There's a hole in my pocket, that's about her size.

His fingers gripped tight on the steering wheel, crouching low enough that his eyes could watch between it and the dash. His breath clouded on the windshield in front of him, winter creeping its way in through the door frame.

He had been waiting in his idle car for at least fifteen (twenty?) minutes now, sucking blue raspberry slush through a straw. What kind of stalker chooses a blue raspberry slush anyway? Not only was it winter, making the prospect of drinking ice completely impractical, but it would inevitably result in staining his tongue blue. And who wants an apology from a guy with a blue tongue?

Slurrp.

As it turns out, he wasn’t the most adept stalker after all. He had considered petitioning Dwight for some tips, but by the time he would have finished mapping out his “strategies” on a chalkboard it would have been too late for him to tail her anyway. Besides, it was just following someone around, wasn’t it? How hard could it possibly have been?

Pretty hard as it (that’s what she said) turned out.

Not only had he lost her a mere two blocks from the office, but he had tried to meet her at her apartment, only to find that she wasn’t there. He caught a lucky break when he stopped for gas and happened to see her car pull into the grocery store parking lot.

He was with her. Some doctor that her parents had set her up with a few weeks ago.

Ryan watched as he opened the door for her, watched as her laugh reached her eyes, and drummed his fingers against the steering wheel impatiently.

He should just get up and go in there after her, he really should, and yet he didn’t seem to being moving. He took another large gulp of slush, hoping that the sugar buzz might at least spur him into some sort of action.

It had apparently worked, surprisingly, because he soon found himself walking toward the store, his hands stuffed in his pockets, his eyes fixated on the sliding doors.

His leg caught on something (a leash as it turned out) and his knees hit the pavement, biting his cheek in the process.

“Watch it, pal,” a woman scowled at him, pulling her barking bulldog in the opposite direction.

“Yeah, thanks,” he muttered, tasting the blood in his mouth.

It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the harsh light of the store, but he quickly slipped into one of the (cereal maybe?) aisles, actually feeling lucky to be trailing someone that was constantly talking. Seemed to make the job quite a bit easier at least.

He meandered his way down the aisle, following her chattering voice on the other side, stopping to pretend to examine a chocolate bar, while really hoping for a moment to eavesdrop in relative anonymity. Instead, he found himself tuning out her words like he usually had and wondering why candy and cereal would share an aisle, finally rationalizing that sometimes the two could, in fact, be interchangeable.

“Are you sure this is the right aisle for water chestnuts?” The man’s voice brought him crashing back to reality.

“Um, I don’t know, is it a fruit or a vegetable? I mean, who really knows the answer to that, right? Is it either? What are those even for?”

A slow burn in the pit of his stomach intensified as he listened. Grocery shopping together seemed like an awfully intimate endeavor for such a young relationship.

How he would give anything right now to debate with her over Justin Timberlake solo artist and Justin Timberlake circa NSync. Or to have her sitting on his parents couch, riffling through old baby photos and pointing out which of his features she hopes their children will have. Okay, maybe not the second part. That was a little much. But, even so.

“How about this?”

“Kelly, that’s cayenne pepper. Do you even know what we’re looking for?”

Ryan could feel his face growing hot, hearing another man talk down to his girlfriend. Okay, so what, he did it sometimes (a lot of times) too, but only when she was really getting on his nerves. And she knew he never meant it really, didn’t she?

It might have been all the talk of cayenne pepper, or maybe it was his earlier run-in with the dog (he was incredibly allergic to both) but a tickle rose in his nostrils.

Oh shit.

He tried to think of something else, anything else. Usually if someone said ‘God Bless You’ to him when he was on the verge of a sneeze that made it vanish, but there was no one around. Well, no one but Kelly and…

Trying to hold it in had apparently only intensified the sound of his inevitable sneeze as it reverberated down the aisle. He was a notoriously loud sneezer, always had been.

“Ryan?”

Kelly’s head was poked around the end of the aisle, and then she was walking towards him.

“Ryan, what are you doing here?”

Well, it was now or never, really.

“Kelly… I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I’ve been a real idiot.”

She crossed her arms, taking that wide-legged stance that girls always take before you dish out an apology to them. The one that lets you know that you’re in real deep shit and you better make it good.

“I’m sorry for treating you badly, I’m sorry I didn’t appreciate you, I’m sorry I made out with Karen after Jim broke up with her, and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it sooner.” The words came out like a bulleted list of his failures.

Kelly still stood there saying nothing. But at least she wasn’t walking away, yet.

“I do want to be the kind of boyfriend you want,” he sighed. “I’ll do, you know, whatever. Whatever you want me to do that I haven’t been doing. You know, the whole candles around the tub, or surprising you with flowers when its not your birthday. I want to do that for you.”

“Why?”

The question was curt and to-the-point (very un-Kelly-like), but it was a valid one. Why did he anyway? For the past year he had been convincing himself that all he really wanted was to be rid of her. Why not take the easy out? Or was he just not an easy-out type of guy?

“Because, Kelly… because you make me… happier. Without you I’m just this guy that acts like he’s better than everyone else, but you’re the one… you make me better.”

Apparently that was what he needed to say, because she ran toward him squealing, throwing her arms around his neck, covering his face with two different shades of lipstick.

“I knew you’d come around,” she giggled. “Just so long as you never do that again.”

Ryan nodded, part of him wondering if he should take the whole thing back, part of him relieved that she had forgiven him.

He took her hand and led her out of the store, her date forgotten.

"Ryan?" she turned to him once again.

"Yeah?" he strained a smile, hoping that he wasn't going to have to tack anything else on to his list of apologies.

"What's wrong with your tongue?"