I motion to Logan, and he precedes me out the door. I follow, closing it behind me softly. I want to slam it, but I don’t want her to know how I’m feeling.
“What the f**k happened between you two?” Logan asks as soon as the door closes.
I shrug. Logan is famous for his shrugs. He should accept mine. But he doesn’t. Instead, he punches me in the shoulder.
Shit, that hurt. “What the f**k?” I ask.
“What happened?” he asks. He looks straight into my eyes.
“Nothing,” I say. I shake my head. “Not a f**king thing.”
“Dude, you had a pillow shoved in your lap, and you were getting off her bed when we walked in. Something happened.” He shoves my shoulder, almost knocking me over. Logan’s a big boy. A little bigger than me, and I’m a big guy. “Not to mention that she looked like she’d just been f**ked.”
I stop and turn to face him. I lay both lands flat on his chest and shove him as hard as I can. “Don’t ever f**king talk about her like that again,” I warn.
Logan takes a few steps back. Then he grins. “It’s about f**king time,” he says. He holds up a hand to high five me.
“Fuck you,” I say instead, and I keep walking toward my dorm. I can’t get there fast enough.
“Did you kiss her?” he asks. He grins at me again, and I feel a smile tugging at my own lips. But it doesn’t last for more than a minute. His joviality isn’t contagious.
“I was about to…. Then you guys busted in,” I admit.
“She wants you, man. She’s got it as bad as you do. Trust me.”
I shake my head. “She doesn’t.”
“She does.” He claps a hand on my shoulder. “She told Emily. Emily told me.” He pauses and then says, “You’re welcome.”
“What did she say?” I ask. I probably don’t want to know.
“She said she wants to have your babies.” He jumps back when I go to punch him, and he laughs.
“Shut up,” I say. “This is serious.”
“Why’s it so serious all of a sudden?” Logan asks. “This shit’s been going on between you two for a long time. Why does it suddenly matter so much?”
“The contest is today. They’re raffling off a kiss from her.” I heave a sigh. “One lucky winner is going to get to kiss the woman I love. In front of everybody.”
“Oh, f**k,” Logan breathes. “That’s shit.”
“I asked her not to go,” I confess.
“So, go buy all the tickets,” he says with a shrug, as though he just solved world poverty or AIDS.
“It doesn’t work like that. You have to guess the number of jelly beans in her jar. If you get the wrong number, you don’t get anything. If you get the right number, you get to kiss her.”
“So, we need to figure out how many jelly beans are in her jar,” he says simply. He looks at me. “Did you see the jar?”
I nod. “It’s a pickle jar.” I hold out my hands to show him the size. “The big kind.”
“So we need a jar that size, and we need to fill it with jelly beans and then count them. At least then you can get close, right?”
I scrub a hand down my face. “This is stupid. I’ll never get it. Every guess costs a dollar.” I reach into my pocket and pull out my wallet. It’s nearly empty.
“You’re just going to let somebody else kiss her?”
“If I’m not there, I won’t see it.” I shrug my shoulders, trying to hide the fact that I feel as if I’m being gutted.
He stares at me. He doesn’t say anything. “If it were Emily, I’d buy every f**king pickle and every damn jelly bean in the state of New York. There’s no way my girl would kiss some ass**le.”
“You’re right,” I say. “We need to go to the store.” Hope swells inside me. Do I have a chance? I won’t know until I try, I guess.
Logan and I go shopping, and after we get all our supplies, he looks at me and says, “I hope you like pickles, dude, because we’re going to have to eat this whole jar so we can fill it with jelly beans.”
I look at the jar. “I don’t like pickles that much. You?”
Logan pops the top while we walk back to the dorm and starts eating. This is what friendship is all about. He crunches each bite over and over until he swallows, and then he reaches for a second one and passes it to me, taking another for himself. He stops a stranger on the street. “You want a pickle?” he asks. The stranger sidesteps him. “What?” he asks. “You act like it’s every day somebody offers you a free pickle.”
The man keeps going. “Dude, I think he thought you mean a pickle.” I make air quotes when I say the word pickle.
“How could I mean a pickle when I’m standing here holding a jar of pickles?” he asks.
I shrug. “You didn’t look like his type anyway.”
“I’m too pretty for him, right?” he asks. Logan’s all tatted up, on top of being huge.
“That has to be it.”
By the time we get to the dorm, all but two pickles are gone, and we’ve left a trail of people eating pickles in our wake.
I burp into my closed fist. “I’ll never eat another pickle again.”
Logan dumps the last two in the bushes outside the dorm. “I can’t eat another one, man,” he says, belching.