You Are the Only Exception

It was a Saturday night in Chicago. Naturally, for Maria Velto, this meant she was cozy in her studio apartment, drinking cheap coffee and watching SNL while the rest of her building was out hitting the town. After a long and strenuous week of dress rehearsals for her lead role in the latest Starkid production, coupled with the fact that “going out” was never Maria’s style in the first place, the bitter taste of the black liquid and Seth Meyer’s Weekend Update was a great way to wrap up the week.

Somewhere across town at Joe Moses’s and Joey’s place the whole cast and crew was probably getting hammered on kuluha concoctions cooked up by Walker and Darren. Ugh, Darren...

Just the thought of him irked Maria sometimes. But not because she didn’t like him. On the contrary, it was the mere fact that she actually DID like Darren that bothered Maria so much. He was everything she typically couldn’t stand in a guy- macho and cocky, toolish and a bit of a lush, always putting the party above all else. He was a player, a manwhore, an arrogant son of a bitch... The list went on and on.

And yet for some inexplicable reason, Maria, non-drinking, feministic, responsible and clean-cut Maria, LIKED Darren. They just clicked. Sure, they were probably the two least romantically compatible people in the world, but maybe that’s why it worked. There was no pressure of time or nature. Their relationship seemed to defy all laws of sense.

Maria's doorbell buzzed.

"Who the Hell could that be?"

As soon as she opened the door, the image of curly-haired, stumbling buffoon Darren Criss filled her vision. “Damn you, you dirty girl!” Darren slurred, pointing the tip of an empty- you guessed it- kaluha bottle at Maria’s nose. She pushed it away and rolled her eyes.

“Great to see you too, smart ass. What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be in whatever gutter you just crawled out of?”

“Why weren’t you at Joe and Joey’s?” He whined, completely ignoring Maria’s snide remark.

“Since when do I ever go to your dirty, post-college college-boy parties?”

“Laaaaaaaame!” He blatted like a tuba.

“What do you want, Darren?”

“I liked my life before you,” he stated heroically, stepping over the threshold and pushing past Maria into her living room. Taking a moment to silently ask God for some patience, she shut the door behind him.

“Oh?”

“Yeah man! I was livin’ the dream! Girls everywhere, drinks all the time, mad partying everywhere I went, and zero shit about what anyone thought of me,” he pointed at his chest. “But that’s alllllllll fucked up now because I can’t get you out of my head. You just haddddddd to be DIFFERENT.”

“You’re going to need to start making some sense or I’m going to have to kick you back onto the streets.” Maria responded.

“I was mackin’ hard on this girl tonight,” he explained through drunken hiccups. Maria had to try her hardest to suppress the world’s most sarcastic eye-roll for his usage of the word “mackin.” “And then as soon as I was gonnaaaa, you knowwwww, seal the deal, I thought about YOU.” He said the word with a certain mixture of disgust and pleasure.

“And?”

“And then I didn’t wanna mack no more! I totes lost muh flow, ya know?”

“Actually, I don’t know. Not in the slightest, Darren.” Maria shook her head. “And that still doesn’t explain why the Hell you’re standing in my living room at 1 am on a Saturday night.”

“You’re hot, dyaknowdat?” He flopped onto the sofa. “Your hair is pretty and red and soft looking,” Maria absentmindedly touched her hair, “And you’ve got a hot bod and killer blue eyes and a nice, sexy smile and all that.”

Despite herself, Maria blushed a bit. Luckily for her, she figured, Darren was far too inebriated to notice such details. He continued his ramblings, “you’re a smokin’ hottie... But I don’t actually want to fuck you!”

Maria sneered. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“No! No no no no,” Darren mumbled into the arm of the sofa. Maria shoved him sitting upright so he wouldn’t get his noxious liquor breath on her nice, clean, furniture. “I mean not RIGHT AWAY. I like, want to take you out and shit. Like on a date with flowers and I’ll wear a tie and pay for everything like dinner and not at a dumpy fucking Burger King but at a nice restaurant with nice food and then I’d walk you home and not even like kiss you or anything because-” he froze. Maria had been so fixated on his rambling that when she tried to get him to continue, her throat felt dry.

“Well?”

“Because I LIKE you, Mariaaaaaa,” he moaned. “I don’t wanna hook up with you because I LIKE you! I wanna treat you like a good dude would, but you’re so smart and I’m this whatever GUY who totes doesn’t GET you and I haven’t ever FELT this way about a chick before and it’s driving me FUCKIN’ CRAZYYYYY. I wanna sing the blues for my MARIAAAAAAA!” He sang into the empty bottle like a microphone.

“Shhhh!” Maria pleaded, pushing the bottle away from Darren’s mouth. “Just calm down a bit, ok? My neighbors will call down and bitch to the landlord.”

“But Mariaaaa,” Darren moaned once more, throwing his arms around her sloppily and smashing his face into the side of her arm. “You make me- You smell nice,” he switched his train of thought like a startled animal. “Pretty girl smell I want to date. Ha! Darren wants to date a girl! Darren wants to date Maria! Darren being crazy. Ha ha ha!”

“Listen, Darren,” Maria sighed, starting to feel a little tender towards him, despite the overwhelming smell of the booze. She wriggled free of his grip and took his lopsy, stubbly face in her hands, trying to force him to focus on her face and the words coming out of it. “You’re drunk right now. You don’t know what you’re talking about. So I’m just going to chalk this all up to nonsense and forget it ever happened, which I’m sure your wicked hangover is going to give you no problem with,” she couldn’t help but add at the end.

But really, she wasn’t so sure she could. Hadn’t she, in a way, been waiting to see this side of Darren? Actually hoping that a sweet (in his own way), actually normal CARING guy might emerge from the murky depths of his douchbaggery? And what was that old phrase Maria’s older brother used to say when their mom and her sisters would sip a little too much wine at the family New Years Party and start talking shit about their husbands- “A drunk mind speaks a sober heart” or something like that... Would it totally be out of the realm of possibilities to think that Darren might actually mean what he said- that Maria meant something different to him than any other girl?

He had gone quiet for a bit, his eyelids dropping lower and lower over his piano-black pupils. Maria got up and fished around her closet for some blankets.

“Crash here tonight,” she said quietly as she brought them over, tucked Darren in, and put a pillow under his head, which he quickly cuddled up to without question. “We’ll sort this out in the morning. Goodnight, Darren.”

Maria was halfway into her room before she so much as knew Darren had even heard her talking. He stirred a bit, and mumbled.

“You know,” Darren mused into the baby-blue pillow, although his tone suggested he was still talking to Maria, “usually when I look at a chick all I see are a pair of boobs and a good time.”

“Oh, good grief, I knew it wouldn’t last,” Maria grumbled.

“You didn’t let me finish,” he slurred, sitting up and looking at Maria with puppy dog eyes. Droopy, drunk, puppy dog eyes, but sweet all the same. He continued on his epiphany, “I was saying blah blah blah when I look at a chick I see just boobs and stuff... But not with you. You are the only exception.”