Rule #8 Don't keep hooking up with her if you see her as a potential girlfriend

If you could use the facilities at the gym without paying, why would you sign up for membership? Sex is very important in a relationship, but if you want to go down this road, remember there are other things to explore and share besides your reproductive organs.

Go out with her. Tell her a secret. Show her the skeleton in your closet (unless you have one literally). Let her give you a hug. Enjoy the way the air changes with her around you.

Then go ahead and have more sex ;)

......

Jake watched Jessica pick up a bottle of body lotion from the shelf, trying to decide on a fragrance. They were standing in Jo Malone at the mall after leaving the house together.

The breakfast at Jiang's seemed to have brought them closer, even though Jessica might have agreed to spending the day with him simply because she felt too embarrassed to stay at home. Either way, she was here with him.

That was good enough.

He would've laughed if a few months ago someone were to predict that he'd enjoy shopping with a girl, but right now, he felt as if he had made a huge progress from stripping in a hotel room to standing around smelling testers.

"I like this one." He pointed to a bottle that said orange blossom.

"I can decide for myself," Jessica said, but she picked it up and placed it in the basket anyway.

Jake grinned. "I figure I have a say since I'm the one who'll be sniffing all over you."

She eyed him sideways and shook her head, like he was a bad puppy she didn't know how to deal with. Jake remembered when he first met her, she was one blooming smile following the other, but now he had collected a few more expressions along the way.

Her frowns, her pouts, her stricken face when thunder struck, her shaky voice when they overslept, the way she brushed at her hair when she was nervous, how her voice rose, the way she sighed at him when she was annoyed yet amused at the same time.

She was exceptionally beautiful.

"What did my dad say to you?" she asked again as they sat down for drinks. The waiter had messed up her order, but she glanced at the counter, saw that they were swamped, and decided not to say anything. Jake smiled internally at the way she grimaced every time she took a sip.

He shook his head. "I can't bring myself to live through that horror again. I'm scarred for life, Jessica."

"Really?" Her eyebrows knitted together. "I'm so sorry about that. You didn't have to stay but you were so cool about it."

"Nah, I'm kidding. Your dad is awesome. He's very understanding," he said. "Not to mention breakfast was great. I enjoyed everything from the century eggs to your mom's feng shui lessons. Maybe even Michelle's digs at me."

She laughed. Life is short and summers are shorter, and to be able to sit together on a fine day like this was sweeter than postcoital bliss. Jake was glad he could appreciate the simplicity of it.

He was admiring the curve of her lips when his eyes caught a blond head across the fountain. The familiar shine of her hair was etched in his memory, and it was now coming alive and roaring like a golden lion.

It was like getting a kick to the groin. He momentarily forgot how to breathe.

"Jake?"

"Dammit." He turned his whole body and covered one side of his face with his hand. He was hyperventilating but he couldn't stop.

"Jake, are you okay?"

"Do you see a woman standing by the fountain? Blond, thin—"

"The one with the little girl?"

"Yes." He took a few more deep breaths. "That's...that's my biological mom."

Jessica turned to him with widened eyes. She didn't say anything.

"I haven't seen her in years...is she coming towards us?"

"No, she's heading the other way. Do you want to—"

"I don't want to see her. I just...I just want to sit here and hide real maturely like an ostrich." Jake peeked through his fingers as if he was watching a horror movie. He had lost all interest in shopping and he realized his heart was still hammering like a construction site. His scalp prickled. It felt like being dumped into an icy lake and then made to give an impromptu speech in front of the whole class.

He was not prepared for this.

Jessica placed her cool hand on top of his. Jake looked up at her, lost and dazed, wondering why a simple gesture like that made him feel completely exposed, like she was prodding a very private part of his heart.

......

"I don't remember much of her. Just the facts," Jake said. He sat in the driver's seat but hadn't bothered to start the car. "She left us when I was four. When I turned 13, my sister found out where she lived. We set out to see her and we didn't tell our parents about it."

Jessica didn't rush him, so he felt it was okay to continue.

"I didn't even know what I wanted to get out of it. I wasn't looking for an apology or much of an explanation. I just wanted to see how she was doing and talk to her. We drove there and pressed the doorbell, and we waited for a long time before she came out, and when she did, she just looked at us. She stared at us and we stared back. None of us knew what to say. Then a baby started crying, and I could see from the way her head turned that she really wanted to get back inside. She asked us if we wanted to have something to drink, but it was in a way...I could just tell she felt she had to say it. It was one of the things I was always uncomfortable with...feeling that kind of embarrassment. I want people to genuinely want my company instead of feeling obligated, even when it comes to my own birth mom.

We came out and sat in the car, and then I turned to my sister and asked her, why isn't she interested in us?"

His breathing had become ragged once again, and he could almost taste the unpleasantness in his mouth. He didn't consider himself damaged because of the incident, but it was the dreadful feeling of not being on speaking terms with someone who was supposed to be important. It was being rejected without knowing why. "Jess...even your dad wants to know more about me."

Jessica did the exact same thing Emily did back then. She put her arms around his shoulders and pulled him against her. "It's her loss, Jake. She doesn't know what she's missing, because you're an absolute delight to know."

He shuddered in her arms. He was unfamiliar with everything about this scenario. She was often sassy and he was shamelessly cocky around her, and there was always an undercurrent of sexual tension even though they had pretty much jumped each other's bones the first chance they got. Now she was running her palm down his back, and there was nothing erotic about it.

"We came home and we told our parents," he said, "and I was so afraid my stepmom would be mad at me. I think of her as mom, you know, and I didn't want her to take it the wrong way, like I wasn't satisfied or that I didn't love her enough. That's the thing I regretted the most, that I might have hurt my mom during this quest. She said she understood, but she wished we had told her because we were too young to handle something like that."

"Oh Jake. It'd be hard to handle no matter how old you are."

That was true. Look how badly he was still handling it. He looked up at her and met her eyes, which were quiet, kind and lovely, and he sighed softly, not because girls usually loved it when he did that, but because she made him feel safe enough to do so.

"Jess, can you come home with me? I don't want to be alone right now."

......

"You have a very nice room," Jessica said.

Jake had drawn on one side of the wall with crayons when he was little, and his mom had placed a picture frame over it so that it looked like an art piece. He told her this and she smiled.

"That's so cute."

"My mom's an interior designer," he said. There were several tall bookshelves, all painted white, which looked pleasant against the blue grey walls. Jessica scanned the books and turned to him.

"Do you have a favorite author?"

"I don't read enough to have one," he said, "but I like Jack London. How about you?"

This time Jessica answered right away. "Eileen Chang. She mostly wrote about relationships and love, but her stories aren't romances."

She shared her favorite story with him, which was titled Red Rose, White Rose. "There are two women in every man's life, one is the red rose, and the other is the white rose. The red rose is sexy, fiery, full of passion, while the white rose is refreshing, cute, and delightfully sweet. Every man has to face this dilemma," she said. "This is a direct quote from her book: 'Marry a red rose and eventually she'll be a mosquito-blood streak smeared on the wall, while the white one is moonlight in front of the bed. Marry a white rose, and before long she'll be a grain of sticky rice that's gotten stuck to your clothes; the red one, by then, is a scarlet beauty mark just over your heart.'"

"That's a beautiful quote, but I'm a really stupid boy," he said. "If you want to tell me something, you have to be very direct."

"We're always disappointed with our choices, Jake. You choose one and you long for the other, and you'll end up torturing yourself with the idea of what if."

"Only indecisive, ungrateful men have that kind of problem," he said. "I'm very sure of what I want, and the more time I spend with the red rose, the more I want to be with her. The only what if I'm torturing myself with is what if she doesn't want me the way I want her."

Jessica sighed. She was about to turn him down again, he could tell, when she stopped in front of the bookshelf.

Jake followed her gaze and saw that it was a photo of him and Emily, with both of their heads shaved.

"That's my sister. She was undergoing chemotherapy at the moment. She was getting tired of losing her hair, so we decided to take matters into our own hands. I did it first so she had the courage to do it." He was uncomfortable with the way she looked at him, in that you-are-such-a-sweet-guy sort of way, so he added, "Do I look hot with a shaved head or what?"

She smiled briefly. "How's Emily?"

"Don't worry, she's cured," he said. "She even got elected as Prom Queen with a Chemo Port under her skin. It's one of the better types of lymphoma."

"Hodgkin's lymphoma?"

"How do you know? Wait. I didn't tell you my sister's name."

He was suddenly afraid. It explained a lot of things. It was just like a movie he watched on TV once with Emily, a Charlize Theron film, about a girl diagnosed with cancer who slept around and switched boyfriends monthly so she didn't get attached.

"I want to tell you something about me," Jessica said.

Please don't be sick. Please. Jessica you can't do this to me.

"I can't drive, you see, and even though we have a driver, I prefer the bus sometimes. One day, I met a gorgeous girl at the bus stop. She had stylish short blond hair and a floral bandana. I thought she was a model. We started talking, and she told me she had a bad day, and I said I did too, and I started complaining about how the shoes I ordered came in the wrong size and I was going to have nothing to wear to a party.

What's bugging you, I asked, and she told me her test result came back and her blood cell count was too low, so her chemotherapy treatment had to be rescheduled."

She shook her head. "Can you believe how mortified I felt? Here I was moaning about some stupid shoes while she had to be administered with those stimulating factor shots so her body could be ready for more toxicity. I started volunteering at the children's hospital since then."

"Wow." Jake's body relaxed. "Why don't you just donate money?"

"My parents are already doing that. Sometimes I think they feel guilty about our wealth. Donating is great, but there's always the uncertainty of not knowing where the money goes exactly. At least when I'm volunteering, I can see with my eyes that I'm helping."

"What do you do at the hospital?"

"Read stories to the children and their siblings, mostly. We draw together sometimes too. There's this girl Hannah, she loves—loved to draw. She was only ten but she had already gone through seven surgeries and eighteen sessions of chemotherapy. I grew really close to her. The day she was admitted to the intensive care unit, I went to get my tattoo." She pulled her lips into a sad smile. "You asked me about it once. It was a bat, because bat is fu in mandarin, and it sounds the same as luck. It was supposed to be a symbol of good fortune."

Jake watched her talk and let the truth pieced itself together. Jessica had lots of children's drawings in her room. She was great with kids. She didn't have that many clothes. She never ran out of stories to tell. She went to lots of crazy parties and got herself drunk. She was always busy and couldn't change her plans.

As if sensing the grave atmosphere, Jessica smiled again, brighter this time. "I'm glad Emily is doing okay," she said, still facing the photo. "Small world, right? She's the girl who inspired me at the bus stop, and now I'm here banging her hot brother."

She was exactly like him in the way that they seemed to find it uncool to admit that they had a heart, as if it was safer to hide behind sexual innuendos and smirks and dirty jokes.

"I don't think of you as a hot girl I'm banging anymore," he said. His hand traveled up her spine, found her shoulder, and spun her around to face him.

Jessica looked up at him.

He moved his other hand to cup her face. She closed her eyes as he bent down to bring his lips to hers, and for the first time ever, he felt like he did something on impulse.

There was no careful checking of her facial expressions, how her body responded, what kind of signal it would send off. This wasn't the kind of lustful kiss that started from the face, went to the neck and eventually landed at the inside of her thighs. He did it just because. He couldn't focus on how she felt, because there was too much going on inside his own head.

You're so great, Jessica. You have the class of a rich girl but none of that snobby attitude that comes with it. You're considerate, kind, and wonderful. Thank you for holding me in you arms when I had that panic attack. Thank you for introducing me to your culture. It's as fascinating as you are. I adore everything you care to share with me so far. I have a feeling you won't disappoint me. Give me a chance to disappoint you. We're so much alike, and if I'm going to do something as stupid as getting involved, I want to do it with you.

Then Jessica placed her hand against his chest and pushed him away. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I can't do this."

Jake watched her fumbling with the doorknob, shocked, hurt, and mostly confused. It was so obvious that she liked him too.