Just Desserts

3: Bad Advice

Late as usual but at least its here

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For the second day in a row, Derek walked out of his bathroom in the morning to see Jesse lounging on his bed.

"Jesse!" He stammered, taken by surprise.

Jesse glanced up from his phone and grinned. "Hey, man! How was yesterday?"

Derek sighed and slumped onto his desk chair. "I met someone," he said, spinning his chair with a foot.

Jesse made a surprised sound somewhere between a squeak toy and a dolphin and dropped his phone beside him. "Is this someone a girl?" Jesse's grin pushed his eyebrows up to his short cropped hair.

Derek tried to spin away to hide his reddening cheeks, but his extroverted friend noticed and Jesse made the guy's equivalent of a squeal. "Well how'd it go? Did my advice work?"

Derek furrowed his eyebrows and stopped spinning the chair so he was facing Jesse again. "Yeah, thanks a lot. The new girl came in, and I tried to stick to what you said." He kicked the foot of his bed and spun to the wall again. "I'm pretty sure she hates me now, and I didn't look cool or macho or confident or anything. I just sounded mean and weak." He looked over his shoulder at Jesse. "What did I do wrong?"

His friend folded his arms behind his head and stared up at the ceiling. "Well, what did you say?"

"I took your advice and I tried to be macho, but I took it too far-" Derek stopped abruptly.

Jesse sat up and cocked an eyebrow. "How far," he said suspiciously. Derek pulled a pencil from his desk and rolled it between his fingers.

Head still down, Derek murmured, "I might have said some things that could have been deemed racist,"

He lifted his head slowly, his eyes meeting Jesse's disappointed ones. "Derek, that's not what I meant when I said confident."

"I know..."

"Listen, man," He threw his feet up to Derek's arm rest and the two boys stared out of the window. "No girl is going to like you if you insult her. And frankly, no one is going to. good first impressions are important, but bad ones are persistent."

Derek stared out the window, his lips drooping a little. "So she's never going to speak to me again,"

"Come on, Derek, bro, don't be like that. The only thing you can do is be yourself and let the confidence come to you. When you get used to her, confidence will come to you." Jesse dropped his feet and leaned his elbows on his knees, rubbing his fingers together. "And she's not that scary right," he laughed, but Derek's face paled.

"She-she punched me," he whispered.

Jesse's eyes bulged and his mouth swelled like a balloon. Derek winced, but Jesse couldn't hold back the laughs. "She HIT you?" Derek's face was turning redder than a lobster in lava. This didn't help Jesse at all, and he started shaking and cluching his stomach.

"So i guess she IS pretty scary," he finally squeezed out. "Oh man, I didn't expect my advice to suck that much."

Derek just stared at the ceiling, waiting for the straggling giggles and his burning ears to stop.

Jesse inhaled deeply. "Ok, what did you do after that," he said, struggling and succeeding to make his straight face stick.

After a few spins in the chair and a few furious blinks, Derek muttered, "That was the beggining of the day. I spent the rest doing inventory in the back."

"Jenna let you? Did she see this?"

"No," a few more spins, "but she knows there's an issue."

Jesse stood up. "Well, man, you have work today, and you need to prepare yourself to face it."

With the mention of the looming work day ahead, Derek's face quickly shed a few layers of red. He spun back to the desk and held his face in his hands, covering his eyes like a child watching a horror movie.

Jesse flopped back on the bed and sighed. "Derek, you're going to be stuck with her all summer. You have to take control of this-" Derek winced visibly, hunching his shoulders. "- situation, but maybe you don't have to change who you are. Whatever happens, you can't spend the rest of the summer counting the number of butter tubs you have in the back."

Derek sat up, but avoided eye contact. "That doesn't sound too bad."

"But really, man, you have to do something. You should apologize. Can you do that?"Jesse sat up and kicked Derek's chair till he was facing him.

"Do I have to?"

Jesse stood and walked to the door, speaking from under the door jamb. "Yes, you do. And I'm going to drive you there so you don't have the time to yourself to horribly misinterpret my advice. Again."

Derek frowned a little but stood up, following him down the stairs.  

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It's uneditted but its up and thats what counts right?

xoxo Julie