All This Time

What if...?

It took four days for C to reply to her last letter.

Four days.

Mika didn't want to make a big deal out of it. She had been sufficiently distracted with all the time she hung out with Paul over the last few days, after all, keeping her from obsessing at the lack of notes on the board. But still, it felt a little unfair that he never replied to her last letter and that he stopped just as when she had finally broken free from her block.

In fact, she had just finished the poster that would replace the one in the lobby. And if C had replied to her, she would've told him that he could get his poster so she could hang this one up. But he didn't respond, so the poster remained at home.

Then, boom! A letter. A long one, too. However, instead of the great feeling she usually got from reading his words, Mika felt strangely unsettled.

"I thought you were going to post this downstairs?" Therese asked, pointing her lips to the poster on the table as she smoothed out the wrinkles on the sheet mask that covered her face. She joined Mika at the couch, where she had been moping about C's letter.

"I forgot about it," Mika lied, looking at the half-finished letter beside it.

"No, you didn't. I saw you bring it down yesterday. Why is that still here?"

Of course, Therese saw through that. Mika was too tired to explain, so she got C's last letter from under the notepad and handed it to her. With raised eyebrows—at least, it looked like those were her eyebrows behind the sheet mask—she got the letter and read it quietly.

"Well?" Mika said after a while. "What do you think?"

Therese folded the letter back slowly. "I think C's in love."

"Right?" Mika threw her hands in the air. "I knew it. He's in love. And he was also at the watercolor class last weekend, but for the life of me, I can't even remember if there was another guy there besides Paul! I—"

"Are you jealous?"

"What? No! Why would I be jealous?"

"I don't know. Why are you acting so strange about it, then? Is this why you didn't put your new poster there?"

Wow, Therese was on a roll there. "I'm...maybe. But it's not because I'm jealous."

"Okay, so why?"

Why did she feel weird about it? What was she expecting anyway? That C also had some feelings for her? That C would ask to meet up with her, ask her out on a date, fall in love, and they'd be together? It was silly when she framed it this way, except that maybe Mika had wanted that to happen at some point.

The bigger reason is that there was something in the letter that felt almost like a goodbye. Or maybe not yet a goodbye, but a slow and gradual death of their exchanges. If he was in love, then he'd be busy with that girl soon, and he wouldn't have time to write to her. And because she was just an artist whom he didn't even know in person, then it would be easy to just stop writing—which he already did, if the past five days were any indication.

So not putting up her new poster—the one she was working on before her dinner with Paul and finished after—was a way of delaying things. Maybe if she told C that her block was still there, then he'd keep writing. Perhaps for as long as there's no new poster there, C wouldn't get his, and Mika wouldn't lose her friend who had been so helpful to her in the past month. What if he took her creativity and inspiration with him?

Therese snorted when Mika was done explaining—no, ranting—to her. "I think you're giving him too much credit."

"But he did help me."

"No one's denying that. But most of the work was with you. This,"—Therese pointed to the poster on the table—"didn't just happen. This was you putting in the work, choosing to show up. C just reminded you of all these things, but not even a thousand of his letters can make anything happen if you didn't choose to do it."

Mika looked at the piece on the table. Didn't she just tell C to make his own choices instead of letting life happen to him? He just followed her advice, and she was about to follow his until she let her fear of losing him get in the way.

She exhaled. "Okay, I'll post this tomorrow."

"Awesome. At least we already have a page with your contact details on your new website!" Therese clapped her hands loudly, just as she had done when Mika told her last Friday that she was almost ready to get her work out there. She had never seen her best friend put a website up faster than she did that weekend.

"And look, if he does stop writing, I'm still here," Therese continued. "And Paul's here, too. I mean, I assume he'd be there for you since he's been around you every single day. I'm sure he'll be able to inspire you a lot." She smirked at Mika before rising from the couch to go to the bathroom.

Mika just laughed. The thought of Paul sent a flutter in her stomach, but she'd think about him later. She had a letter to write.

"Hey Miks," Therese called from the bathroom after a few minutes. "What if you can't remember if there was another guy in the watercolor class because there was no other guy there?"

"What do you mean?" Mika asked, looking up from her notepad. Her best friend leaned against the bathroom door frame, a mischievous smile on her lips.

"What if C was actually Paul?"

Mika's mind flashed back to that dinner with Paul and how he oh-so-casually quoted the words on her poster. Or the fact Paul was the youngest in his family and a lawyer, too. Then she remembered that time last Sunday at the watercolor class when he tried to paint his second name on his paper to test out the different colors. The letters looked a little too much like how she wrote the word in her first poster. Or those times she'd catch him watching her with a small smile on his face, like...he was content to watch her have fun.

And didn't C's new letters always arrive soon after her morning sessions with Paul at Ahjummart?

Could it be? If Paul was C, then he was at the watercolor class, and...

He was in love with her?

But...it couldn't be.

Right?