Complications

ADRIAN’S POV

Adrian Cole had a problem he couldn’t solve, and it was sitting three seats over in a back row of Contracts.

He’d noticed her the first day of classes — actually, he’d noticed her before that, at some point during orientation when he’d walked past a circle of students and caught her laughing at something someone had said, the kind of laugh that seemed to come from somewhere genuine instead of the practiced social performance most people defaulted to. He’d kept walking, hadn’t thought much of it at the time.

Then she showed up in his lecture hall, and suddenly not thinking about her became significantly harder.

The staring wasn’t intentional at first. It was just — she sat there, took notes like she was having a conversation with her own handwriting, asked sharp questions that made the professor pause before answering. She had this way of tucking her hair behind her ear when she was concentrating that made it hard to look anywhere else once he'd noticed it.

After about a week of that, it became intentional. A choice he made and then regretted the second he did it, because she caught him more often than he expected, and now there was this thing between them — this awareness — that he definitely didn't need.

The problem was that Adrian already had a girlfriend.

Her name was Claire, and she was exactly the kind of girl his parents approved of — smart enough, attractive enough, from the right kind of family, ambitious in the way that didn’t threaten his own ambitions. They’d been together since high school, mostly out of inertia and the fact that breaking up felt more complicated than staying together. She was in a different school, studying something entirely different, which made it easy to exist in his own space most of the time.

It had been easy. Before.

Now he was sitting in Contracts trying not to look at a girl he’d never spoken to, in a relationship with someone he talked to maybe twice a week, and the cognitive dissonance of it was starting to feel less like a distant problem and more like something actively fracturing.

“You’re doing it again,” Ken said, dropping into the seat next to him after class one day. Ken was his roommate, had been his best friend since high school, and had the unfortunate ability to read Adrian in a way Adrian generally preferred people didn’t.

“Doing what?”

“That thing where you look like you’re solving a math problem in your head. You’ve been doing it since Tuesday.”

Adrian gathered his things, not answering.

“Is it Claire?”

“No.”

“Is it?” Ken paused, looking back toward the lecture hall they’d just left. Understanding crossed his face. “Oh. It’s the girl from Contracts.”

“There’s no girl from Contracts.”

“Okay, the non-existent girl that you keep staring at in Contracts seems to be the problem.”

Adrian stood up, already walking, and Ken followed, as expected.

“You’re with Claire,” Ken said, and it wasn’t a question.

“I know who I’m with.”

“Do you, though? Because you look at that girl like you’ve forgotten that fact entirely.”

Adrian didn’t answer that. Mostly because Ken was right, and Adrian didn’t particularly want to think about what being right meant.

The situation got worse when she actually confronted him about it.

He’d been expecting it, in some distant way — the kind of thing that was obviously going to happen eventually if he kept being careless. What he hadn’t expected was how direct she’d be about it, how she’d corner him in the hallway and ask him straight up, like she wasn’t afraid of the answer.

“Why do you keep staring at me in class?”

His first instinct was to deny it. His second was to tell her the truth. He went with denial instead, which felt safer, even though they both knew it was a lie.

Later, in his apartment, he found himself thinking about her — about the way she’d crossed her arms like she was braced for him to either lie or tell her something that would hurt. About the fact that she'd gotten nothing from him but evasion.

Claire called that evening, and he picked up mostly out of habit.

“Hey babe,” she said, and she sounded tired, which she usually did. “Long day at school. How was your day?”

“Fine.”

“Just fine?”

"Just fine.”Adrian said

There was a pause where she probably wanted him to ask about her day, or elaborate on his own, and he didn’t. The silence stretched between them, the kind that should have felt uncomfortable but mostly just felt like confirmation of something he’d already known.

" Adrian?”

“Yeah?”

“Are we okay?”

It was a direct question, and he respected that, but he didn’t have a direct answer. So he lied, the way people do when the truth is too complicated to say out loud.

“We’re fine.”

“You don’t sound fine.”

“I’m just tired. Long week.”

She believed him because she wanted to, probably, or because questioning it would mean having a conversation that neither of them seemed ready for. They said goodnight, and Adrian hung up feeling like he’d just confirmed something he’d been trying not to think too hard about.

He lay in bed that night, staring at the ceiling, and found himself going back to that moment in the hallway — to the girl with the crossed arms and the direct question and the eyes that seemed to actually see him instead of just seeing the version of himself he’d agreed to be.

He thought about what Ken had said, about looking at her like he’d forgotten about Claire.

he had.

Or maybe he was just remembering what it felt like to want something instead of just accepting it.

Either way, it was a problem. And Adrian Cole was very good at pretending problems didn’t exist if he ignored them long enough.

The question was whether ignoring this one would actually work, or whether it was already too late.

It didn't work.

He told himself it would, that a few days of deliberate avoidance would be enough to reset whatever had shifted in him since orientation. He moved his seat in Contracts, three rows back, angled so she wasn't in his direct line of sight anymore. He told himself this was strategy, not surrender.

It lasted four days.

On the fifth, he was back in his old seat before he'd consciously decided to sit there, and she was three seats over again, tucking her hair behind her ear over a page of notes, and Adrian understood with a kind of quiet dread that moving seats had never actually been about seating charts.

Ken noticed, obviously. Ken noticed everything, which was either the best or worst thing about having him as a roommate depending on the week.

"You moved back," Ken said, not even looking up from the game he was playing on the couch.

"It's a big lecture hall. People move around."

"Sure. And I'm sure it's a coincidence that you moved back to the exact seat that gives you the exact same view of the exact same girl."

Adrian didn't answer that. There wasn't really an answer that didn't make things worse.

"You know," Ken said, finally glancing up, "you could just talk to her. Like, actually talk to her. Not the hallway thing, which from what you told me went about as well as a car crash."

"I have a girlfriend, Ken."

"I'm aware. I was there for most of the relationship, remember? I'm just saying — you're allowed to have a conversation with a human being without it meaning something. Unless it already means something, in which case that's a different conversation."

Adrian didn't dignify that with a response. He went to his room, closed the door, and lay on his bed staring at the same ceiling he'd been staring at for weeks now, like the answer was going to appear up there if he waited long enough.

It didn't.

What he thought about instead was Claire, and the phone call, and the particular hollowness of telling someone "we're fine" when he wasn't entirely sure that was true anymore. He thought about how long it had been since he'd actually looked forward to seeing her, rather than simply expecting to, the way you expect a Tuesday to follow a Monday. Comfortable had somehow, without his noticing exactly when, become a word that sounded less like affection and more like inertia.

He didn't let himself think, not directly, about what it meant that comfortable was the opposite of whatever he felt sitting three seats away from a girl who asked questions like she wasn't afraid of any answer she might get, including the ones about him.

Adrian Cole was excellent at compartmentalizing. It was, in some ways, the skill that was going to make him a good lawyer someday — the ability to take a tangled thing and sort it into boxes small enough to manage, ignore, set aside for later.

The problem was that some things didn't stay in their boxes. Some things kept finding their way back out, no matter how carefully he thought he'd sealed them in.