Dead To Me – Chapter 2 – How it started
It was my last year at university, which meant everyone was pretending not to be terrified. People called it freedom, but mostly it looked like cheap wine in plastic cups, weak lighting that made everyone look either sick or sinister, and conversations about internships spoken in fake-casual voices that cracked with desperation.
I went because my friend Katlyn insisted.
The friend Andrew came with, actually. Someone I studied with. Someone loud enough for three people, whose laugh could shatter glass and whose confidence I borrowed like a coat I couldn’t afford.
Andrew didn’t belong there, which was probably the first thing I noticed. He stood in the middle of all that student noise looking calm. Not cold. Not arrogant. Not scanning the room for someone to impress or fuck. Just composed in a way that felt deeply unfair.
Messy dark curls that looked like he’d run his hands through them a hundred times that day, blue eyes that didn’t dart around like everyone else’s, one hand in his pocket like he had no intention of competing with the room’s frantic energy. He was a fixed point in a sea of chaotic motion.
He’d already started working for a big company. Just started, technically, but to us that already made him look like a finished product. A real adult. The kind who probably owned more than one decent shirt and understood taxes without crying.
He was talking to Katlyn, nodding along to some story she was telling with his full attention, his body angled toward her in a way that made her feel like the only person in the room. I watched him from the safety of the kitchen doorway, nursing a warm beer and feeling profoundly out of place.
It wasn’t love at first sight. I don’t trust people who say that anyway. Usually that just means someone was attractive and they got lucky later.
It was more like a magnetic pull, a quiet hum of recognition that I immediately wanted to ignore. He was too tall, too steady, too… everything. He was the kind of man you built things with, and at twenty-two, I was still convinced I was a demolition project.
So I did what I usually do when I’m nervous and feel like an imposter.
I became practical. I weaponized my own insecurity. I left the safety of the doorway and walked over, my heart doing a frantic tap dance against my ribs.
Katlyn saw me coming and her face lit up.
“Rene! There you are! This is Andrew, the one I was telling you about!”
I smiled, a tight, nervous thing that probably looked like a grimace.
“The one with the soul-crushing job at the corporate behemoth?”
I said, my voice higher than usual.
“A pleasure. I’m here to judge your life choices.”
He didn’t flinch. He just turned those calm blue eyes on me, and a small smile played at the corners of his mouth.
“Guilty as charged,” he said, his voice smoother than I expected.
“And you’re the one who’s going to save the world with a philosophy degree, if Katlyn is to be believed.”
“That’s the plan,” I shot back.
“Either that or I’ll just get very good at arguing with people about the nature of reality. It’s a toss-up.”
And just like that, I started the conversation.
I asked about resumes, interviews, companies, what he would recommend, what mistakes people made. It was the perfect excuse. It gave me a legitimate reason to look at him, to study the way his mouth moved when he spoke, to notice the little scar above his left eyebrow, to see the color of his eyes up close. It was a shield. I wasn’t a girl flirting with a cute guy at a party; I was a serious student networking with a professional.
It was pathetic, and it worked.
He answered seriously too, which surprised me.
There was no flirting layered under the advice, no smugness about his own success. He spoke like he actually wanted to help, like he remembered what it felt like to be on this side of the graduation stage, staring into the abyss of the job market.
He told me about the importance of a clean, one-page resume. He told me to quantify my achievements, even the small ones. He told me which recruiters to avoid and which ones actually gave a shit.
Katlyn, bless her heart, sensed the shift in the air and drifted away, leaving us in our own little bubble of career counseling and barely contained attraction.
The noise of the party faded into a dull roar. It was just him and me, and the space between us crackled with a tension that had nothing to do with employment prospects.
Then he said, “I can send you my resume if you want. You can see the format I used. It seemed to work.”
That was how I got his email.
Yes, it sounds ancient now. Medieval, basically. A fucking email address. In an age of instant gratification and dick pics sent via DM, getting an email felt like being handed a handwritten letter.
But he didn’t ask for my number, and I wasn’t bold enough to offer it. So email it was. A romance built on subject lines and attached documents. Very sexy, in the nerdiest possible way.
I went home that night with his email address burning a hole in my phone. I felt a strange mix of triumph and terror. I had his information. I had a way in. But now I actually had to use it.
I spent an hour drafting a message that was supposed to be casual and professional but ended up sounding like a robot trying to mimic human speech.
*Dear Andrew, Thank you for the informative discussion at the social gathering. I would be most grateful for the opportunity to peruse your curriculum vitae at your earliest convenience.* I deleted it.
I tried again. *Hey, it’s Rene. From the party. The one who’s probably going to be unemployed and living in a van down by the river. That resume offer still stands?* Better.
I hit send before I could second-guess myself.
He replied the next morning. It was clean, professional, and funny in a way that sneaks up on you. Not performative. Just observant.
He attached the resume, then added a P.S.: *P.S. The van down by the river has a certain romantic appeal. Just make sure it has good Wi-Fi.*
And that was how it started. Not with a bang, but with a P.S.
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