Wyn was a liar. She had written thirteen and a half versions of the letter she gave Raif and the one she presented to him was the most palatable, but it was still a lie. The part about her brother was true enough, so the whole thing was coated in enough truth to stop anyone from guessing what the lie contained in the letter could be. 

The lie was that it wasn’t personal. Actually, her discomfort had everything to do with Raif. The thing was, when they moved into the same building on September first, mere steps from each other, it wasn't the first time she'd met him. She had met him exactly three times before that. 

The thing was, Wyn was beautiful like an anime girl, except better. Tactless young men were always telling her that she looked like Sailor Moon, except not Sailor Moon herself because she was a brunette and Sailor Moon was blonde. It was a little hilarious because once the guy started scrambling for the other sailor scouts, he would look at Wyn's reaction and realize he had failed epically. One guy even put up his hands in surrender, shook his head, and wandered off.

What all this added up to was that Wyn had huge eyes, an expressive mouth, and terrifying manners that were so superior she had never once been dumped by a boyfriend or stood up by a date. 

That's where Raif entered, oblivious of having entered the scene at all. She first saw Raif in that classic way people see each other for the first time... across a crowded room. There was a blue spotlight on him as he weaved his way through the club and even though another man had been paying her a compliment, she didn't hear him. She only saw the man who looked better than an elf out of Middle Earth crossing the room. His face was very pointed with three points all in a line: one for his widow’s peak, one for his nose, and the last for his chin. 

Wyn told herself she was not in love, because to be in love with a person you knew nothing about was completely stupid. 

When she was introduced to him later that night, he looked through her. It wasn’t that he was looking at another girl behind her, he wasn't. If she was beautiful like an anime girl, he saw something else about her… something boring. 

At first, she didn’t take it personally that he’d shown such little interest in her. Maybe he wasn’t interested in women, but the occasional glance across the room showed that he liked women. 

Maybe he was already in a relationship. Yet, that didn’t seem quite right either as he noticed various women throughout the night. Wyn watched him let his fingers rest on the waist of one woman. He kissed the hand of another, though it might have been a joke as they both laughed. He twirled another girl before taking her out to dance. For them, he was all smiles and interest.

For her, there had been nothing.

She felt her charms desert her like dry leaves swirling in the breeze, probably the way anime girls felt when their admirers left them for real girls.

When the night was over, Wyn found the meeting disconcerting. In the past, even if a man was not particularly interested in her, he was at least polite to her. It would have been easy to chalk Raif up as a rude man, but that wasn’t true either. He hadn’t been rude. He’d been uninterested. It probably wouldn’t have mattered if she hadn’t been so attracted to him. It was a surprising disappointment. 

She thought she wouldn’t see him again. 

However, she was mistaken. At last year's Christmas party, she was the date of a student in Raif's faculty (agriculture and forestry). She didn't expect to see Raif there, though she was aware it was a possibility. 

When Wyn got ready for the party that night, she simply knew she looked better than she had ever looked before. The roommate of the season was a hairdresser in training who did her hair up in the most exquisite winter braid, so there was a photo session before she left for the party. It proved what Wyn thought, she would never look better again in her entire lifetime. Not in her graduation pictures and not on her wedding day. She was at her peak. 

When she ran into Raif at the party, not only did he not remember meeting her the first time, he also did not appear to think anything about the way she looked. She had blinded every man she’d met that night, but Raif didn’t look at her twice. She wouldn’t have minded his lack of admiration if he’d had a date that night, but he didn’t. He moved from circle to circle, seemingly chasing no one except a good time, dancing with this girl and flirting with that girl. If he was playing the field, if he was flirting with all the girls… then why not her too?

The last encounter had been in the university library. It was like a scene out of a terrible rom-com. She’d been browsing and saw him on the other side of the bookshelf, looking at her over top of the books. He was tall, so he had to bend down to accomplish it. Then, like she wasn’t even there, he leaned forward and tugged a book loose on her side that had been shelved with the spine inwards. He could see the title from his perspective.

He hadn’t been making eyes at her through the books after all!

It was the third blow-by.

When she met him moving into the same apartment building, Wyn wore no warpaint, wore black sweatpants with cat hair and dog hair clinging to them (the sad aftermath of staying with her sister the week before), and her hair tied into a messy bun that could have rightly been described as a dirty bun. 

They bumped into each other and he had no idea who she was again! Regardless, he offered to help her carry in the things that were too heavy for her. So, this man who was not gorgeous, but somehow much better than gorgeous, because of his incredibly striking looks, his complete inability to fall for the superficial, and the kindness to help anyone, even on his moving day, had not found it in his heart to date her, flirt with her or even make small talk with her.

He must not like anything about her! Not her looks or her quick wit or even her incredible availability since she was one door down the hall. Not even one thing! 

And now, through some incredibly backward twist of fate, he hadn’t stayed down the hall from her but moved into her very apartment. 

Wyn felt sick to her stomach. If they lived together, shared warm drinks in the middle of the night, watched TV together, bumped into each other in their towels or housecoats, and saw each other when they were least prepared to face the world, she would fall in love with him. Maybe, through some warped scheme of the universe, he would fall in love with her too, but not because he would have under any other circumstance.

Well, Wyn did not want to be moved around like invisible forces controlled her life. Raif never would have fallen in love with her if they had carried on the way they were. It had already been incredibly serendipitous that he had moved into the apartment next to her. It was unbelievable that things had progressed as far as they had.

At least, she'd thought of the jar. That way he didn't have to talk to her if he didn't want to. Nothing quite like a well-placed hoop for him to jump through to see exactly how he felt. In this case, a hundred hoops. With the help of the internet, it was easy to come up with a hundred dumb tasks to keep him at arm’s length. Some of them were entirely too difficult, too demanding, and there was no rule that said she couldn’t refill the jar with more requests any time she wanted.

Unconsciously, she put her nose higher up in the air and didn’t think about the thing she feared most—the idea she kept locked deep inside her. What if he shared those warm drinks with her, helped her clean the windows, went grocery shopping with her, and did all the things she’d done with her other roommates and, at the end of it, was still not in love with her? What if he didn’t even like her? What if she was still unappealing to him?

Anime girls weren’t anything after the show was over.

Author's Notes: Thanks for reading!  I'll post another chapter tomorrow!  See you then!