Heather had fallen asleep in just her underwear and awoke to the smell of eggs wafting from the kitchen. She bolted up and bounded in and saw me cooking bacon, eggs and toast. “Jefferson?” she gasped.
I looked at her half-asleep eyes, down to her naked chest, a little lower and then back up to her face. “You shouldn’t come barging in here like that because you never know who it could be.”
“Where the hell have you been? You had me and Melissa worried sick!”
“Okay, mom, I’m a grown boy and don’t need to check in every couple of hours. Besides, I am not worth any amount of caring you may have for me.”
“What are you talking about? We are your friends,” Heather said.
“Yep,” I said scraping the eggs off the pan. “Always the friend, never the boyfriend…” I plopped the eggs onto a plate along with some bacon and a piece of toast.
“Is this what this is about? The fact you don’t have a girlfriend?” Heather asked.
I sat down at the dinner table and began eating. “It’s not really that but it’s kind of associated with that,” I said, chewing some eggs. “You can have some bacon if you want, I doubt I’ll eat all of it but you have to put a shirt on first.”
“Where have you been for the last 36 hours?” Heather asked, walking into her room and grabbing a shirt.
“What does it matter? I’m home now so everyone can quit worrying, not like you should’ve been anyway,” I said, biting a piece of bacon.
“I know you caught Melissa and Mike together but…”
“Mike. So that’s his name,” I said. “I figured it was Bob. He seemed like a Bob to me. ‘Hello, Bob! How you doing, Bob? How’s the sex with my ex-fiancĂ© Bob?’” I finished my breakfast and took the plate to the sink and washed the egg goop off. “Well, I’m off to work.”
“No one is going anywhere until we work through this,” Heather grabbed my arm and turned me around. “Something is obviously wrong and as your friend, I want to help.”
I looked down at Heather and smiled. I ran my hand through my hair and then held the back of her head. “You’re cute,” I said, then bent down, kissed the end of her nose and headed out of the apartment.
“Now, before we get to work, I want to explain what happened over the past 48 hours or so,” I began, making eye contact with all the employees present: Aaron, Melissa, Wendy, Wanda, Nathan, Alyson, Jason, Heather, Kepler, and Katie. “Of course, I’m doing this under protest at the urging of Heather so; it all began when I went to Melissa’s apartment to ask her out.”
“Great, now I’m going to look like the bad guy,” Melissa said.
“Not necessarily. Hear me out. When Melissa answered her door, I noticed—learned, really—that her boyfriend was over. Boy was my face red!” I laughed.
“Does this story have a point, Bosco?” asked Kepler.
I looked arrogantly at Kepler and then back at the group. “After leaving Melissa’s with my heart, again, in shards, I went for a drive and somehow, after driving around this county for hours upon hours, I still ended up at a place where everything still made sense.”
“Cemetery,” Melissa whispered at Heather.
“I sat there, it seemed like forever and I had an epiphany.”
“Can you do that without a girl in the room?” asked Katie, jokingly.
“Ha, ha. Anyway, I have decided to swear off any and all girls,” I revealed.
The group looked at each other until Nathan spoke, “Well, it’s not like you’re exactly beating them off with a stick,” he chuckled.
“So what does this mean, Jefferson?” asked Heather.
“No women plus no sex equals no problems. None. Zippo. I’m done.”
“Until…?” Alyson initiated.
“Oh, for the love of… Until there’s the possibility of true love, okay? I haven’t hammered out the details and you all should be supporting me instead of causing me flack!” I said.
“Sorry, Jefferson, we’re going to be supportive of your…decision and will respect it,” Heather said.
“All right, now let’s get to work. We have unappreciative college students to feed,” I said.
Next:
Part five begins. Chrissy is seeing a new guy, Melissa learns a secret about Mike and Jeff has a shot with Alyson which quickly comes to an end.