“You stay here, I’ll only be a minute,” Omkar said, leaving the car keys in the ignition and the engine running. Aria waited until she was sure he wouldn’t turn back, then pulled the keys from the ignition switch and got out of the car to follow him. She followed him through the warren of hallways and through the door of the library without him noticing. She watched him ask a woman there if anyone had found a little collection of keys.
Aria waited for the woman to walk away before approaching Omkar. “What are you doing here? I said I was coming back to you there,” Omkar said in a whisper.
“No way, I’m not gonna sit there and take orders from you, especially when you won’t tell me what the fuck is going on with you. You’re acting totally fucked,” Aria barked.
Omkar tried to quiet her and looked around to make sure they weren’t disturbing anyone. Aria’s habit of swearing added an edge to her that he liked, but he still found it embarrassing when they were in public. “OK, we can talk once we’re back in the car.”
The woman came back carrying something. “Yep, someone turned them in. You’re lucky, I was just about to take these over to Lost and Found before closing up for the night,” she said.
Omkar inspected the collection of keys to make sure it contained the one that he was looking for. “Hey, thanks,” he said to the woman, who had already turned her back on them. She was checking the room, making sure that everything was in its proper place for her to close down for the night.
He pulled at Aria’s arm as a request for her to follow him but Aria balked at the pressure. She felt unsafe with his sudden personality shift. “No fucking way. I am not doing this. You tell me what the fuck is going on with you or I am literally gonna walk the fuck out of here and find another place to stay until you can man the fuck up.”
Omkar put his hand up to her mouth and tried to shush her. She slapped it away. “OK, OK, my God,” he said, leading her by the arm into the aisles of books. The argument was forced to break from their lips at a whisper. Each time the woman tending the library changed her location, they would have to shift where they were standing to stay out of sight.
Omkar didn’t understand how it was possible that even though she had been the one to diminish the magic between them, suddenly he was now the one justifying himself. “Look, I didn’t mean to, but I saw you getting out of that car with that guy last night and I just went crazy, you know?”
“No, I don’t know. You can’t seriously be that childish, Omkar, what the fuck. What, now I can’t even get a ride from a guy without you thinking I fucked him or something?” Aria’s question was salted with accusation.
“I never said anything like that. I just don’t know how to trust you sometimes,” Omkar said.
“Jesus Christ, Omkar, I haven’t even done anything. How the fuck am I supposed to keep your trust when I never even did anything to lose it and you’re acting like I did?” Aria felt like her image of Omkar as the perfect guy was fading. The jealousy that was now governing his words and actions was a whole other side of him and it wasn’t one that she liked.
“Look,” he said, “you’re going to get mad at me, but I found the letter that that guy wrote to you.” Aria looked at Omkar with a confused expression on her face. At first, she did not even remember the letter that he was talking about. “The one written to you from Luke.”
He said Luke’s name like the name itself was a curse. Shame shook her body like an earthquake. Despite the fact that she had done nothing wrong, she began to see the conflict that they were in as being her fault instead of his. She thought about deflecting the shame she felt by getting mad at him for going through her things, but decided against it. Even though she felt pain knowing that he had to distrust her in order to do it, it felt wrong to her that the boundaries of “her things vs. his things” should even exist.
When the lights went off and Omkar heard the last click of the door closing behind the woman whose job it had been to close down for the night, he stepped out from behind the bookshelves and into the great hall. “And just what exactly do you think I said?” Aria asked him.
“How should I know?” Omkar answered, irritated that the argument had turned into a quiz.
“Omkar, Luke is a friend of mine. He lives at the car lot. He gave me this the day I went back there to see if the place had been deserted or not. What do you need to know? Would you have rather I burned this letter?”
“I don’t know what I would have wanted. I guess I would have wanted you to tell me about it when it happened,” he said.
“OK, fine, I can do that but you’ve got to give me a break too, it’s not like I’ve ever had someone to share this kind of shit with. Quite the opposite, actually, it’s been sort of beaten into me to keep things to myself to avoid whatever consequences.”
In the brief quiet that came between them, the deserted library seemed filled with an antique chill. Omkar played with the parchment binding of a book on the shelf next to him. When he looked back at her, through the dim light, Aria could see that his eyes were welling up with tears. Though she wanted to comfort him, she
