The night before:
She has curlers in her hair and a twisting in her stomach. There’s a song on her stereo that he hummed incessantly one day until she asked him in the elevator, “What the hell song is that?” He told her, his lips forming this smile like he’d just told her a secret.
She stands in front of the mirror in her underwear for almost an hour. Just pulling at her skin and twisting her body around, wondering if he’d like the trio of moles just left of her belly button.
There’s the eye shadow Kelly helped her pick out the weekend before. She thinks it’s too much, too showy and maybe he wouldn’t be in love with her that way. So she goes back to an old favorite, just applies a little bit more. When she’s satisfied, she smiles at her reflection before washing it all away and brushing her teeth.
When her teeth are minty and smooth, she lets herself think about his mouth.
There’s a phone that doesn’t ring, but she’s sure he’s just getting settled. She sets herself down on her bed and pictures him standing amidst boxes. She wonders if he felt good, coming home. If he felt content and happy to see the familiar roads and faces and everything.
She wonders if he’s thinking about her.
***
The night after:
Tired and alone, she scrubs her face. She lets hot water turn her hair back into springs and corkscrews. She thinks about Jim and Roy and how time passes.
She wanders through her living room, just walks in circles as her socks slide against the hardwood floor. She imagines him with another girl, with Karen, with someone who hasn’t seen him leak until he’s empty. (Hands on backs and all that.)
She microwaves a frozen dinner for herself and solves the case on Law & Order before the second commercial break. She checks the caller ID on her phone three times just to be safe, because she can see him getting home and regretting what he said. Like she had, because they were the same in some ways.
There’s a glass of wine for every time she found herself crying in the third stall of the bathroom that day. It’s four and half, the half for the time she cried in the parking lot because she was sure she wouldn’t be able to make it to the bathroom and she felt like all of the air had been let out of her and she wondered if Bob Vance had that sort of air pump.
She looks him up in the phone book just to see his name in print with his Scranton address, because she isn’t really convinced that he’s here. The letters in his name have her remembering last year and all of his downward smiles and sideways glances.
She falls asleep with the light on.
***
The night before:
He’s eating a piece of the heavily frosted “Welcome home, Jim!” cake Mark’s girlfriend bought for him when she found out he was moving back in. The sweetness makes him feel sick, but so does looking at the five cardboard boxes scattered in the living room and thinking about telephones or girls with green eyes and pale skin. He figures this sort of nausea is better than most sorts of nausea so he takes another bite and swallows hard.
There’s an anvil in his gut, weighing him down with impossible strength. He pulls shirts from his suitcase and hangs them carefully in his new (old) closet. He watches them line up, one after another, like days and has to stop for a moment before he can start on his ties.
He feels like a rubber band. He’s been stretched and stretched and stretched and now he’s been snapped back.
He makes his new (old) bed and stretches across it when he’s done. The pressure builds behind his eyes until he’s convinced he’ll go blind before morning. He’s pretty sure he’d be able to see her even so.
He throws his forearm over his eyes and just to feel that hum in his chest for a split second, he lets himself remember how her body felt when she arched into him and the almost urgent pressure of her mouth.
When he finally lifts his arm, the sun is rising.
***
The night after:
He doesn’t kiss her goodnight even though she shuffles on her feet and bites her lip like a girl who expects to be kissed on her doorstep. He just says goodnight and hurries back to his car where his phone isn’t ringing in the passenger seat.
There had been drinks, fancy cocktails for her and three beers for him. She’d left her hand on his shoulder for a long time and he felt nothing but the weight of it. But weight equals warmth after months and months (years and years) of cold air.
He undresses from his work clothes, carelessly dropping his jacket and tie on the floor by the foot of his bed. He unbuttons the top two buttons of his shirt and runs his hands over his face. He can do whatever he wants, because they’re friends and they’ll always be friends. Words bounce back and forth against his skull until they turn into sounds without meaning.
He eats cold pizza he finds in the refrigerator. It’s hard and tastes like cardboard and he doesn’t want to know how long it’s been sitting in there. He doesn’t bother heating it up. Just eats it while standing at the kitchen counter, staring at the doors to the cabinets.
He hears Mark come through the door. He’s alone and Jim swallows the last bit of crust that’s in his hand before he turns to greet him. If Mark catches onto his mood, he doesn’t say anything, just says, “Man, you look beat,” and grabs a beer, turning the TV on in the living room.
He stands in the kitchen for a while after that, listening to the voices on the TV and looking at his hands on the counter. He jumps when the phone rings and he hears Mark pick it up in the other room. It isn’t for him, not that he really expected it to be. Mark laughs loudly and Jim rushes past him to get upstairs.
It gets dark early these days and he doesn’t even bother with lights when he falls across the bed.
Author's Chapter Notes:
Apologies for the angst.
Also: I own nothing.
unfold is the author of 102 other stories.
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