Page 6 of Learn Your Lesson

I didn’t think of boys much when I was younger, but when I turned thirteen, something inside me just…clicked. I was instantly boy crazy, hyperaware of every time a boy so much as looked at me, let alone brushed past.

By the time I was in high school, I was sneakily watching romance movies on my laptop and hiding books in my room like they were paraphernalia. I spent multiple nights a week under my comforter with my eyes wide as I read Wattpad stories. I listened to the few friends I had tell me stories of dating and going to first, second, or third base with my phone in hand, feverishly taking notes.

But I knew better than to eventryto date in my household.

It wasn’t until I left for college that I had enough guts to kiss a boy. It was slimy and gross and didn’t do much for me, but I didn’t want to be a virgin my entire life, so I let the guy have his way with me in the back bedroom of a house party.

My head hung off the bed the whole time, and he had an old Chingy song playing on his speaker.

It hurt at first. Then it was just uncomfortable.

It lasted approximately forty-eight seconds, and to this day, I still counted them as the worst of my life.

Add in the fact that the jerk bragged to his friends the next day before promptly making me out to be some kind ofStage 5 Clinger, as he’d put it, and it was then that you could say my appetite for romance was snuffed out like a match flame.

It had devastated me that my mom and grandma were right.

I’d wanted so desperately to have the kind of love I’d seen inThe Notebook.I’d even dreamed about something as hilariously inevitable as the stubborn, helplessly love-sick situations inNo Strings AttachedorFriends with Benefits.

I wanted to be the average girl who turned the head of the billionaire, or the shy bookworm who got the quarterback, or the cool advertising account manager who fell for her childhood best friend.

But I didn’t have a childhood best friend.

I was the furthest thing from cool.

And my only experience with a boy had left a taste in my mouth so sour, I still wasn’t rid of it even seven years later.

So, here I was, twenty-six and devoted to my life as a teacher. I didn’t watch romance movies anymore, but instead indulged in crime documentaries. I didn’t listen to love songs, but to podcasts about how cool ants are. I didn’t go on dates, but instead spent my evenings with my three cats and my current project — be it sewing, knitting, painting, or some other craft I saw on social media.

To some, I knew it seemed an unfathomable existence. It sounded lonely and pathetic.

But Ilikedbeing alone. I liked throwing my all into my classroom, into the students whom I had the chance to plant seeds with at the perfect age for them to sprout. I never felt lonely, not with my cats, my mom, and my grandma.

I did, however, feel stuck sometimes — like I wasn’t living life, but rather that life was living me.

“Oops!”

I blinked out of my thoughts as Ava sent the glass of murky water toppling, and instead of moving to clean it, she just looked over her shoulder at me.

I smirked, grabbing the tray of fruits, veggies, and crackers I’d put together and bringing it with me into the living room — along with a towel.

“Don’t worry, my little angel bug,” I said, pressing the towel into the wet carpet. “Life’s no fun without making a mess once in a while.”

Mr. Turkey

Will

Chef Arushi Patel was proof that angels were real.

It had been Uncle Mitch who’d first found her. Shortly after Jenny died, when I could barely keep my kid alive and drag my ass to work, I came home one day to find her in my kitchen. My uncle knew I needed help, but he also knew I wasn’t capable of seeking it out myself.

A normal, well-functioning person would have been shocked by a stranger in their home.

But I was numb to everything at the time.

I hadn’t so much as questioned her presence, tending to Ava as Chef Patel cooked me my first hot meal not from a drive-thru in weeks. When I finished eating, she cleaned up the kitchen, crossed her arms, arched a brow at me, and said, “We doing this?”

I’d had her on a weekly payroll ever since.