#starter:c

How is it possible that all of them are out? At the same time? Ira makes sense because she has a job and an adult life, but Cody is on her couch 98% of the time, and Jules runs in and out like a fairy on acid most of the day, usually leaving the door at the very least unlocked. She would choose this moment to be responsible.

Another couple of minutes and she'll resort to Plan B. That is, the fact that Parker and Aaron both have keys to the place. Not that she thinks either of them will be home either, because that's her luck today. She rests her forehead against the door, whining.] God, why hast thou forsaken meeee?

How many minutes was Parker going to be in her room?

Because it shouldn't be this hard, being in a room with her boyfriend. But when he sat down on her bed and tried to push her hair behind her ear, she knew it was a grey area. A fuzzy spot in her vision where all she could think about was Aaron.

She's been with Parker for ten years and slept in the bed of his best friend -- but Parker so much as tuffs her hair behind her ear and all she can think about is Aaron.

So she made up an excuse. Put her books away and said she had a meeting to go to with her adviser -- something about a mistake in her dissertation and you can't have that, not when you're so close to graduating. But she left so quickly that it didn't even occur to her what a bad idea it would be to go straight to the apartment he lives in, because she just wanted to see Aaron for a minute. Why did they have to live together?

She hurries in, shutting the door behind her, seeing Aaron on the couch.] I just left Parker in my room and then came here because I'm an idiot.

[It doesn't make sense for Maria to still be nervous. Aaron knows nearly everything she's ever thought about him over the last ten years, even if she's only said pieces of it out loud. She's told him with her touch. With nights spent sharing a backseat covered in sand from their feet. With sneaking into his room in the middle of the night when sleep feels so far away that she can't breathe. With the sound of her heartbeat every second he sits too close to her.

She can hear it now and it's maddening, pounding along the inside of her skull like her brain and heart might have swapped places and it were sitting inside of her head, rolling around as she walks down the street. It would have made sense -- would've explained the electric charge radiating from the middle of her chest. 

But she is nervous and it seeps out of her pores and leaks onto the ground with every step her feet take across the broken concrete of the neighborhood Parker's mother wishes they'd never moved into. Part of her wants to tell him to go fuck himself for never calling her. For making it so that Maria always has to answer the phone and hear worried tones on the other end and have to soothe the mind of the woman whose son she doesn't feel faithful to anymore.

Who she isn't faithful to anymore.

Would she care, if she knew it was Aaron? Her other son. That third one that wasn't an asshole and wasn't dead who had been there just as much and just as often and who she was sure she loved too. Wouldn't she understand?

He'd called her that morning during breakfast, probably because she hadn't come to his place and she hadn't come home and she didn't let Ira or Nat know anything which was really unlike her. And she'd blocked it. Like it didn't even matter at all. Like talking to him, her boyfriend of ten years, was the least important thing she could possibly have to do today.

It would have been so easy to answer. To lie and say she got caught up in the lab and that she'd be home soon. But that came later with the monsoon of side-glances and "I'm sure you did." comments. He did that a lot: made her feel guilty when she hadn't done anything wrong. Only this time it was different.

And so when it's the middle of the night and she can't sleep, she doesn't go to Parker's room anymore. The apartment is the same, but the door she knocks on almost silently before turning the knob and poking her head in is someone else's. And she hopes that he isn't asleep.

Her words are whispers that don't travel across the small abode.] I broke into your house again.

Because she'd been avoiding their apartment like she'd hidden a deep secret there, and opening the door with her own hands would let it out to drown her. Parker had come to her place a couple of times in the last week, but not many. She'd been busy. He'd been weirdly distant and she couldn't really say that she minded right now, with the way things are. 

It was avoidance and she knows it. Just like going out with her lab partners and leaving her phone in the lab and "accidentally" forgetting to bring it home every night. Aaron might have texted her in the last few days but she genuinely wouldn't have known because it's been sitting there dead since the night she went out to the wine bar.

So when she walks in, she does it when she knows that Parker won't be there because it's in and out. Grab the book and go. But it'd never be so simple and of course Aaron is home because why wouldn't he be? He fucking lives here.]

Not to mention how ragingly drunk the man was when he stumbled into the hallway last night.

He knocks, three good, loud times. Because he'll probably be hung over. And it's about eighty percent to gloat, but under he twenty percent pretense that he's checking on the extremely drunk guy from last night.

Maybe he'll complain about the inappropriate touching and threaten to press charges or something. He'll see what happens.]