His apartment is silent, save for the eggnog-induced snoring reverberating through the walls from the unit next door, because there’s already a foot of snow muffling the streets and the plow hasn’t found them yet. Ryan sips his hundred dollar scotch and hopes it’ll make up for the broken heating and the fact that no woman has touched him since that girl in the bar he barely remembers that threw up on him in the cab. But he’s still cold, still alone, and it bothers him more than he’d like, more than he’d admit to those idiots back at Scranton or his mom or those assholes that whisper behind his back at work.
Ryan slips the sleek cell phone out of his jacket pocket. Her number is still programmed into the directory, under her last name because at least then he could pretend it was still professional. The sharp ring of falling into a familiar hole whirs in his ears like an electric drill because he’d started drinking at four and this is the hangover kicking in already.
But then it’s her, her voice on the other end in the sugar-coated drizzle that always manages to worm its way into his head. But it isn’t actually her, just the automated message that he’d helped her program into her cell. If he listens hard enough he can hear himself sighing exasperatedly in the background, a little sliver of before caught in time like flowers in cellophane. The recording beeps and the air holds its breath.
He hangs up.
The apartment is dark, all the corners creasing inward onto the leather furniture and the boxes he never unpacked. He wishes he’d gotten a tree now, but it’s Christmas Eve and it’s snowing and it’s too late.
For a lot of things.
