Lahat ng Kabanata ng My Bestfriend’s Brother Is My Tutor: Kabanata 71 - Kabanata 80

STACY The music was already pulsing when Lisa and I arrived at one of Bridget’s acclaimed parties, the beat vibrating through the floor and into my chest. The house was packed, with people spilling out into the front yard, laughing and shouting, red Solo cups in hand. I glanced at Lisa, who was grinning ear to ear, clearly excited to dive into the chaos. Her eyes were also darting a lot and I knew she was looking for Bridget. I wasn’t in the mood to give her the talk so I said nothing. “Come on, Stace,” she said, nudging me with her elbow. “Let’s grab a drink.” I smiled, trying to match her energy, because that’s what tonight was about. All the times I have tried to use a party to distract myself from Jerome, or literally any other guy, it always ended up in a disaster. Today wasn’t going to be that, though. Lisa and I were going to have a good time because there was no one on my mind. No Jerome, no Max, nothing. It had been two weeks since I ended things and I’m quite

JEROME The next morning, I woke up feeling sore. The sunlight filtering through the blinds woke me up before my alarm did. I squinted against the brightness, my head still heavy with sleep. For a moment, I stayed there, disoriented, trying to gather my train of thoughts about the day before, the day ahead and the present time. That’s when I felt the warmth beside me. Nattie’s arm was draped across my chest, her steady breathing confirming she was still asleep. That’s when the memories from last night came flooding back in a very heavy push. I turned my head to look at her and I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. A little bit of everything —guilt, regret, and confusion. We’d had sex. It hadn’t been planned; it hadn’t even been thought through. One minute, we were hanging out at my place, just talking like we always did, and the next, things escalated faster than I could’ve anticipated. And now, here we were—tangled up in sheets, the evidence of our night together undeniable. But I

JEROME As the lights came up and the applause for the play died down, everything I had been feeling through out the length of the show returned a thousand times more. The tension, the discomfort, the need to break something, maybe even my head. They all knotted in my chest. Stacy had given up her chair for Nattie, I noticed that. She didn’t want to be close to me, that was all my mind told me at the moment. Nattie was still pressed up against me, her fingers trailing along my arm, her hand slipping into mine as if to mark her territory. I tried not to pull away, tried to keep everything looking normal, but the truth was, I felt suffocated. Every touch, every glance she threw my way, felt calculated—deliberate. And with Stacy just a few seats away, it felt like the walls were closing in on me. I knew Nattie too much to not know that she was doing this all on purpose. “Let’s go congratulate them,” Lisa said, standing up and glancing between Nattie and me with a raised eyebr

JEROME Attending church was not my thing to do, I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I had been to a church. For no reason, exactly, I just got busier with a lot of other things and it had never felt like a necessity to me, so today, when I woke up with an impulse to go, it confused me a lot. The feeling was something I couldn’t quite explain to myself. I just knew that I had to go, no matter what, and that Sunday morning, I found myself walking into a church downtown. It was the kind of church with stained-glass windows and an old wooden sign out front. Not once last night did I make a plan to be here but as I approached the building, I aimed to understand why I was doing this. Elena and Marilyn, emptiness, sadness. I was going to church because I felt like a waste. As a teenager, when Marilyn and I were together, I had heard her and her mom on different occasions talk about their faith and their love for God. They religiously attended sermons, even going every

JEROME I showed up to class earlier than usual that day, hoping to settle into a groove before the students started pouring in. My mind wasn’t exactly where it needed to be though I couldn’t place exactly where it was. This morning, I had randomly gotten a notification from Nattie and my eyes oddly moved to the date. Today was the thirteenth day of October, the day we got into the accident, the day Marilyn died. Then there was Elena with her surgery slated to happen tomorrow. And there were Nattie’s words to me about what I wanted. I had been revising that question, spending time understanding myself. All of these issues were static in the back of my mind, being present while I did every little thing. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, is how life just keeps moving. No pause, no time to drop off and take a breather, we just keep moving. I’ve had to do everything without complaining. Go to the studio, pick up my groceries, say hi to the people I knew on the road, fill my tan