The Offer
1272 Words
POV: Zara Mitchell
I spent two weeks after the chocolate bar being very deliberate about not thinking about Aaron Cole.
I was unsuccessful.
Not in the dramatic way, not lying awake constructing elaborate scenarios or finding reasons to linger in the corridor. Just a persistent low level awareness of his presence on the other side of a thin wall. The sound of his morning routine. The smell of whatever he cooked on Sunday evenings that always drifted under the gap beneath my door and was always, irritatingly, good. The way I noticed when he had not come home by eleven and then felt annoyed at myself for noticing.
I was not falling for Aaron Cole. I was simply a person with thin walls and an inconveniently good memory and an awareness of her immediate environment that had become, recently, somewhat more immediate than strictly necessary.
I told myself this with decreasing conviction as May arrived.
He knocked on my door on a Tuesday evening in the second week of May.
Not to leave something outside it this time. He knocked and waited, which meant he wanted a response, and when I opened the door he was standing there with his hands in his pockets and that same steady, unhurried look that I had decided was either his greatest quality or his most dangerous one depending on the day.
"I wanted to ask you something," he said.
"If it is coffee," I said, "the answer is still no."
"It is not coffee." A pause. "There is a food market on Saturday morning two blocks over. I thought you might want to come. Not a date," he added, before I could say anything. "Just two people who both need groceries going to the same place at the same time."
I looked at him for a long moment. He looked back without shifting, no anxiety in his posture, no performed casualness. Just a man asking a question and being entirely comfortable with whatever the answer turned out to be.
That comfort unsettled me more than eagerness would have.
"No," I said.
"Okay," he said. And he went back inside.
I closed my door. I stood with my back against it. And something that had been building quietly for weeks finally reached a point it could no longer hold.
I was not going to keep doing this.
I knocked on his door ten minutes later.
He opened it with an expression that gave nothing away not surprised, not triumphant, not cautious. Just present.
"Can I come in?" I asked.
He stepped back. I walked inside.
His apartment was the mirror of mine in layout but completely different in character. Books on every surface not arranged for appearance, actually read, with broken spines and folded corners. A plant on the windowsill that was alive and clearly tended. A jacket over the back of the desk chair. It looked like a place someone actually lived in, which mine, despite months of occupancy, still did not quite manage.
I turned to face him. He had closed the door and was leaning against the kitchen counter with his arms loosely folded, watching me with that attentive quiet that I had come to understand was simply how he existed in the world.
"I need to say something to you," I said. "And I need you to hear all of it before you respond."
"Okay," he said.
I looked at him directly. "I know what you are doing. The food outside my door. The notes. The chocolate bar. The market invitation that is definitely not a date. I know what it is and I need you to understand something very clearly: I do not do relationships. I am not interested in being anyone's girlfriend. I am not available for love or whatever version of it you have decided to offer me, and I am not going to change my mind about that no matter how patient or consistent or genuinely decent you turn out to be."
He said nothing. He was listening the way he did everything completely.
"What I can offer you," I said, and my voice was steady because I had made my peace with this version of myself even if I did not always like her, "is s*x. That is all I have. You can take it or you can leave it and find someone who has more to give. But I will not pretend I have something I do not, and I will not let you keep doing this thinking it is going to end somewhere it is not going to end."
Silence.
Then Aaron Cole uncrossed his arms and looked at me with eyes that were doing something I had not prepared for not offended, not deflated, not calculating. Something quieter and more complicated than any of those things.
"Why?" he asked.
I blinked. "Why what?"
"Why is that all you have?"
The question landed somewhere it was not supposed to. I had prepared for yes or no. I had not prepared for someone turning the offer back around and asking about the architecture of the person making it.
"That is not your business," I said.
"Maybe not," he said. "But I'm asking anyway."
I did not answer. We stood in his apartment in the particular silence of two people at an impasse and I waited for him to do what I expected to accept the offer as given, or to decline and end it cleanly, or to push in a way that would give me a reason to leave.
He did none of those things.
"I'll accept," he said finally.
I stared at him. "You will accept."
"Yes."
"You understand what I said. What I am offering. Nothing beyond it."
"I heard you," he said. And then, quietly, with a steadiness that should have warned me: "But I want you to know that I'm not accepting because it's enough. I'm accepting because it's the door you've opened. And I'll take whatever door you open, Zara."
Something moved through me at that a tremor, brief and immediately suppressed. I did not examine it.
"That is sentimental," I said.
"Probably," he agreed.
"It does not change the terms."
"I know."
I looked at him for one more moment. Then I crossed the room.
I will not reduce what happened that night to mechanics. That is not what it was, even then, even under the terms I had set. What I will say is that Aaron was gentle in a way I had not expected and thorough in a way I had not prepared for, and that somewhere in the middle of it something happened that had no place in the arrangement I had constructed, a moment of stillness, a breath, a look between us that lasted longer than it should have and communicated something neither of us had agreed to communicate.
I left before midnight. Back to my own apartment, my own bed, my own carefully maintained separateness.
I lay in the dark and I ran a precise internal inventory checking, systematically, that everything was where I had left it. Walls intact. Heart uninvolved. Terms of the arrangement clear and observed.
Everything was fine. I was fine. This was fine.
The problem, the one I would not admit for a long time was that the look had happened. That single unguarded moment where two people see each other without the protection of whatever they have decided to be.
I had seen Aaron Cole in that moment. Really seen him.
And the far more terrifying thing was that he had seen me too.
And he had not looked away.
- Writer
