Chapter Thirty-Seven: "Above and Beyond."
"IT'S FRIDAY!" I exclaimed as I walked into the kitchen.
Yasmeen sat at the table, chewing on a cantaloupe from a bowl. Her eyebrows furrowed at the screen in front of her but at my entrance, she closed shut her laptop.
"You okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine," She wasn't. This had been going on even before the new semester started. What was happening? "Why are you so happy?"
"Because we're going out for sushi today with Iman. And before that, I'm going to study with Clayton."
"You Clayton and never study," She laughed. "You make plans for the next party."
"Exactly," I said. "And my favourite Youtuber uploaded a new video so I can watch that later tonight. And I woke up with a really good mark on my last project. And because it's Friday. I'm in a very happy mood and I want you to be in a happy mood with me."
I put on a wide smile that she had no choice but to reciprocate her dimples etching into her cheeks. But those faded as fast.
"Are you sure you're okay?" I asked, taking a seat across from her. "Is everything okay at home? Is it Areeb? I thought we liked him. He didn't do—"
"Areeb is fine," She blushed, pushing her bowl of fruits in my direction to share. "Home is fine. I've been thinking about a lot of things."
"Anything I can help with?"
"No, it's okay." She assured me as Mariam walked into the kitchen, grabbing a banana and typing aggressively on her phone. Yasmeen and I exchanged a look. There was only one reason for our friend's annoyance lately: Kyle.
"What did he do now?" I asked.
"What didn't he do? He keeps making plans and then blowing me off and somehow that led to a fight. It's 9 o'clock and we're fighting. I don't have time for this."
"What are you going to do?" Yasmeen asked her.
"I don't know." She shrugged, attempting to brush aside the evident frustration on her face but it didn't disappear. I haven't thought about Kyle since the night at Outlaw. Yet every time I heard of him it was never anything good. All he and Mari seemed to do were argue for a pair casually seeing each other.
When she left, Yasmeen turned to me. "I need her and Kyle to be over."
My thoughts were the same. Even if Kyle was the one who told me what was happening with Aven, I was tired of him upsetting my friend and I was tired of her trying to do something she wasn't cut out for.
I glanced down at the time and then at Yasmeen who was finding a sudden interest in our kitchen floors. She'll tell me her thoughts when she wanted to. "I'll see you later?"
She blinked before looking up at me, "I'll see you later."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Where are we going?" I asked Iman as we walked through the warm building of Roger Hall in the afternoon.
"I left my sweater in this room," He said, adjusting his brown hat that was similar to the dark green one I was wearing. "Josiah said he left it in there for me to pick it up. We were talking about something."
Surprisingly, Josiah's name didn't cause that unsettling feeling in my stomach. Josiah led me to think about research which made me think of Dalhousie. Since my mom and I had spoken, I didn't find myself investing all of my energy into it as I had at the start of the school year.
I glanced over at Iman. One of his many sweaters' arms was poking out of the sleeve of his jacket. "You're wearing it."
"I had two sweaters I brought today. Mari forgot hers and she was cold in genetics so I brought it for her. Also, she's been seeming a little tense lately."
The Kyle stuff. Of course, Iman would be able to read her properly. "You think so?"
"I know her," He declared, keeping his eyes straight ahead as we approached the room I figured was his destination. "I know so."
He opened the door, gesturing for me to enter first. But once I did, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye.
I froze, locking eyes with the other person in the room.
Oh my God. When I turned around, away from him, the door slammed shut behind me.
That was when I got angry. Jiggling the doorknob with all my might, it didn't give. "Iman!"
The man in the room didn't say anything but the man on the other side of the door remained calm. "I'm not letting you out until you see what he has to say."
See? "IMMANUEL."
"NO!" He shouted back. "Give him five minutes."
"I don't want to give him any minutes!"
"Jaime, please," We both struggled with the handle for a few more seconds but he had the upper hand of strength. "You know I wouldn't be holding onto this door if I didn't think this was a good idea. I wouldn't do that to you. You wouldn't do that to me. You know it."
The air expelled from my cheeks at his last sentence. A part of me hated that I did know it. Iman was a man of good intentions. If he was doing this, it wasn't going to be because he foresaw me getting hurt. He always meant well with his actions and that caused me to turn around.
Aven looked patient as he always seemed to be, expecting this response from me. He still had yet to shave; the stubble dusted the golden-brown skin of his cheeks. The clothes he was wearing made me suppress my surprise. They were a part of the ones I had picked out for him that time he came to my workplace. That felt like forever ago. We felt like forever ago.
I stood there staring at him, wondering why he was wearing clothes as if he had presented in front of a group of important people. As if he was about to present in front of me.
When he spoke I fought the need to shut my eyes and embrace his deep voice. "I need you to hear me out."
"Hear you out about what? We don't need to have a repeat of our last conversation," I stressed. "At the end of the day, we weren't together. You didn't cheat on me."
"But you said it feels like I did."
"Because that's what it felt like," I snapped before putting my hands on my face. I was doing so good at moving past this, past him.
Iman's five-minute rule flew out the window of the room we were standing in as my frustration got the best of me. I rattled the doorknob, ignoring my friend's protest on the other side of the room as I put my entire strength into exiting the room. Whatever he had to say didn't matter. There was absolutely nothing to speak about anym—
"I have proof."
I stopped rattling the doorknob, turning to face him. "Excuse me?"
"I have proof," He said slowly and it was then I noticed he had a remote in his hand. "Iman said that you won't change your mind about us unless you were proven otherwise. I'm here to prove you otherwise."
What?
"The last time we talked, I didn't get to speak," He continued, crossing his arms. "And I'm glad I didn't because I wouldn't have had everything I had today to back up my words. I need five minutes and then you're going to decide if you believe me or not."
"Okay," I crossed my arms as well. "I've given you more than five minutes of my time in the past. That's your five minutes. I don't believe you."
Aven closed his eyes for a second before opening them and it was then I recognized that expression. It was the same one he had on the court of his volleyball games. The one that showed how determined and focused he was on the game.
It had never been an expression he had centred on me before. The sheer intimidation of his expression made me still, not in fear but in intrigue.
"I know you're upset," He said. "If I saw things your way I'd be upset too."
That sentence bothered me. Similar to the one Iman had said over the break about how I perceived things. As if there was another way. I sighed, walking over to one long desk up front and leaning against it. Aven watched me cautiously as I glimpsed at the clock on the wall.
If there was a way to see things differently then I wanted to see what he had. "You have five minutes."
Aven moved fast.
The lights in the room were hit off and a projector screen started moving down as in the front of the room as the blinds in every window were pulled down to encase us in slight darkness if it wasn't for the sunlight streaming through the cracks. He clicked a few buttons on his laptop and I watched the screen in front of me come alit with a presentation.
I didn't say anything, watching him move quickly with the remote in his hand as he moved past a few slides and animations (Seriously?) to a video and pressed the button.
"I'll start here. This is the CCTV footage from Outlaw," My eyebrows went up. "From 11:43 PM."
An overview of the inside of the club was shown from a corner with the time running at the bottom of the video as seconds passed. The occasional black and red lights flowed over the darkroom as people danced. I could see the booth Aven and Dev were sitting at that Saturday night. Aven was talking to the girl, Eden who was smiling at him.
Five minutes. Five minutes. Five minutes.
When the club went black, I could barely see a thing on camera but seconds later I could see Eden's lips on Aven's and blackness once again before Aven paused the video.
"What are you trying to prove with this?" I asked quietly.
"I'm trying to prove that I didn't kiss her." My lips parted at the confidence in his statement. "She kissed me. I didn't kiss her back. Look three seconds later, you can see her walk away."
He continued the video and when the red lights washed over the booth area once again, Eden was walking away from Aven who had something in his hand. But I paid attention to her face.
She looked disappointed.
And embarrassed.
Aven stopped the video. "The day on the hill? You said I had my hand in her hair. I did because—"
He moved to another video. A Snapchat video with a timestamp from about forty minutes before the first video. Whoever was recording had taken the video in a place with a lot of trees before coming out onto a sidewalk of downtown Jasper Bay. Suddenly, Dev appeared in the video, shaking out his hair and running his hands through it. A second later, Aven approached him, the two of them taking out leaves and branches caught in their hair. Then the camera moved to a group of people. On the side, talking to another girl was Eden, both ended up out of her hair.
"I told you on the phone I had a branch in my hair," Aven continued. "We ran into a few people we knew. Eden was part of that group and we ended up taking a different path. At the club she had a branch in her hair she didn't realize was there. I took it out. That's what was in my hand. That is why my hand was in her hair."
The next slide was a zoomed-in picture from the first video. It was a twig.
He wasn't done.
"Now the Kyle thing," Aven moved to the first slide. "He told you Eden came into my room and that we had sex because he saw a sock on the door?"
He didn't need me to nod. He was going to acknowledge every single thing I had told him of on Edgar Hill.
"Eden and I know each other because of our thesis projects," Aven explained. "We have the same supervisor. We're acquaintances. Nothing more. At least on my end."
He pressed the button, flipping to another slide with a link to an online drive. He pulled up a file from the drive with numerous documents of the same paper but different version histories. This was Eden's proposal paper for her thesis. When he pulled up each paper, I read the title and looked at the margin where I could see comments. Aven's comments.
Aven's comments over a series of days but he focused on the date where the first round of edits occurred.
"Do you remember this date?" December 1st. I remembered that day because it was the last time I had been to Aven's apartment. Even if I forgot it, Aven was prepared.
The next video he played was timestamped of the same day. At 2 pm. I had a class at 4:30 that semester. On that day. "You got a ride with Laurie. You left at about 4 o'clock."
We both looked at the video where Laurence and I were walking to the elevator and he was bothering me about not giving him a new idea for his next fundraiser. I remembered that video because he had sent it to Dev and me. We left around 3:54 PM.
"Eden came over minutes later. If you look at the time between the edits in this document and the time you left, there's no way I'd have had sex with her in between that time. I was editing her proposal for a solid 45 minutes."
My eyes went along the screen as he kept talking, allowing me to examine the margins and the dates. To see the punctuation he inserted, the lines he had taken out and the suggestions he made on the side. His comments read in the same way I've heard him fix Dev's paper during one of our study sessions in the library over the break.
"That day, Kyle saw her enter the house," He continued, keeping the same assured tone in his voice. "He was the only one there but the entire time we spoke about the thesis. I showed her some of my research and the paper I had to hand in along with my presentation. I worked on that presentation and proposal day and night. I also helped her with hers. I barely slept. I barely saw you. That sock on the door that Kyle saw was because I forgot to take it off after you left. That's it. Kyle assumed."
I swallowed hard as Aven flicked through more screenshots of edits, of days leading up to the day before he finished his presentation and proposal, all on Eden's proposal.
"And after I edited that paper, on that day, Roy, my co-captain picked me up because I had practice," He switched slides, displaying the text messages between him and his co-captain along with the time and date. "Objectively, there was no time between when you left and when I went to meet Roy for me to do whatever you think I was doing with her."
There were so many slides, of his edits, and text messages accompanied with dates of when Eden said she was going to send him her changes to the document, asking when he would be in the office or at his place to discuss the proposal and their individual presentations. I looked at all with my heart beating in my ears before Aven stopped on an email screenshot. "Now, can I explain the kiss? Please?"
I didn't bother looking up at the clock to see if five minutes had passed. I nodded.
"This is an email that was sent from our professor on that Saturday night that our marks were posted," He gestured to the screen. "He sent the email between the time period from when we had spoken," He pulled up another slide to show me the start and end time of our own call before going back to the email. "And the time she had kissed me." He pulled up a timestamp of the CCTV footage once again.
"I didn't know that the marks were posted," He said. "Dev was making me do another shot at the time the email was released." He played another video. All of the videos were chronological with the way he was telling me the information. As if he had practiced it numerous times.
He had memorized the presentation like the back of his hand.
Dev was doing as Aven said, making him take another shot in the video before the two of them were laughing at something with others at the table, the lights dancing over them in the same pattern of momentary red and black at random periods of times.
Eden came to Aven, looking excited and waving her phone in her hands, making him see what was on her screen. The flash of the lights, of redness and darkness, came at random intervals but from this angle, I was able to see Aven's hand come up to her hair. He struggled a bit before pulling the twig out.
"She told me she got a great mark on her own paper. One minute I was taking the branch out of her hair because she couldn't get it out and the next thing, she kissed me. I pushed her away the second I realized and she walked off. And...And if you don't believe that then here. I talked to Eden the other day."
I kept my eyes on him as he hit play on an mp3 file on the slide.
"I wanted to talk about Saturday night." He said in the recording.
"I'm so sorry. I don't know what I was thinking," Eden sounded panicked. "I shouldn't have kissed you. I didn't know you had a girlfriend."
For the hundredth time in that room, my eyebrows went up. Her anxious statement of 'I shouldn't have kissed you' seemed to imply that not only have they never kissed before but they've never had sex as Kyle suggested. I didn't know you had a girlfriend stated that...
"I didn't think you still--"
"I do," Oh. "But I wouldn't have done that if I knew. I'm so sorry, Aven."
Aven paused the recording.
"You got evidence." Those were the first words to come out of my mouth since he started this and they came out in pure disbelief. He got as much information as he could, put them in a slideshow and presented it all to me.
When he said he wanted to fix this, fix us, this was what he meant.
"I had to." He said, looking back at the screen. "I know you. I know that one video would not have been enough. I know that you were never going to listen to me if I didn't have all of this. Not if I saw you at the club. Not when we were on Edgar Hill. Not if I took the phone from Iman on New Year's or if I spoke to you after your presentation--"
"You came."
The soft smile that appeared on his face hit me straight in the chest.
"I told you I would," He said. "I still wanted to support you somehow even if you weren't speaking to me. You did so good up there, Jay."
His words of praise rendered me silent. I was still hesitant as I processed everything he had shown me. That beast guarding the safe filled with everything of him I went insane over was still present.
Aven must have noticed because he gestured to his laptop again. "There are different videos in here: my interactions with Eden in the office that I got from other people. My interactions with other people talking about you. I talked to everyone I knew and their friends about what they recorded that night. Luckily, Aaliyah was the one who asked if the club had video surveillance and I realized that was the best thing to show you."
Aaliyah. Meaning that they, his friends back home, helped him with this.
The look on my face must have displayed my thoughts because Aven continued. "Iman, Aaliyah and Ezekiel helped me try to get as much evidence as we could. Iman tried fixing some of the videos for sound as well as he could. Ezekiel helped with this during his break—he was good with presentations back in high school and added animations for no reason. And then Aaliyah helped me organize the information."
I stood there, completely and utterly dumbfounded.
"I called the club and asked one of the managers who worked there to see if they could send me the video from that night. It took Ezekiel flying down there between games and season passes for me to have access to it."
The fact that he had dedicated so much time to prove me otherwise made me grip the table behind me. He had gone above and beyond.
He pulled up another video. "But I got videos like this too. This is from Matt. He's one of the guys that came out with us that night. Iman was able to boost the audio on me and Dev and drown out the other voices.
I watched the white guy's, Matt, nose take up half the screen as he looked to the side and laughed at whatever the other person told him. Suddenly, Aven and Dev's voices became audible.
"—can't believe she kissed you," Dev slurred, his speech coming out slower than usual. "You're telling Jaime, right?"
"I'll tell her when she gets here."
"You were going to tell me." I breathed.
"Of course," He said when he paused the video. But I never let him. I was out of that club a second after I saw her lips on his.
"You've also mentioned Trinity." He continued to go through dozens and dozens of slides that were meant for me to eventually go through on my own. I watched them whip past on the screen, my heart beating faster and faster with anticipation. He was prepared for any and everything I had said to him.
Aven clicked a button and I listened to another recording. I listened to his voice. "Remember a few weeks after we started dating, I told you I was going to break up with you."
A laugh came from the other person in the conversation. Trinity. "Yeah, I don't know what the hell I was thinking staying with you when you said that."
"Did I tell you why I said that back then?"
"No, you didn't. But you didn't even do that. We broke up months before graduation. Why?"
"Do you remember Brent from high school? He was in 12th when we were in 9th. Got in the NBA, a few years back?"
"Yeah, he dated Keyana's sister, no?" None of these names meant anything to me. But the NBA part made me raise my eyebrows. This all tied back to—
"He said that to his girlfriend after he got drafted. Ezekiel overheard him at a party."
"But didn't they get back together? Aren't they married?"
"Yeah," Aven said, laughing at the irony. "Ezekiel got it into our heads that he was going to make it to the NBA by the time we were 18 and I'd be going to the Olympics for volleyball or whatever. And he said that we shouldn't be tied down when we would be doing our sports."
Trinity laughed. "Yeah, that sounds like something you and Ezekiel would say in the past. You were both so serious about basketball and volleyball."
Aven paused the video, turning to me. "We were kids. I'm not trying to excuse the shit I said to Trinity when we were 15, but I wouldn't do that now. I didn't even follow it back then. I forgot about it a month afterwards. But when I told you I wasn't the same person I was years ago, saying stupid stuff and doing stupid things, I meant it."
Oh. "Did Trinity and Eden both know they were being recorded?"
"You can hear me ask them for permission at the end of their recordings." He moved through once again and I listened to their responses as Trinity said Aven could do whatever he wanted with the phone call recording and after Aven told Eden what happened, that there was a 'misunderstanding', she all but pressed him to show me the recording.
The two of us stood there in silence as I went over everything in my head, my mind spinning. A misunderstanding was a good way to put this all.
"And another thing. Eden pointed out that I told her you were my girlfriend." He said slowly. "I thought we were together. My friends—Dev, Laurence, Iman, Ezekiel, Aaliyah—hell, my parents and my sister knew."
"Your family knew?"
"After my mom talked to you on the phone that one day, she texted me afterwards saying that she already loved you without meeting you. Clara asks for pictures of you and brings you up on our calls or when she sends me videos," He gestured to the screen. "They're all there but that's where I fucked up. I assumed and look where it got us."
He assumed. When he had whispered, 'You're mine'. When I had the words back, thinking he had only said his words in the heat of the moment. I had thought of the worst even then when it was anything but.
Iman had said Aven used to compile proof to get him and Ezekiel out of trouble as kids. His friends meant the world to him but I had never have guessed that I meant that much to him. That he would consider doing all he could, throwing himself into his passion for the sake of me.
"We didn't talk about it," I whispered, blinking rapidly.
"I should have," He continued, "Especially with what Iman had told me about Malcolm."
"There were some things you and Malcolm did that were similar but I didn't want to relive that uncertainty," I admitted with a sigh. "Like not kiss me in public or in front of others like with Laurence—"
"We barely had time to go out together because of exams, assignments, volleyball and work," He explained, setting the remote down on the table. "I didn't kiss you in front of Laurence or even Dev because I didn't think you liked that. Remember Halloween weekend? You made a face at Kyle and Mariam when we went to Wendy's. I didn't think you were into PDA. And I've thought about the last time we saw each other. A lot."
"I can tell," I said quietly.
"I thought about everything you said to me," He uncrossed his arms, setting the remote down on the table, "I spent time with you over the break because I wanted to--not because Iman told me to. I got you a Frank Ocean shirt because I hated that you couldn't get anything you wanted from the pop-up and I wanted to make you happy."
The memory of how excited I was to open the package he had left on my desk filled my mind, that he had thought of me. That shirt had been shoved deep into my closet after what I had seen.
"And the playlist--Do you remember when you came over after a game and you asked me when the playlist would be done?" The first time we were alone after he had kissed me. I nodded. "I said it's not. I said that because I wasn't planning on the playlist to be done. I made the playlist because I wanted to show you that I think about you all the time."
I sucked in a deep breath, feeling tears well up in my eyes, "Really?"
"Have you looked at the playlist since everything happened?" I shook my head, my vision blurring as I pulled out my phone and the app. My eyes rounded at the abundant amount of songs he had added over the past few weeks all up to today. Hundreds and hundreds of songs ranging in genres and various moods.
I exhaled, anger and pain from the past weeks releasing from my body as I looked up at him. "I didn't know."
"You didn't know about a lot of things. You don't even know about how much shit Iman kept giving me before we kissed," A short laugh fell from his lips and it made my chest swell. "Especially when we were in Toronto at the record shop when he was looking for Zeki's gift."
"When you went to go check out the records, he was like 'there she goes, Aven. Are you going to follow her?" He mocked Iman, shaking his head. He did follow me and he talked to me like he could speak music with me for hours. Aven shrugged helplessly. "I couldn't stay away when you were racing through my brain all the time, Jay."
Every single word that came out of him hit me deeper. Every word made my mind hazy at the unbelievable reality that he was saying all of this to me. About me. He felt like this the entire time? "I was really confused. Especially about your behaviour over the break. You were so hot and cold."
"Ah, that," He looked down at the ground for a second, his ears had turned red. "When I'm around you, I'm never thinking. At least, not properly."
"You've said that," I recalled.
Aven nodded slowly, "I, uh, ended up talking to Zeki. It was a lot of back and forth for the entire reading week before he, all of them, told me to go for it. But I wasn't going to do anything you didn't want me to do. I needed to see the green light and that night, at the orchestra concert..."
"I gave it."
"Yeah, you did." He said, unable to fight the smile on his face at the memory.
The memory of that kiss settled in my mind. That memory and everything I'd been told started to unlock the safe and open the files in my head that I had of his laugh and smile. I tried to find any doubt in my head about what he had said and what I had seen.
Aven took our silence to shut off the projector and close his laptop before taking a cautious step toward me. "I don't know if what I did here was enough. I don't know if you need to go through all that we collected or if you don't. I just wanted a chance and if you don't believe me then at least I tried."
He stood there waiting. He didn't look anxious as he waited for my response. The way he looked at me right then and there was in a way I missed over the past weeks. It drew me to take another step toward him.
"Just me?"
He recognized my question, his brown eyes lighting up as a smile graced his face and he gave me an assured nod.
"Just you."
"Only me?"
"Only you."
"Aven?"
I stood in front of him. I was able to see the mix of relief and minimal anxiety clouding his expression. "Yeah?"
I was halfway through linking my arms around his torso when Aven didn't waste a second in surrounding me in his arms. I felt him relax against me, felt the rapid beat of his heart against my ear as I melted into his familiar body and he held me. He held me as if he couldn't fathom the idea of ever letting me go.
"You believe me?" He whispered, his tone light.
I lifted my head from his chest to peer up at him. "I believe you."
I didn't know who reached for the other first. All I knew was that my back was pressed against a table and Aven's lips were slanted over my own as he took what he didn't have for the month we had been apart.
I delved into the heat of his touch and his mouth. My hands clutched at his biceps, at the stubble on his face, reaching for him in any way possible as he devoured me. "I missed you," He breathed against my mouth. "I missed you so much, Jay. You have no idea--"
"I know," I assured him, knowing how hard it was to move past him.
"No," His eyes searched my face like he had to memorize every feature of mine. "You don't."
The look held sheer intensity and intimacy, allowing me to not second guess the underlying message. This was one thing I knew I couldn't be confused by even if he didn't say additional words.
I opened my mouth to speak when the door opened. "Okay, it is really fucking quiet and I'm concerned—shit." Iman shot us a sheepish smile once he realized our position. "Sorry, I'll uh, text Yas that we'll move sushi for tomorrow."
Before he left, he shot Aven a thumbs up. "Great job!"
When the door closed behind Iman, Aven reached down, intertwining our fingers. I didn't think he planned to let me go for a very long time.
"You don't have any more plans or any studying to do today, do you?"
I shook my head. "Not until tomorrow."
He beamed. "Good. I want to take a long break with you."
I grinned, getting on my tippy toes to press a chaste kiss to his lips. "I could use a long break."