Revisit to the past
Ryan lay on the bedside digesting all that had happened for the past couple of days. Today her simple apology had made him shocked and had compelled him to recollect the thoughts that he had been avoiding since he saw her name on the new hiring list.
It was his third year at the university, and by this point, Maya O'Connor was this woman you could not bring down. What she was doing was not only done properly – it was done perfectly. An exceptional debater, the life of any group assignment, and one of those few lucky souls who can seem to make acquaintance with almost everyone one can imagine.
Ryan had been her complete opposite in every single aspect of life possible. Where she was friendly and easy on the eyes, he was cold and analytic. Where she could generate interest among individuals, he rarely engaged them directly. However, he never failed to look at her even as far back as he could remember.
The first he got to know the extent to which she dominated his mind streams was during a campus open mic event. This was not the kind of party he would usually go to but his friend, his roommate had wanted to come. And then Maya took the stage. He recalled the look she had presented when she was under the dim stage light—right at home. She slid her fingers up the strings of the guitar passionately singing with a strained voice. It's not just songs; it is her soul put out into the public domain.
Ryan had sat stiffly in his chair, with his eyes glued on her. And when she was done the audience stood and clapped while he only remained seated and unmoving. He had no time to think of this because he felt a terrible pain in his chest, a true understanding that he was in deep shit. That evening while he was stretched on his bunk bed staring at the roof he tried to persuade himself that it wasn't important.
She was Maya—fascinating intelligent Maya–and he was simply… Ryan.
It had been a formally arbitrary day and Ryan was outside the library while returning from the library. Ryan had stopped short when he saw them: Maya with her back to the railing by the outside café and the man in front of her with a smug look on his face as he stumbled over his words and gave her a too-cool-for-school pickup line. He immediately knew who he was: some senior guy infamous for being quite the egotistical, superficially charismatic twit.
Ryan's face tensed up as he remained out of the group's field of vision. He could not understand what she said but the faint giggling she produced resonated deeper in him than any physical pain could. That is why she was not even aware of the fact that it would require no effort on her part to mesmerize an audience.
He'd gone before he could hear the other part of her statement, his hands balling into fists. Furthermore, just thinking about some man like that being around her filled him with rage. He had known that guy – knew that he was a shallow man who did not deserve someone like Maya. This was cemented in youth: that moment became something ugly within Ryan.
What does it matter? A voice spoke in his ear. You wouldn't stand a chance either.
In the final debate, they had had they did not present to the best of themselves. Ryan still wasn't sure if he had come to that room more frustrated with himself or with Maya but he had vented it on her. He had treated her unfairly, reducing her arguments nearly to scorn, to things that a man would not say to a woman. She had fired back and from this, the argument got more intimate.
"If only you could tear apart your arguments the way you tear apart everyone else," she'd told him sneeringly. The words had struck a nerve. He understood that she was suggesting that he sat safely behind those remarks and was too cowardly to risk it on his own. She was not wrong, but those words still prick the skin. 'First, you'd be making a valid argument,' he snapped back fighting the shivers that emanated from his voice and went straight down to my nerves, chilling me with a block of ice.
The spectators were hushed now, the air was charged with a sort of electric current. He noted the pain flash across her face but did not back down, instead, he ramped it up. It was easier to attack than to admit the truth: that her words were too truthful that is why they pained her so much. Well, Maya hadn't simply rolled over and accepted it. 'Everyone criticizes others so that they do not tell the truth about them,' she had told me, her words measured more like a warning than anything else. "What do you have fear of, Ryan?" That had been the final blow. He didn't even have an answer and she strode away from him like a queen who just dismissed her servant and he just stood there feeling lost and more vulnerable than any man should ever feel.
Now, years later, the memory is still vivid. Ryan pulled forward till he was hunched over his desk, with his hands joined firmly together. She'd apologized today. Not just for the coffee, or the email, but for everything. Punchily sarcastic and freezingly polite, it was not the sorry he had anticipated. It was real. Honest. It had taken him unawares, of the least of expectations. For years he had bought the story that Maya was invulnerable, unassailable, one move ahead of the game. This was not the woman who had forced Gunther to come with her against his will, who had looked right through him with such disdain, on the television screen just this morning. She had apologized for her sins, for the things they had done in their past, and for the first time, he was looking at her differently.
He rubs his hair, blowing air out of his mouth. And all the while what he claimed to feel had not been hate at all? If anything, he'd despised it – this apprehension ever throttling him, ever compelling him to care this much. How much he still cared. He was able to convince himself in college that his feelings were irrelevant to the process. That she wouldn't—or couldn't—see him as anything other than a competitor. And so, he'd turned those feelings into something else: resentment. But now that he saw her, heard her speak, and saw her handling the patients and other employees—his carefully constructed defense mechanism was slowly disassembled.
She was still arrogant, must still be enchanting and dazzling, but she had that grace of mum. She was not only the girl whom he had once defeated intellectually or the girl whose presence in a room enriched it. She was a girl who was able to develop, who was able to drop the past and come again. And Ryan? He wasn't sure if he could.
And, now, the things that had previously made him uncomfortable about her were not a problem: he wasn't afraid of her brilliance, her confidence, her way of questioning him. He feared how easily she could undo him.