Of soulmates and one-night-stands

When Jason turns twenty years old, he goes to his best friend’s New Year’s Eve party. He does that every year without fail, but this year, Jason has a new best friend, and so the party takes place in a different house, with different guests. That’s how he gets to meet Eva.

Between them, it’s love at first sight. He sees her, she sees him, and they both instantly decide that they like one another. Jason is wearing a white T-shirt and a green cap – backwards, obviously – and Eva has chosen a green dress and a white scrunchy, which probably means that they are soulmates that dress accordingly even before having met. All in all, it’s extremely romantic.

It should be noted that this last part is mostly important to Jason. Eva does not care much for romanticism since her last boyfriend – a prince charming coming straight out of a storybook – cheated on her with her roommate. She does find Jason quite to her taste though, and well, it’s New Year’s Eve: they’re both drunk. Eva considers herself free to make any mistake she feels like making, and then to blame it all on the alcohol and the heat of the moment come morning.

They talk little before taking it up to Eva’s room. The talk is good though, so it’s not a complete loss – with each passing second, Jason feels more and more like he’s speaking with the love of his life. Eva prefers the banging they do quite enthusiastically in her bedroom, but then, everyone is different and likes different things, so it’s not a problem at all. They talk some more afterwards, while they’re resting on the pillows, and this discussion Eva enjoys more than she cares to admit to.

It’s still early in the evening, because the party started two hours before it ought to, meaning it’s not even close to midnight and everyone is already drunk out of their ass, happily passed out on the couch or up in one of the many rooms of the mansion. Eva is Nate’s cousin, she sleeps here tonight, which is why she gets her own room with a key to lock the door, but a lot of the guests don’t care much for that and just hop into the first empty room they see. The end result is more than a little confusing for anyone searching for their lost friends. The party is a big one, because Nate decided that he could perfectly well host a frat party in his parent’s house for New Year’s Eve and there was no deterring him from it. Eva finds it ridiculous. Jason loves it – he’s not Nate’s new best friend for nothing, she thinks.

So that leaves them with a lot of time to kill before they have to dress up again and head downstairs for the countdown. And once the banging is over, with the absolute certainty that Jason won’t be up for another round in the foreseeable future, there isn’t much left to do but talk – even Eva has to concede to that.

Jason carries the conversation. He doesn’t mind, though – more and more he manages to make Eva laugh, and if truth be told, she has a smile like he has never seen in his life. Bright and radiant, so dazzling it eclipses everything else in her face for a few seconds when it appears. He loves it. He’s not quite at the point where he’s certain he loves her, but he’s getting there steadily. There is something about the pure intimacy of talking with someone you just had sex with, right in the bed where said sex took place, that gets him every time. Eva lets her fingers run across his arm absent-mindedly when she answers his questions. It feels great. It feels like something he would want the woman of his dreams to do.

Though he doesn’t notice it, he has a tendency to slur his words when he’s a little bit drunk. He talks and talks, and more often than not his sentences end on a muddle of half-mumbled sounds as he dozes off for a second. Jason feels warm and happy, and Eva can’t help but find him adorable, truthfully. It has to do with the way he rubs his hair against the pillow like a pleased kitten, the way his long lashes brush against his cheeks when he closes his eyes, the way his clear blue iris seem almost transparent when he opens them again. He smiles when she smiles, as if that were some sort of automatic reaction from him, and though Eva knows that she’s drunk as well, he truly is handsome when he smiles back at her like that, somehow simultaneously coy and confident.

When the time to get back to the party eventually comes, they’ve spoken for quite some time. Jason picks Eva’s white scrunchy from the ground and claims he’s going to keep it as memory of her, and when she laughingly protests, he gives her his green cap in exchange for it. “You’re in green anyway,” he grins as he snaps the scrunchy around his wrist, “I’m just helping you complete your look.” Of course, he’s entirely wrong, because Eva’s dress isn’t exactly the same shade of green as his cap, and it doesn’t go with a cap nearly as well as it did with her previous elaborate hairstyle anyway. But she lets it go, and takes the hand he offers her while heading out of her room.

In the living room, it’s utter chaos. Nate very probably hadn’t anticipated how many perfect strangers would show up at his party, brought along by friends of friends of friends – Eva has a headache just envisioning the cleaning that awaits them the next day. Jason high-fives some of his friends while making his way to a couch, even stops to chat with a few of them, but his hand makes its way to Eva’s waist, and he presses her closely to him as he walks.

The couch looks pretty disgusting. He sits down anyway, but Eva takes one look at the vodka-soaked cushions and perches herself on his knees. Truth be told, Jason is perfectly happy with that, though he makes a point of loudly complaining about it just to make her laugh. She’s breathtaking – she’s showstoppingly spectacular in his cap, with her chestnut hair crumbling all over her shoulders and that smile of hers on full display. He feels this close to falling in love with her.

As seems obvious, Eva does not at all feel close to falling in love with Jason. First of all, Eva does not believe in love anymore – as a reminder, she caught her ex-boyfriend cheating on her with her roommate one day she got home early from a friend’s birthday party. Second of all, Eva – contrarily to Jason – is well aware of their surroundings, and the lewd comments that Jason’s friends seemingly can’t help uttering sort of ruin any romantic mood she might be in.

Still, she has to admit it: he’s cute. In fact, if she trusted her senses, she would say that he gets cuter and cuter as the party goes on.

Somehow, she’s able to get her hands on two glasses of champagne as midnight approaches, without even having to fight too much for them.

“TEN,” she hears Nate bawl from somewhere in the room, though she can’t see him from her seated position, “NINE, EIGHT…”

Beneath her, Jason is whole-heartedly hollering the countdown along with everyone else, and she finds herself smiling down at him as she raises her glass towards him.

“HAPPY NEW YEAR !” he screams at the top of his lungs, and then, lowering his voice and looking at her, “To new beginnings”. And there is a promise, right there in her eyes, of something new and beautiful blossoming in the middle of the cheers and hugs around them.

They toast. “To new beginnings,” she confirms.

And then they never see each other again.

***

Of course, this wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. Based on their matching outfits, great sexual encounter, tender smiles and lengthy discussions, Jason and Eva should by all means have fallen head over heels for each other. They should have woken up in each other’s arms, gone to take some coffee together at Starbucks, stuck together for a while, met their respective families, married, had children, grown old together and died. Jason is pretty sure of that.

Yet God works in mysterious ways. And besides, they make a tragic mistake: after drinking their glasses of champagne, Eva manages to convince Jason that a shot contest would definitely be the most fun way to end the night. They are joined by Nate, who makes it his mission to make his cousin and his best friend drink as much as possible. Eva ends up in the toilet emptying the content of her stomach, at which point her best friend shows up and takes matters into her own hand. This is tragic, because it means that Jason is unceremoniously kicked out of the bathroom, and thus doesn’t get to spend the night in Eva’s bedroom, to wake up in her arms and so on.

All in all, it derails the entire plan.

Come morning – or, more exactly, come the middle of the next day’s afternoon since they aren’t up before that point – Nate confronts Jason. They have a lengthy discussion which derails the plan further, and which could be summed up the following way: “Bro, sleeping with my cousin? Not cool. But getting together with her? Impossible. Whose side am I supposed to take when the two of you inevitably break up in a horribly messy way?”

To Nate’s credit, Jason’s approach to love and relationships has consistently made for ugly breakups.

And Jason, for all his undying faith in true love and soulmates, believes just as much in friendship as he does in love. He considers Nate’s words very carefully, comes to the conclusion that there is some sense in them, and decides that he will not pursue Eva unless she pursues him first. Of course, believing in true love and soulmates, Jason is also pretty certain that Eva will in fact make the first move if he fails to.

He is thus awfully disappointed.

***

Eva, for her part, is not quite sure of what she thinks of the night before. She enjoyed Jason’s company more than she thought she would, and is thus caught in a dilemma: she can classify this whole thing as a great, extremely wholesome one-night-stand, with a very cute and nice guy the likes of which she should have one-night-stands with more often; or she can decide that she wants to take things a step further, because Jason just seemed that much like a nice guy and her night was actually great from the point she met him to the point she started puking in the toilets.

Being unable to make up her mind, Eva decides that the best course of action is to let Jason decide for her, and then to follow his lead. He ignores her. So, she ignores him, and brushes off the slight pang of regret that she feels at this turn of events.

Eva has had her heart broken once by a boy who didn’t care enough. She is hell-bent on not repeating this mistake with every cute guy that crosses her path.

***

Some trajectories are destined to cross once and then never again. Fate, as it happens, does not always place again and again on one’s path all the opportunities that one failed to seize. Jason does not see Eva again. Eva does not see Jason again. It’s a tragedy, in a way: a small, scaled-down tragedy, a tragedy that’s not to be worried about too much.

Eva keeps Jason’s cap for a while. She finds it cute, endearing. She has a fond memory of the moment he artfully placed it on her messy hair, of his smile widening as he took her in. She keeps it long enough for that memory to start fading, until all she has left of it is the impression that it made on her. Long, long after that party, on a night where she’s taking stock of her old things with her fiancé as a means to prepare for their moving in together, she finds it again and sticks it on his head. “It suits you better than me,” she says playfully, and he grins at her in response.

Jason finds his new soulmate – which, for once, is actually his future wife and love of his life – when he walks into his first economy class the following semester. He sits right next to her and offers her the white scrunchy. “You,” he says, “look like an Eva.” He’s wrong, of course, but that makes her smile all the same, and about that at least he was absolutely right: her smile is as beautiful as Eva’s was.