Under the Umbrella ✓

-24-

"You're the first guest I've had over since I have been here," she heard him say.

She glanced back at him in shock. "Really?" He nodded. "Wow." She turned off the stove and began to make the sandwiches with what she had cooked. "How long have you lived in this place?"

"Three years."

Her eyes widened in awe and disbelief again. Three years and she was the first guest? It was impossible to believe. He seemed to have been stable from a very long time ago, and yet, after all these years, his apartment was as vacant as if he had only recently moved in. "How old are you?"

He didn't answer for the longest time, leading her to assume that he didn't hear her, so she waited until she finished with the sandwiches. She retraced her steps back to the counter he sat at with the simple meal in her hand and it was only then he replied to the question she had asked minutes ago.

"I'm turning twenty-nine this year."

She sat on the barstool opposite him after getting a hold of two water bottles from the fridge, placing the plate of sandwiches between them. Seeing his body up close was even challenging than trying to veer away from it when she was three feet apart from him. She realized his muscles weren't powerfully built, but they weren't really faint either. Pull yourself together, Aria! "You're eight years older than me," she hurriedly said as she skirted her eyes around the marble countertop, trying to divert herself. "Eat."

"Aren't you going to eat?" he asked, eyeing the sandwiches blankly.

"You first."

He looked at her transiently. "You know that sounds suspicious, right?"

"You know you're hurting my feelings, right?"

He wordlessly grabbed a sandwich while Aria stifled her smile. She didn't think he'd take her seriously. She hadn't even used a hint of seriousness in her tone.

She carefully surveyed his reaction as he munched on it, hoping she hadn't messed up their meal. "Okay?"

He wolfed the sandwich down in two bites. "It's good," he admitted, reaching for another as she grinned this time in satisfaction and dived in for her own.

As they topped up on the sandwiches, Aria fought the urge to look up from the plate in fear of ogling at Elliot's body again. It wasn't anything but a bunch of tissues that she occasionally drooled over in movies and TV series, and yet she was acting as if she was deprived. It took her a lesson of inner disciplining, but she tackled the task smoothly.

Until he threw in a question for her.

"What do you study?"

She dusted the crumbs off her fingers as she instinctively looked at him with a question in return. "How do you know I am a student?"

"You ask a lot of doubtful questions. Do you still think I'm a-"

"Don't even say the word," she hastily interrupted him. He needed to let go of it already. "You said so yourself; I'm a curious woman."

He looked at her in a way as if he wanted to guarantee that she wasn't lying. "I assumed so since you're twenty-two. Besides, you were waving a C graded paper around some time we met."

He sees everything, she grumbled in her head. Elliot noticed every little trivial thing that most people wouldn't even bother with. Then again, she wouldn't know what was negligible and what wasn't when she wouldn't even notice anything in the first place.

She didn't have to be embarrassed about it to someone she wasn't trying to impress, but the next thing she knew, she was saying, "I'm not as stupid as those papers portray me to be."

His lips betrayed one of his minuscule smiles again, the first she had seen for the day. "I didn't say you were stupid," he stated before adding, "C isn't a bad grade."

She cleared her throat, trying to forget about the comment she made. "I major in finance."

"What do you plan on doing?"

"Banking, accounting. Whichever." He nodded musingly at her response. "So are you the kind of lawyer who represents at the courts?"

"Well, sometimes," he mumbled as if he was trying to evade the topic. "I am usually not given cases like that."

"You don't get to choose your cases?"

"Not really."

"What kind of cases do you get?" she asked fascinatedly.

"Just corporate stuff." He chugged the water from his bottle in measured gulps, taking as much time as he could before looking at her. Aria blinked, prying herself out from being fazed by something so normal. "Do you like what you study?"

She made a face, shaking her head as she did. "It's boring, very boring."

He leaned closer with his arms crossed over the countertop. "Were you interested in it in the beginning?"

"Not really."

"Then why did you choose it?"

"Because it was a reliable field. I couldn't afford to choose something that wouldn't ensure me a job."

He didn't ask her to elaborate on it, which she was glad about since she realized she had said more than what she should have.

"Did you have something you wanted to do?"

She hummed contemplatively. "I don't think so..." she trailed off, still in thought. "Oh, I guess I liked journalism."

"Do you write?"

"No," she answered. She didn't even want to think of trying it in case she'd regret choosing a field that she wasn't fond of when her list of regrets had been piling up for a very long time. She worried she'd open up unnecessary matters of her life if she didn't turn the focus back on him, so she was quick to boomerang his question. "Do you like your job?"

Their questions went back and forth at a steady, loosened pace. Aria didn't feel the time steal away as they spoke. She tried to keep much to herself, and she thought she was doing a decent job at it, but she wasn't even conscious of what she was doing or slipping in the more she learned about him. She was a fool who didn't know what she wanted, but she was going to be an even bigger fool for realizing it way too late.