Page 29 of The Consequence of Loving Me

A contradiction I have come to know about her.

She smells so sweet, a contradiction of her sour attitude.

“Maverick, are you seeing this?” Her hair hits me in the face as she leans even more over me, her finger touching my laptop screen.

Our professor is in head to toe My Little Pony gear. It’s basically cosplay of a rainbow pony. His face is even smothered in sparkly shit. His wife and kids are posing in the picture with him, all of them dressed as different ponies.

“I mean, holy fuck. This is amazing!” Veronica goes back to her chair a few feet away from me, chuckling to herself.

“Shh!” a feisty student directs at her from across the library.

Veronica makes a face back at the shusher.

I laugh under my breath, shaking my head. Judging by the way Veronica glares at the girl, she’s thinking of a way to rile her up even more.

“Ready to get back to studying?” I ask her, trying to pull her eyes away from the girl and back on me. It’s a nice afternoon and while the weather is almost perfect outside, Veronica and I are both holed up in the library studying for our upcoming sociology midterm.

“What are you thinking about?” Veronica asks, causing me to jump.

I bite down hard on the pen I didn’t realize I was chewing on. The pen makes a cracking noise. I look down at it, making sure I didn’t just make it explode. When I’m sure it isn’t bleeding ink everywhere, I throw it down onto our large table.

Looking across the table, I find the start of a doodle on her notepad. Before she realizes what I’m doing, I grab it from the table and take it to examine further.

“Maverick! Give that back right now.” Veronica shoots out of her chair and tries to grab it from my hand, but I have an iron grip.

My eyes glide over what she was drawing. It’s a pair of eyes filled with unshed tears. I’m amazed at the amount of detail, done with just her pencil. The eyes seem kind, genuine, like they’re staring into my soul. The more I look, the more details I notice. In the pupils, there are small waves.

“This is incredible, Veronica,” I tell her, pulling it away from her reach when she lunges for it again. I go to flip through the rest of the notepad and notice many drawings of different features. There are hands, a nose, eyebrows, freckles, moles. As the pages flutter, I see the same pair of eyes—over and over again. They’re always sad.

Finally, when I’m too busy staring at her art—the beautiful lines and curves of the drawings—she rips the notepad from my hand. I’m about to compliment her further when she storms away from me. The only thing she has in her hand is the notepad, the rest of her belongings still strewn about all over the table I’m now alone at.

I jump out of my chair, making eye contact with some of the people glaring at us. I ignore them and rush in the direction she went. She’s weaving in and out of bookshelves, going deeper into our campus library.

I finally catch her in a dim corner. “Veronica,” I say quietly, grabbing her by the elbow. I go to turn her toward me and what’s on her face absolutely destroys me.

It’s hurt. It’s raw. It’s real. But most of all, it’s betrayal—betrayal I put there.

My heart drops to my feet. I’ve never been looked at in the way she’s looking at me right now. And in this moment, I know whatever I just came across in that notepad is more than just pretty doodles to her. The drawings are another jagged piece of her puzzle I can’t seem to put together.

I know the right thing to do right now is comfort her. To drop it. To apologize and ask her how I can fix the mistake I just made. That’s what I would do for any of my friends. That’s what I’ve always done for them. But I can’t. I have to know more. So instead of pulling her in, comforting her and dropping it, I slide the blade in further.

“What are those, Veronica?” My hand is still gently wrapped around her slender arm.

She uses the arm I’m not holding to clench the notepad closer to her chest. You would think by the way it’s pressed against her that she thinks I’m about to rip it from her hands and destroy it.

A tear falls from her eye. One single tear. I track its movement down the slope of her cheek, off her chin and onto the black sweatshirt she’s wearing. It drips right next to a paint stain.

“They’re imperfections,” she whispers, not looking away from me.

“Imperfections?” My mind reels with what she means. I look away from her crystal-blue eyes, glossy with unshed tears, and look at the book cradled against her chest.

“I draw—well, I prefer to paint—imperfections.” Her voice is stronger now, as though she’s gaining her composure back.

I know the moment of me getting information from her is fleeting.

“Why?” I ask, my voice gravelly and low, trying not to interrupt the fragile bubble we’re currently in.

She leans back against the bookshelf. “Because it’s what I do. I find imperfections. I paint them. I put them out into the world forever.” Her eyes glance to my lips for a split second.

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