Page 66 of What's in a Kiss?

I take a glass from Jake’s tray, sit down at our outdoor table, and drain my piña colada in a breath.

“Whoa there, tiger,” Jake says, sitting next to me and taking a gulp himself. “But I guess wehavebeen working hard.” Heholds my gaze and smiles. “So, now that I’ve plied you with alcohol, what should we do next?”

He asks this rhetorically, as if there is only one answer to this question, and the answer requires no words. Luckily the rum pumping into my bloodstream is giving me just the sort of courage I need.

“What do you say we play a game?”

“Which one?”

“Truth or Dare.”

“All right.” Jake smiles. “Truth.”

How did we happen?

Why do you love me?

Where’s my mother?

What should I do?

I can’t ask what I really want to know. But I can start small with what I’ve learned in the past two days.

“When you think of... Amy Reisenbach,” I say, hoping I got her name right. “What first comes to mind?”

Jake takes another sip, then looks at me with deep, complex affection. I want to linger in every layer of it. He’s got me on the edge of my silk-robed seat, because somehow, I’ve struck close to the heart of our story.

“I was scared,” Jake says.

Scared is not a side of Jake I’ve seen. I want to ask a million questions, but I force myself to wait, to listen.

“Don’t get me wrong, I was ecstatic for you. Getting discovered by a network head right out of college, just for being yourself at a Yankees game?”

I stare at him, stunned, as he keeps talking.

“The luck required there,” he says, scratching his head. “It stills blows my mind.”

Does Jake mean what I think he means? The famous Yankee game where real-life Jake got discovered...Iwas the lucky one that day?Ileft the Bronx with the life-changing job opportunity? It’s a memory I’m dying to access, unpack, and examine from different angles. But all I can do is hear Jake out.

“Good old Section 15B, Row 2, Seat 9,” Jake says, in a haunted tone that confirms that in another world that seat was meant for him. I took Jake’s seat at the baseball game, then I took his place in life.

“After that game,” he says, “life looked so different from everything we’d planned. I’d just started at theTimes—”

“TheNew York Times?” I balk accidently out loud.

Jake worked at theTimesafter college? Like the yearbook said he would?

He laughs, like I’ve made an old inside joke. “And you were beginning to audition on Broadway...”

Like the yearbook said I would.

“You’d gotten twelve callbacks...”

“But no offers,” I fill in. It’s just a guess, but Jake nods.

“And of course,” he says, “your loan payments...”

“Right,” I gulp. “Of course. Those. They were...”