It was time to see Darren again.

I was filled with regret for having agreed to speak with him. It felt too soon, especially after Nancy had blown up about the same thing we had fought about just the day before. I was sick of hearing about this misconstrued version of events. When I had told Kimberly what happened through video chat on my bus ride to the office, her sharp jaw nearly touched her chest. Hearing her confirm that their jealousy and suspicion was complete nonsense, made me feel more confident in my stance. She reassured me that I hadn't done anything wrong by being friends with Adonis and the fact that I needed reassurance in the first place made me want to punch Darren.

Nancy and Darren should have come to us and told us how they were feeling. I was so over the mind games. It was disappointing that I would have to engage in one of my own in order to get a peak at the company's financial records.

My nerves were so high that I couldn't make myself eat anything for breakfast. When I arrived, I had to stand outside the building and breathe for a few seconds before heading inside.

A rush of air brushed by me and refreshed my paling skin upon entering. The sight of Mike placing a wet floor sign on the lobby floor decreased my heart rate. It was always nice to see the building's friendly manager.  It had been a long while since I had seen him last.

“Hey, Mike!” I greeted him with a smile. He glanced up from the floor and removed the earpiece of his headphones to let it sit around his neck. “How’s it going?”

“Hello, Mickey.” He seemed distracted by something, like he was suffering whiplash from being ripped from his thoughts. “I’m fine. Same old, same old.”

“Is everything okay?”

Seeing Mike thrown off made my nerves sky rocket. I had been dependent on him being lighthearted and jolly to keep me sane. I hoped his anxious mood wasn't foreshadowing how my meeting with Darren would go.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, throwing up a hand like it was no big deal. He looked down, fiddling with the wet floor sign. I hovered for a moment longer and the facade wore off. “Darren . . . you and him . . . is everything, alright?”

I pressed my lips together. I didn’t know why he would think otherwise. He had no way of knowing that the two of us fought. Darren wasn’t friends with Mike like I was. He wouldn’t tell him about our fight. Whatever Mike knew he knew because he heard it through the grapevine.

“Uh, we’re working on it. It’s been a weird couple months,” I said, keeping vague in the hopes that he'd elaborate for me. I was curious about what he heard exactly. 

“Has he gotten into any trouble?”

“Trouble?”

Seeing my blank face staring back at him, he shook his head. He was retreating, going back to his work to keep busy. “Nevermind. If he is in some kind of trouble, you should hear it from him.”

I followed him to his cart of cleaning supplies, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice. “He’s been up to something? Something bad?”

“I have to get back to work." He was refusing to look at me for any longer. The wheels of his cart screeched on the floor before going back to the regular thumping of his supplies. The sound faded into my heartbeat that pounded in my ears. 

Taking the elevator up, I tried to reset from my conversation with Mike. He didn’t tell me anything new. I already had suspicions that Darren was keeping things from me. This should have only motivated me to do what needed to be done.

The elevator dinged and I heard the chatter of the office before the metal doors parted. There was someone barking into a phone about shipments and two people at a desk up front shuffling through papers that crinkled under their thumbs.

I had arrived a few minutes before Darren's shift. While I laid awake at night trying to plan for the job, I realized that the chance Darren would let me look at his company's documents was low considering we had just fought. I needed to find a weaker link.

Calvin glanced up from the papers he was holding. His grip on the stack faltered ever so slightly at the sight of me. He recovered in a moment's time but the adrenaline pumping through me gave me the vigilance to catch it. He dropped the papers and the breeze of air that passed me was laced with Lysol and cleaning products.

“Hey, Mickey. What can we do for you today?” Finger nails bitten down to the nub sporadically reached up and scratched the back of his ear like a twitch.

“Can I speak with you for a quick minute? It won’t be long.”

He went rigid at the request but nodded. He gestured to the corner of the office where his desk was and led the way. With his back turned to me, I reminded myself that this was not the time to get distracted. Whatever had him jittery had to wait.

“What’s up?” he asked, crossing his arms and giving me a tight lipped smile.

“I’ve been making a bit of a career change lately. I’m starting to write my own stuff rather than just editing and one of the pieces I’m working on is actually an article about this company.”

I had thought of the lie the night before and rehearsed it about a million times in my head. I had every facial tic and vocal inflection down pact.

“You’re giving us free press?” Smile lines formed at the corners of his lips. “You’d do that?” 

“Not for you or the company in itself,” I said with a playful smile. “I wanted to do something nice for Darren.”

Calvin ducked his head. He was frowning. He knew Darren and I fought. I had thought so considering the two were roommates and Darren had said he shared the letter from Adonis with them. I'd have to lean into that.

“It's a surprise and I’m going to give it to him before I have it published just in case.”

“What do you need me for?” he asked.

“I need access to the company’s documents. I won't look at anything too private. I just need to get a sense of the journey you've all taken to create this from the ground up."

He winced. ‘’That’s -” 

“Please,” I said, hoping my pout was pitiful. “I think . . . I need to do this for him.”

I was hoping that Calvin wasn’t too dense to understand the subtext of my words. I was hoping that whatever Darren may have told him and his other roommates about our fight was fresh in his head. I was a girlfriend desperate to win back the man she loved and it had to help that he had known me for years.

Instead of answering, he pulled the keychain and ID card hanging around his neck by a bright purple band and gave it to me.

“He'll be in soon. You want to be out of there by then.”

“And you won’t tell?” I asked. My mind didn't want to wander over to the scenario that Darren found out I was snooping. Even if it was under the guise of winning him back, the less Darren knew the better.

“My lips are sealed.” He sighed, looking me up and down with a new emotion that I couldn’t quite place. He began to walk away, and though his words sounded muffled, I heard them. “Poor thing.”

I didn't have the time to question it.

The files were organized in clean manilla folders in the backroom. They were in a filing cabinet with a giant bean bag chair thrown on top of it like a last minute attempt to clear the space. That was what you got when you worked at an office with a bunch of overgrown kids I supposed.

My fingers found the financial records like it was a google search. I didn’t bother reading any of it but instead took pictures that I directly sent to Vincent. What made the process difficult was how my heart hammered against my chest. My eyes kept wandering to the door every few seconds like someone would burst in and expose me for working with the cops.

When I was finished, I took the elevator down and headed to the donut shop next to the office building. I bought a coffee and then stood outside the building as if I had never entered at all. Darren met me there with a paper bag in hand and a beanie shielding his head from the cold.

“Hey,” he exhaled, sending a mist of white fog into the air. He stopped three feet away from me. His eyes traveled the length of my face and then behind me, then back.

I almost leaned forward to press into him for a forehead kiss. The motion had become compulsive like the urge to say bless you after someone sneezed. Since we had deviated off of the usual script I was lost on what it was I was supposed to be doing.

“Hey.” It was lame. I should have said more but my mouth was full of tar. I had gone behind his back and sent his financial records to a police officer. I had betrayed him. I betrayed Darren, my Darren. The two of us were supposed to be on the same team.

“You didn’t come all this way by yourself, did you?”

A truck whooshed by, going faster than it should down a city block. It threatened to spray the slush that had built up from the night's snowfall onto the sidewalk. Darren took a step closer to me to avoid it.

“I did.”

"You should be more careful. A lot of crime has been happening in this area. Not the best place to be working at now," he said, rocking back and forth on his heels. His attempt at small talk was off putting. An awkward Darren was a foreign Darren. "I can manage because I got a little more muscle on me than you."

The joke fell flat.

I was running down the aisles of my mind to find an appropriate response. I was seesawing between the act I needed to put on in order to get the most information out of Darren and what I authentically wanted to say.

“I’m selfish,” he said. “I’ve been so selfish.” The words were choppy. They came out staggered then fast. For the first time, Darren’s charm and charisma, the way he seemed to say everything like an actor at his hundredth rehearsal, had vanished. 

“I overreacted to the note and to the necklace. I was just pissed that someone else was more thoughtful than me. I was jealous of Adonis - which is so stupid because he was engaged to your sister! I was a petty douchebag back at the apartment. I made it all about me.”

His gaze darted all around the street as if there were tiny flies buzzing around. His wild gestures scraped at the air like something was slipping through his fingers.

“I completely lost my cool because I was scared. I know I never show it but I’m so desperately scared that one day I’m going to lose you - that you’ll realize I’m not good enough or that someone will take you away. I know it was wrong but I acted that way because I love you.”

I clenched that cardboard coffee cup in my hand like it was a railing. Its warmth was fading and my bare fingers were turning red from the cold.

Darren was scared. Darren had always been scared, just like me.

Someone approached us from the sidewalk to get into the office building. I took a step forward to give them some room. At this proximity, the steam from my coffee sunk into Darren’s button coat.

He’d been my rock, my anchor, since we became a couple. To think that the same person I had ran to whenever I was afraid, the same person that shocked me with how effortlessly collected he was, was just as scared as me. Knowing that did something to how I saw him.

Darren, not the man who was brave enough to face everything. Darren, the man who was scared but remained at my side.

“Say something,” he pleaded, his voice nothing but a whisper.

My eyes stung with tears.

He sighed, breaking our gaze to flutter his golden eyelashes at the sky. A light snowfall had started.

He reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out the crumpled up paper and the ladybug locket I left at his apartment. He took my hand and laid the two items in it with the same grief ridden expression one would see at a funeral. He sniffled and I couldn’t tell if it was because of the cold or because he was crying.

His fingertips brushed my palm as he began to pull away. He was going to retreat into the building but I grabbed his hand before he could.

What am I doing?

He paused, gazing down at me with uncertainty. 

It was too hard. My brain and my heart were operating on two different levels. One of them was winning.

“I missed you,” I said and those words were enough to close the space in between us. He cupped the sides of my face and kissed me like it was the first time.

My pessimism about the fate of our relationship melted like the snowflakes that fell onto our coat sleeves. There was so much time between us, so many laughs, so many tears, so many kisses. I was a fool to think I could throw it away so easily. I had never turned my back to Darren before because I couldn't. Being with him could tear me in two but maybe I would let it. Maybe despite all the consequences, he was what I wanted.

I knew I wasn't thinking rationally but I could save that for another time.

Darren pressed his forehead into mine and wiped my tears away with his thumbs.

"I'll never let you go, Mickey. Never."

Author's Note - Don't forget to vote and comment! Thanks y'all!