Looking For Trouble

Chapter 10: Panty-monium

CHAPTER 10

Arya Crawford

He left early the next morning, leaving behind the carefree blessings of the beach for the laborious responsibilities of the city. The world waking up, shaking off the last few specks of the night. He drove back into New York, with the sun rising in the sky and me waving goodbye in the rearview mirror.

A fragile friendship had reemerged between us. The instability of it awakening memories of the fragile friendship we had forged once before, at the beginning of my prison internship. There was the same caution, the same surprising comfort, the same easy company as there had been that first time. But unlike that first time where the new friendship was cushioned by the lightness of the ignorance about one another, this time the weight of knowledge of the other was burdensome.

That first time, we weren't aware of how it would feel to lose one another. But this time, there was a resounding echo of the pain at the possible loss of the other.

Last time I didn't know how much it would hurt. But this time, I knew. This time, I was aware of the ache his loss would bring. But I wasn't sure what tugged at the disquiet in my heart; the awareness that my heart would mourn the loss of him, or the fear that one day I would lose him again. Maybe it was both.

The only measure to banish these worries had been the reverberating determination to not allow myself intimacy, emotional and physical, with him. That is, I couldn't let myself develop feelings for him again. It was integral to maintain the wide berth that simple friendship allowed. It was better to have him in my life as a friend, rather than feel something more and allow the fear that had rooted itself in the recesses of my mind, fear of his capability to inflict violence upon me, to trickle in and stain everything. To see him only through the tint of that violence, and lose his friendship.

I was able to dispense myself of the worry of feeling pain at his loss by convincing myself that if I never started liking him as more than a friend again, there would be no fear of loss and no fear of violence. Perhaps this wouldn't make sense to others, but reassuring myself this way made me feel better able to move forward with my friendship with him.

I shook my head to dispel the thoughts that had indiscreetly plagued my mind since Carter and I had called a truce the day after Aaron and Charlie's wedding a few weeks ago.

The sky outside my window was overcast but the weather app on my phone didn't show any chance of rain. I gathered my laptop and charger, textbooks and notebooks, from my desk and shoved them into my bag. I didn't normally lug textbooks around but today I needed my Criminal Law 101 textbook for a study-group later in the day, and the Astronomy textbook to lend to Carter. After a few seconds of struggling to make space in the bag for everything to fit, I pulled out a copy of Wuthering Heights from my bag. It was the one I had lent Carter the day I had left the internship. He had brought it back to me.

The first Astronomy class I had attended after Aaron's wedding, I hadn't hidden from Carter like I had been doing before. That first class after the wedding, I had waited outside the lecture hall like everyone else instead of sneaking in when I knew Carter couldn't spot me. He had found me in the crowd of students congregating outside the lecture hall, and I hadn't felt the ridiculous need to run this time. After our conversation at the beach, I wasn't worried about him bringing up things I didn't want to discuss and he seemed more at ease too. We had sat together during the lecture; three rows down from the back, two seats in at the end from the left. And from then on, without being told, we started saving the same seat for each other if either one of us was ever running late. We'd sit together every class, twice a week on Monday and Wednesday, and walk back together in the evening after class ended until we had to split up to go our separate ways to get home.