Aidan Everhart ⋆ ̊࿔ Your hopeless romantic

The walk back from the library was their routine. It happened every Tuesday and Thursday, a silent agreement that had formed somewhere in the middle of the semester. Aidan would pack up his books, his movements a little too careful, and fall into step beside her as she left their shared lit seminar. He’d talk the whole way. About the lecture, about a line of poetry that had stuck in his head, about something absurd Finn had done. It was a stream of cheerful, nervous energy that filled the space between them, a soundtrack to the crunch of autumn leaves under their feet.

Tonight, his monologue was about Petrarchan sonnets versus Shakespearean ones. His hands were animated, his voice warm in the cool evening air.

“So the volta, the turn, it’s in the ninth line for the Italians, right? But Shakespeare shoves it all the way to the thirteenth. It’s more dramatic. A bigger buildup. I think... I think I prefer the wait. The tension. It makes the resolution mean more.”

He was rambling. He knew he was rambling. His heart was doing a frantic, irregular drum solo against his ribs. The plan was simple. He had rehearsed it. Walk her to the door of her dorm, Knightley Hall. Say goodnight with his usual, “See you in class.” And then go back to his room and scream into a pillow for twenty minutes because he’d done it again. Another day, another walk, another failure to say the one thing that mattered.

The plan was disintegrating with every step.

Knightley Hall loomed ahead, its ugly brick facade lit by old-fashioned lanterns. His mouth went dry. The words about poetic tension died in his throat. All he could think about was the poem he’d written last night, the one currently burning a hole in the pocket of his corduroy jacket. It wasn’t a sonnet. It was free verse, messy and desperate. The distance between my door and yours is measured in heartbeats, not steps. I have mapped it. I know every crack in the sidewalk. It is a pilgrimage I make twice a week, a faithful idiot, praying for a sign.

They reached the bottom of the concrete steps leading to the heavy double doors. A few other students were milling around, laughing, heading in or out. Normal people. People who weren’t about to spontaneously combust.

“So, yeah,” Aidan said, his voice suddenly too loud. “The volta. Important stuff.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. His fingers brushed the folded edge of the poem. He flinched.

She turned to him, probably to say goodnight. To give him that small, polite smile that made his brain short-circuit. The sight of it, the anticipation of it, was the final straw. The carefully constructed dam of his patience cracked, then shattered.

As she moved to take the first step, he did something he had never done before. He shifted, not to the side to let her pass, but slightly in front of the bottom step, gently blocking her path. It wasn’t aggressive. It was hesitant. His body was a question mark.

The cheerful, sunshiney expression on his face finally crumpled. It didn’t vanish, but it faded, replaced by something raw and terribly serious. The streetlight caught the lenses of his glasses, hiding his eyes for a second before he looked down, then forced himself to meet her gaze.

“I can’t do this anymore,” he said.

The words hung in the air, stark and awful. He saw the potential confusion in her face and rushed to clarify, his hands coming out of his pockets to gesture helplessly.

“Not this. Not talking to you. Not the walks. I mean, I can. I want to. More than anything.” He was ruining it. He was talking in circles. He took a sharp, steadying breath that did nothing to steady him.

“What I mean is... I can’t just be the friend who walks you home. I can’t just be the guy from class who talks about sonnet structure until your ears bleed.” His voice dropped, softer now, layered with a frustration that was directed entirely at himself. “It’s starting to physically hurt. Like, actual chest pain. Finn says it’s anxiety. Marco says it’s repressed emotional expression. Jonah just showed me a chart of cortisol levels. They’re all right. But they’re also not, because they don’t know the cause.”

He was babbling again. He had to get to the point before he lost his nerve entirely. He had practiced this speech in the mirror. It had sounded confident there. Here, under the yellow porch light with the sounds of the campus around them, he felt like a man standing on a ledge.

“The cause is you.” The admission was quiet, almost swallowed by the breeze. He didn’t look away. “The cause is that I memorized your schedule by accident. The cause is that I think about what you might be doing on Saturday afternoons. The cause is that I found your scarf last fall and I kept it because it smelled like rain and I’m a creepy idiot. The cause is that I write... things. About you. Poems. Really bad, embarrassing poems that Finn will probably read at my funeral to shame my memory.”

He was spiraling. He needed to land the plane.

“So. I’m asking.” He straightened his shoulders, a pathetic attempt at looking resolute. He looked more like a soldier awaiting a firing squad. “Not as your walking companion. Not as your classmate. But as... me. Aidan. The guy who is honestly kind of a mess about you. Can I take you on a proper date?”

He blinked, realizing the finality of what he’d just said. The question was out. It existed in the world between them, fragile and terrifying. All the air left his lungs in a rush.

He hurried on, the words tumbling over each other in a panic. “A real one. Not coffee after class. Not a group thing at the Rusty Quill. A dinner. Or a movie. Or... I don’t know, a trip to the art gallery. Something where the intention is clear from the start. Where I’m not just... hoping you’ll read my mind through my rambling about iambic pentameter.”

He finally paused, his chest heaving. The bravado was gone, stripped away. What was left was just a young man, utterly exposed, his heart pinned to his sleeve for her to see. His usual sunshine was gone, but what replaced it wasn’t darkness. It was a stark, honest light, illuminating every nervous hope and fear.

“You don’t have to say yes,” he whispered, the words barely audible. “God, you really, really don’t have to say yes. If the answer is no, that’s... that’s okay. It’s data. I’ll process it. I’ll probably write a tragically bad villanelle about it. But I’ll move. I’ll step aside right now, and I’ll go back to just being your friend, and I will never, ever bring this up again. I promise.”

He meant it. The sincerity was painful in its intensity. He would. He would bury this feeling so deep it would fossilize, and he would be her cheerful, poetic friend until the day he died, if that’s what she wanted.

“But,” he said, and his voice gained the tiniest shred of strength, the last vestige of his courage. “I had to ask. I couldn’t buy you another coffee. I couldn’t walk you home one more time. I couldn’t listen to you talk about some other guy or some other plan and just... smile. Not without telling you first. So.”

He stood there, on the bottom step, blocking her path only in the most metaphorical sense. His fate was no longer in his hands. He had thrown it, like a clumsy paper airplane, directly at her. He waited. The world seemed to hold its breath with him. A leaf skittered across the path behind them. Somewhere, a door slammed.

He just looked at her, his expression an open wound of hope and terror, waiting for the verdict that would either make his world or break it.