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Which must have shown on his face because Mel squeezed his hand. “It’ll be okay.”
He shook his head, staring out at the ice, feeling like an even bigger idiot than he’d first thought. “Nah, Mel,” he muttered. “I fucked it. Well and truly fucked it.”
“Jer.”
He looked back at her.
“You said she’s smart.”
He nodded. “She is.”
A pat to his hand before she broke off a piece of her pretzel and offered it to him.
A piece he would have refused before.
A piece he understood now was a peace offering.
He took it.
Mel smiled.
“She’s smart. So,showher you can learn, that you can see and understand her perspective, that you’re not always a giant pushy pain in the ass, but agoodguy.” She glanced at the ice. “Show her that you can change, and she’ll see it.”
He inhaled, took a bite of that pretzel.
And smiled for the first time in a week.
Fourteen
Teresa
“Booyah, mofos!” she declared the following evening, tossing down her last card. “UNO champion once again.”
Cora groaned, tossingherfinal card onto the discard. “So freaking close.”
“You’ll never beat me, muahaha.” She pressed her fingers together in a rolling pattern, a la the stereotypical evil genius ready to monologue.
“We will if we ban you from future Game Nights,” Heidi, Cora’s friend, grumbled, but she shot Teresa a smile that told her she was teasing.
Which Teresa ran with. “Thatisone way to win.”
“Outside the box thinking is our specialty,” Stef, another friend of Cora’s, chimed in.
“Damn right it is,” Kate, the final member of the trifecta of Cora’s friends, said on a smile. “Because clearly UNO isn’t.”
That had them all laughing as Teresa shuffled the cards and dealt the next hand. This time T wasn’t the winner, but as always, it was a hard-fought battle until the end.
“All right,” Steph said as she dropped her hand onto the table. “I’m UNO-ed out. Can we continue on with the bad reality TV and junk food portion of our night?”
There was a round of agreements, including from Teresa herself.
She’d survived her mother on Wednesday, her brothers yesterday, and though she was normally a social person, the game night scheduled for that evening hadn’t been something she wanted to attend.
She’d actually considered blowing it off, staying home, and consuming her body weight in junk food, but then she’d decided that feeling mostly came from wanting to avoid Jeremy.
And she wasn’t going to let the weirdness between them stop her from enjoying herself, from enjoying her friends.
She needn’t have worried.
