No Regrets This Time

Chapter 2

I grew up in a house where feelings were something you managed quietly, like a leaking faucet — you didn't ignore it exactly, but you also didn't make a production of calling the plumber. My mother cried in the shower where the water could explain it if anyone asked. My father raised his voice exactly twice in my childhood that I can remember, and both times the house went so still afterward that I understood, even young, that loudness cost something none of us could afford to keep spending.

Melody was born eighteen months after me and immediately broke the mold our parents had built. She screamed when she was hungry, laughed with her whole body, and cried at commercials for long-distance phone plans. Our mother used to look at her sometimes with an expression that was half exhaustion and half something like relief, like Melody was doing the emoting for the entire family and the rest of us could just stand back and watch.

I learned early that composure earned a specific kind of respect — teachers liked me, relatives called me "such a mature girl," and there is a version of a childhood where that becomes a personality instead of a strategy, and I don't know exactly when mine crossed over.

By the time I got to university, stillness wasn't something I did. It was something I was.

University smelled like chlorine and burnt coffee, and Nathan John smelled like cedar, which I only knew because he sat behind me in Structures and leaned forward to ask if I had a pencil, every single class, for three weeks, before I finally understood he had his own pencils and simply wanted an excuse to talk to me.

"You could just say hi," I told him, the fourth week, handing over a pencil I'd started keeping in my bag specifically for this purpose.

"Where's the fun in that." He grinned like he'd been caught at something and didn't mind. "Cassie, right?"

"Cassie Nancy."

"Nathan John." He said it like a title, like it came with a small bow. "You always sit in the front."

"You always sit behind people who do."

He laughed — the real one, the one that starts low and catches — and something in my chest did a small, unwelcome thing, a kind of tilt, like a shelf that isn't quite level.

I want to say I fought it. I didn't, not really. I just did what I always did, which was watch it happen from a slight distance, the way you'd watch weather come in from a porch, close enough to feel the wind change and still telling yourself you're dry.

We started studying together, ostensibly for Structures, though we spent at least as much time at the twenty-four-hour diner two blocks from campus, the one with the sticky red vinyl booths and a waitress named Dot who called everyone honey regardless of age. Nathan drew load diagrams on napkins and explained them to me with more patience than the actual professor had, and somewhere around midterms I noticed I'd started choosing my seat in lecture based on where he'd be sitting, instead of the other way around.

"You're doing the thing," he told me once, over coffee that had gone cold an hour earlier. "Where you decide something matters and then act like it doesn't."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Sure you don't." He was smiling, but there was something underneath it. Some question he wasn't quite brave enough to ask directly. "I like it, for the record. It's very you. Frustrating. But very you."

Dot, the waitress, started bringing us the same order without asking after our third or fourth visit — coffee for him, black tea for me, a plate of fries we'd split without discussing it — and there was something about that small, unremarkable ritual that felt more intimate to me at twenty-two than anything Obama would say to me for the next nine years. Being known well enough that someone brings you the thing before you ask for it. I didn't have the vocabulary yet to understand why that mattered so much to me. I just knew it did and filed the feeling away the same way I filed everything, unexamined, for later.

Melody visited campus that spring, seventeen and already louder than every room she walked into, and within an hour, she'd befriended half my dorm floor and eaten most of my snacks. She met Obama Asta at a party I hadn't wanted to go to, at a house near the water where the bass came up through the floorboards and somebody's older brother was manning a cooler of beer he clearly thought made him the most interesting person present.

"Who's that," she said, nodding at a guy across the room laughing with his head thrown back, easy, magnetic, the kind of laugh that made other people laugh just from proximity.

"Business major. Obama something. He's in my study group."

"He's looking at you."

"He's looking at the chips."

He wasn't looking at the chips. I found that out within the week, when he started showing up to the library at the exact hours I studied, always with some excuse — a shared professor, a group project that didn't exist, a question about a class he wasn't even in. Where Nathan was patient, slow, a little shy under all his teasing, Obama moved like a door being opened, wide and immediate. He had a way of making you feel, in the first thirty seconds of talking to him, like you'd already said something clever, like the conversation was going well before it had properly started.

He asked me to dinner three separate times before I said yes, and when I finally did, he grinned like he'd won something.

I remember exactly what he wore that first dinner — a blue button-down, sleeves rolled to the forearm, and he talked the entire meal without a single pause that felt uncomfortable, filling every silence before it had a chance to become one. He asked about my family, actually asked, followed up on details I mentioned in passing, and remembered my mother's name from a single offhand reference twenty minutes earlier. I remember thinking, halfway through the appetizer, how restful it was. How I didn't have to think of the next thing to say because he already had six of them lined up.

He walked me back to my dorm after, hands in his pockets, not trying anything, which I noted and appreciated, and at the door he just said, "I'd like to do that again, if you would," plain and direct, no games in it, and I said yes before I'd fully decided to, the word just arriving on its own the way words sometimes do when some part of you has already made the choice ahead of the rest.

Nathan found out on a Tuesday. I remember it was Tuesday because we had structures at nine, and he came in late, hair still wet, and didn't lean forward once to borrow a pencil.

After class, he caught me in the hallway. "Someone said you're seeing Obama Asta."

"Word travels fast."

"Small program." He shifted his bag on his shoulder, looked somewhere past me, at the water fountain, at nothing. "He's a good guy. I've heard that. Good guy."

We had one more study session after that, a week later, both of us pretending the conversation in the hallway hadn't happened. He brought coffee from the diner out of habit, set mine down in front of me without asking, and for a while we worked through a problem set in the kind of silence that used to be comfortable and now had something else folded into it.

"Can I say something and have you not make it weird," he said, eventually, pencil tapping against the napkin covered in his own handwriting.

"Depends what it is."

"I think if you'd given me another month, I would have said something. Before Obama. I had it half planned, actually — I was going to ask you to that spring formal thing, the one nobody actually wanted to go to, just so I'd have an excuse." He laughed at himself, short, a little embarrassed. "I kept telling myself there was time. Turns out there wasn't."

"Nathan—"

"I'm not asking you to do anything with that. I just didn't want it to just live in my head forever, is all. Some things you have to say out loud once, even if it's too late, or they just sit in you and rot." He gathered his papers, stood, slung his bag over one shoulder. "Anyway. I hope he's good to you. I mean that."

He left before I could figure out what to say back, and I sat in that library for another twenty minutes after he'd gone, not reading anything, just turning his sentence over and over — turns out there wasn't — until the librarian came by to tell me they were closing.

"You don't sound thrilled about it."

"I'm thrilled for you." A beat. "Genuinely."

I believed him, mostly, the way you believe someone who is trying very hard to be believed. What I didn't understand yet — what I wouldn't understand for years — was that Nathan wasn't the kind of man who fought for things loudly. He was the kind who stepped back, made room, and told himself that was generosity instead of grief.

We still studied together, some weeks, though it got harder to fill the silences the way we used to. He stopped drawing on napkins. I stopped choosing my seat by where he'd be sitting because it no longer felt like an innocent thing to do.

I chose Obama because Obama was easy in a way that felt, at twenty-two, like relief. He filled silences. He made decisions fast and didn't second-guess them out loud, and I had spent my whole life second-guessing everything so quietly that people mistook it for calm. Being with him felt like being handed a script I didn't have to write.

Nathan would have made me write my own lines. I understand that now. At the time, it just felt like effort, and I'd had enough of effort.

There's a night I still think about from that spring, one I've never told anyone about, not even Nathan. It was maybe a week after Obama and I started officially seeing each other, and Nathan showed up at my dorm unannounced, which he never did, holding two coffees from the place on the corner that stayed open past midnight.

"I got you the wrong thing on purpose," he said, handing me a cup. "So you'd have an excuse to complain to me about it instead of whatever else you actually wanted to talk about."

"I don't want to talk about anything."

"Okay." He sat down on the concrete step outside my building anyway, like a man settling in for however long it took. "We can just sit, then."

We sat there for almost an hour, mostly quiet, watching people cross the quad in the dark, and he never once mentioned Obama's name, and I never once explained why I let him stay. When he finally got up to leave, he paused at the bottom of the steps and said, "For what it's worth, I think you picked the fun one. I just always figured I was more of a long-term investment," and he said it light, joking, the way he said most true things, and I laughed the way you laugh at something that's actually landed somewhere it shouldn't have.

I didn't see him again for almost two weeks after that. I told myself it was coincidence, scheduling, and the ordinary drift of two people whose lives had started moving in different directions. I know now it wasn't coincidence at all. He was doing, even then, the thing he'd keep doing for the next decade — stepping back before he could be told to.