The Midnight Quesadilla

My apartment was a mess.

Honestly, I could blame it on my depression if I really wanted to and, really, it is partly true. I get sucked into depressive episodes by getting overwhelmed from getting behind on chores because of my high anxiety induced ADHD. I did talk to a psychologist about it once and he told me to go outside and exercise. But when you get right down to it, I just couldn’t find the motivation to clean my apartment. I wanted to, but I didn’t know where to start.

The week that I started to come out of this particular depressive episode was a weird one. My friend had just broken up with her long-term boyfriend before they were supposed to go on a long vacation and she had the entire week off still. By some weird happenstance, I had that Wednesday off and in a (possibly toxic) attempt to get her mind off things, I said “Let’s go out on Tuesday night!.” No one actually needs to go out on a Tuesday night, but when your friend feels like her world is spiraling out of control because of her own (potentially wrong and bad) decisions, you hop on that spiral with her and buy her a tequila shot.

During the winter, we frequented a small hipster bar in the downtown area that serves overpriced drinks while Bonnaroo’s Greatest Hits drowns out any meaningful conversation one might have. However, once the temperature started to warm up, we migrated back to our favorite local dive bar where the beer flows freely and Kendrick Lamar, Disturbed, and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” play back-to-back. The crowd really doesn’t change, much but since we’d been going to the bar for so long, our friend group had recently come across a group of guys on some of our previous outings. On this Tuesday night, two of the guys, Thomas & Harry, just happened to be there as well. While Harry looked like a bald Henry Cavill, Thomas had the unfortunate circumstance of looking almost identical to Jake Paul but also somehow miraculously looking like Sam Claflin at the same time, and I had the horrible misfortune of being unobjectively attracted to whatever that crossbreed was.

Thomas didn’t have a lot to say, but he had a nice smile & pretty eyes and was just very amicable in general. I’d been flirting, or at trying to flirt, with Thomas for a solid two weeks by this time. It was a very surface level attraction I had towards him, but, as I am 27 and boys still make me nervous, I felt like I wasn’t making much headway. The gods seemed to be smiling down upon me, however, and by some random miracle I had decided to braid my hair, which happened to be a huge weakness (read: turn on) of Thomas.’ Whether it was the magic of my braided hair or my friend, unbeknownst to me at the time, telling him a week prior, point blank, that I just wanted to fuck him, we ended up back at my apartment on that Tuesday night, doing what the good Lord explicitly told us not to do. It was fun, unexpected for sure, but fun.

Like I mentioned earlier, my apartment was a WRECK. Like, take out boxes & bags everywhere, clothes unfolded and tossed around, dishes stacked all around and in the sink, hadn’t even fully unpacked yet from moving in 4 months ago type of wreck. But I did everything in my power to keep his focused on me and off the surrounding mess. He found a forgotten vibrator I’d left in my sheets from earlier that morning as we were crawling into my bed, but other than that, it seemed like there would be no other mishaps for the night. We had a nice, couple romps in the sheets and a decent amount of pillow talk.

I couldn’t tell you what time he said he was hungry. It was dark and I was tired, but I instinctually offered to make him food. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I remembered all the dishes stacked on the counter and in the sink. I silently prayed he would say “Nah, that’s all right” and we’d be done with it but, instead, he asked what I had. I know I could’ve just lied and said I didn’t have anything. It would’ve been SOOO much easier and honestly safer for him in the grand scheme of things. My people pleasing Virgo sun & Pisces moon could not just say no, though, so I quickly ran through a mental list of what I thought I had in my kitchen that I could cook for him. Everything pointed to a cheese quesadilla and that is what I offered.

Thomas agreed to the cheese quesadilla. I got up out of my bed and through on a random shirt off the floor and went to the kitchen. My hand was on the light switch when I saw the outline and was reminded of the dishes on the counter and in the sink. I wanted Thomas to see as little as possible and if that meant me cooking a quesadilla in the dark, then so be it. I had made one enough times before, I could do it in the dark for sure. I placed my one clean saucepan on the stove and turned on the burner. As it began to heat up, I turned to grab the ingredients from the fridge at the same time Thomas walked into the kitchen. While hoping that the light from the fridge wouldn’t illuminate my kitchen too much, I began another conversation with Thomas, and I pulled the cheese, hot sauce, and sour cream out of the fridge without really looking at any of it. I had made myself a quesadilla last week so I knew everything should be good. Emphasis on should.

My eyes were already semi adjusted to the darkness so cooking in the dark didn’t turn out to be the hard. I plopped the tortilla in and then the cheese, and while the cheese was melting, I mixed the hot sauce & sour cream in a little bowl to dip the quesadilla in once it as finished. I flipped the quesadilla over several times before I considered it done and placed it on a plate. I handed the plate to Thomas and turned back around to grab the ingredients to put them back in the fridge. I opened the fridge again, the light shining blissfully out of it, and started to put the stuff back. First the sour cream, then the hot sauce, and lastly, the cheese.

My stomach dropped when I saw the cheese. In the light of the fridge, I could see shades of dark green and white covering the shredding's of cheese. Not just one or two spots in the bag, but thoroughly mixed in. In the waning days of my depressive episode, I had bought new cheese and put it in the fridge but hadn’t had the energy to throw the old bag out and had completely forgotten about it until now.

The realization that had grabbed the wrong bag of cheese set in very quickly and as I popped my head back up over the door to tell Thomas not to eat the quesadilla, he took a huge, first bite out of the quesadilla. Horrified by my mistake, my brain short-circuited. I threw the bag of cheese back into the fridge and shut the door. I stared at him, knowing I should tell him, but as he took another bite, all I could muster out was, “How is it?”

He nodded in satisfaction and if the lights had been on, my face would’ve been bright red. He finished the quesadilla in record time and handed me the plate. I sat the plate on the counter, then walked us back to my bedroom. I knew he wanted to go at least one more round and I obliged but couldn’t stop thinking about the moldy quesadilla currently floating around in his stomach. As we finally settled down to sleep, he let out a long sigh followed by a low “shit.”

“Are you ok?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “My stomach just hurts a little.”

I put my hand on his chest and patted it lightly, giving him a sympathetic “I’m sorry,” while vowing to myself to throw away the cheese in the morning once he left and to never tell a soul what I did (except maybe one or two of my friends). We fell asleep shortly after and he left the following morning. I threw out the cheese as soon as he left and, what I can only assume was a punishment for not telling him about the moldy cheese in the quesadilla, the universe blessed me with a UTI several hours later.

As far as I know, Thomas is ok.