THE CHOICE THAT ALMOST DESTROYED ME

The Inconvenience of Aaron Cole

POV: Zara Mitchell

The problem with Aaron Cole was that he was consistent.

Not in the suffocating way not showing up uninvited or inserting himself where he had not been invited. He was consistent in the quieter, more dangerous way of someone who simply did what he said he would do, every time, without fanfare or expectation of recognition. He said good morning and he meant it. He said he would be quieter and he was. He said anytime and he meant that too.

I had spent three years with a man who said things he did not mean. I had forgotten that the opposite kind of person existed. Aaron Cole was reminding me, and I resented it considerably.

The pasta was not a one time occurrence.

Two weeks later I came home to find a cup of instant noodles the good kind, not the cheap supermarket ones, sitting outside my door with another note. This one said only: Saw these at the Asian market. Thought of you.

I stood in the corridor holding the cup and thought he thought of me. At an Asian market, looking at instant noodles, he thought of me. I did not know what to do with that information so I took the noodles inside, ate them, and said nothing.

The week after that it was not food. It was a note slipped under my door on a Thursday morning that said, Heard you come in late last night. Hope the study session went well.

Four lines. Thirty seconds to write. It sat on my desk for three days before I threw it away, which told me more about my state of mind than I was comfortable admitting.

Maya noticed before I did. She noticed everything before I did, it was both her greatest quality and her most exhausting one.

"The neighbour," she said one afternoon, with the particular tone she used when she had been sitting on an observation and had finally decided to deploy it.

"What about him?"

"You mention him a lot for someone you claim not to think about."

"I mention him because he keeps leaving things outside my door," I said. "It is a logistical observation, not an emotional one."

Maya looked at me with the expression of someone who had heard that specific kind of nonsense before and was choosing, charitably, not to say so directly.

"Mmm," she said.

"Don't mmm me."

"I said nothing."

"You said mmm. Mmm is not nothing."

She smiled into her tea and changed the subject, which was worse than if she had argued.

He asked me out on a Wednesday in March.

We had been standing in the corridor at the same time I was locking my door, he was unlocking his when he turned and said, with the same unhurried directness he applied to everything: "Would you want to get coffee sometime? There's a place two blocks over that's actually good."

I looked at him.

"No," I said.

A beat. "Okay," he said. No wounded pride. No pressure. Just okay the way you say it when you have received information and are filing it without drama.

He went into his apartment. I went into mine.

I stood on the other side of my door for a moment and felt something I could not name not guilt exactly, not relief exactly. Something adjacent to both.

He asked again two weeks later. Same delivery. Same calm. "Coffee?"

"No," I said.

"Okay," he said.

And again two weeks after that. Each time the same word from me and the same response from him no argument, no manipulation, no wounded silence designed to make me feel responsible for his feelings. Just okay, and then he would continue with his day as though the rejection had not cost him anything, which somehow made it more difficult to keep saying no rather than less.

I told Tess about it one evening when Maya was not there, because Maya would have had opinions and I was not ready for opinions.

Tess listened without interrupting, which was her way. Then she said: "What exactly are you afraid of?"

"I am not afraid," I said immediately. "I am simply not interested."

Tess looked at me with those quiet, examining eyes. "You've mentioned him four times in the last ten minutes," she said. "For someone you're simply not interested in, he takes up a considerable amount of your thinking."

I did not have an answer for that. So I changed the subject, which was as close to an admission as I was capable of at that point.

The evening that changed things not dramatically, not finally, but in the small incremental way that things actually change was a Friday in April.

I had had a terrible week. An exam that had not gone the way I prepared for, a call with my mother in which I could hear how much she missed me and could not fix it, and a night where the old thoughts had come back louder than usual, the bedroom door, the clinic, the prescription paper folded in my hand. I had gotten very good at managing those nights but this one was more persistent than most.

I was sitting on the floor of my apartment at eleven in the evening with my back against the bed and my knees pulled up the same position I used to cry in at home, which I had apparently carried with me across an ocean, when I heard a knock at my door.

Three knocks. Unhurried. Familiar.

My chest tightened before I could stop it not from Ryan this time, I realised, but from something else. Something newer and more confusing.

I opened the door.

Aaron was standing there in a jacket, clearly on his way somewhere or back from somewhere, and he looked at me for exactly one second before his expression shifted into something careful and quiet.

"You okay?" he asked.

"Fine," I said. The word came out slightly less convincing than usual.

He did not push. He did not ask follow up questions or offer unsolicited advice or try to insert himself into whatever I was clearly going through. He simply reached into the bag he was carrying and produced a chocolate bar the specific kind, dark with sea salt, that I had mentioned once in passing during a corridor conversation I had not thought he was paying particular attention to.

He held it out.

"Goodnight, Zara," he said. And he went into his apartment and closed the door.

I stood in my doorway holding the chocolate bar and felt something crack open in my chest something small and hairline thin, the kind of crack that does not look significant until you realise it goes all the way through.

He had remembered. A throwaway comment in a corridor about a chocolate bar, and he had remembered.

I went back inside. I sat back down on the floor. I ate the chocolate slowly in the dark and I thought about a boy who paid attention without being asked to and asked for nothing in return and said goodnight and walked away.

And for the first time since I had arrived at Elridge University, I was afraid. Not of him.

Of myself. Of what I could feel starting, quietly and without my permission, in the place I had been most certain was permanently closed.