Could Have Been, Never Was

→ Last Plug

She bounced her leg up and down and looked around frantically in her seat as if she needed to pee. Her laptop's battery only had a few more minutes left but she was nowhere near finished with her report. With the Wi-Fi at her house down for the past two days, the coffee shop was her only saviour. Which was what brought her to her current dilemma; the only unused plug was at the table of an incredibly attractive, in the intimidating way, man.

She tried to look around for another but with each second she wasted looking around, the laptop was one percentage closer to dying. She just had to buy the nice looking laptop with the low battery life.

With her laptop down the last five percent and her report not even planned, she plucked up the courage and walked to the attractive man's table. When he looked up from his reading and fixed her glasses, she almost went weak in the knees.

"Excuse, can I sit here? My laptop is dying and this is the only free plug."

"Feel free," he said, even pushing the chair out for her.

"Thank you."

After she settled in, she found it hard to work since she would either look up at admire his beauty or they would accidentally make eye contact. Even when she was working, she could feel his gaze.

"What are you working on?" He asked.

"My report for class, physics. The calculations are easy and all but it's the whole introduction, theory mumble gumble that throws me off."

"Really? I always found the calculations to be the hard part, especially when you had to calculate the error propagation. Never knew what I was doing and I'd just give it to my partner to do," he said with a laugh.

"But error propagation's the best part. Actually the best part is seeing the percent error to be as close to zero as possible."

"Where were you when I was taking physics? We could have been an amazing team," he said with a wink. "What experiment did you do anyways?"

"This one about simple harmonic motion, quite simple to be honest."

"I really needed you when I was doing this. I'm Aria by the way. I may not be of use with any calculations but I'm pretty sure I could find my old lab report if you need any help."

"Darla, nice to meet you and thank you."

Darla eventually finished her report and Aria, who already reread his book twice, stayed and kept her company.

"Are you done?"

"Yeah, how long is that book? You looked like you were on a roll before I got there. Did I interrupt your reading?"

"Don't worry about it but how'd you know I was on a roll?"

"I was eyeing that plug for a while before I actually moved," she admitted.

"So that burning sensation I felt was you?" Aria joked around. "To be fair, you were much more interesting than this book."

Darla bit back a smile and pulled back a strand of hair. "You too, you were a lot more interesting than the report."

"Even the calculations?"

"Yeah," she said, "even more than the calculations."

There was a pause between the two as they both didn't know what to say. Aria played around with his hair and Darla found a new interest with her shoes.

"So I'll see you some time?"

"Yeah, I'll see you." The two turned and walked their own way before they both turned back to face each other.

"You know, I don't have your number."

"I was going to say the same thing."

"Do you. Ah never mind. Wait, actually."

"Do you want to go grab a bite?"

"I'd love you."

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N O T E

Originally written for IAOW (on vivalding), it got scrapped in favour of another one (which you can read as World 3). However, I didn't want to let this OS go to waste so here it is.