn't want the heartbreak of realizing that they're not meant to be together.
"Nick," she says softly. "I'm not... I'm not ready to be someone's wife."
His smile falters. "I never said that, Jess."
"But you did," she insists. "What you're describing, that's married life. I mean, we already live together. That's the next logical step."
"Well, what do you want?" he asks.
"I don't know," Jess admits. "Maybe I'll be a principal, or I'll open up my own school, or maybe I'll just give up on everything and go to New Orleans and write a detective novel. But that's still ages away."
Nick's brow furrows in confusion. "You'll move across the country to write some far-fetched detective novel, but you can't imagine us together five years from now?"
"It's not like that."
"Then what?"
Jess lets out an exhausted sigh. "I just don't think you can create a plan for your life because crazy things get thrown at you. Like your boyfriend cheats on you, or your marriage falls apart, or you fall in love with your roommate. So maybe it's crazy to talk about giving up on a steady job and travel thousands of miles away to write a young adult novel, but that's the closest thing that I have to a plan. And I think it's even crazier to try and plan every single detail of our future together."
"I think it's crazy not to," Nick counters. "I just can't live that way. I have a kid, and she can't just go with the flow. She needs structure. Routine. Predictability. I have to pay for her college fund and pay the bills and run my law firm. I can't just abandon my life to write the next great American novel."
Jess tentatively pulls her hand away from his, and Nick reluctantly lets her go. They sit in silence for a moment, the weight of their conversation fully sinking in.
"Nick, why is this so hard?" she says. "I mean, we've been together for two days and look at the mess we're in. I don't want it to be like this all the time."
"I don't know," he admits, frowning down at the table, "and it's awful."
They're both quiet. Jess has this horrible feeling in her chest because she knows what's coming next, and she knows it's going to hurt.
"Do you ever miss when we were just friends?" Nick asks quietly. "Back before all of this, when there wasn't all this pressure about having a future together, or trying to figure out what this relationship is, or the kisses we did or didn't remember, or having feelings for each other but not knowing what that really meant?"
Jess can already feel the tears building up in her eyes as she looks at him. "I miss having my friend," she confesses, her voice barely above a whisper.
"Yeah," Nick agrees. His jaw is clenched tight, and she can tell he's fighting back tears. "Look, Jess, it's not that big of a deal. We tried. It's just... you know..."
"Just say it," she whispers, her lip wobbling.
"I think we should call it, you know?" He shrugs, a half-hearted smile on his face. "We had one night. That's all."
"Okay, let's call it. I think that feels good to me," she lies. "Does that feel good to you?"
Nick nods, his eyes pointedly trained down on the countertop.
Jess waits for a moment. She's not sure why, if she's hoping that he'll suddenly change his mind, or if Caroline will suddenly call and apologize, or that she'll suddenly get a wave of courage and tell him that it doesn't matter that she's terrified of the future he's planned out for them, but that she wants to try it anyway because she cares about him. Or maybe she's waiting for herself to stop being so afraid of heartbreak and say that she loves him back.
But none of that happens.
She leaves in a daze, and her door shuts behind her with a resounding thud. Nick returns to his room a moment later, and she can feel her heart break with the sound of his door closing behind him.