word count: 2500

The weather was clear, the air crisp, the sky a sea of navy blue, and Kay, standing wearily at the threshold of his shitty apartment door, looked over the shitty parking lot and at Elaine in her shitty cut-off sweatpants despite the chill and at the shitty melting snow and he longed for a shitty onslaught of sleet and rain and maybe a little thunder just to get some sort of cosmic sympathy.

His date - if date she could be called - leaned down to pat him on his cheek consolingly and wordlessly. She was taller than him and wearing towering platforms; she fairly dwarfed Elaine, who watched her go with an expression of positive appraisal.

Ninety seconds ago he had finally succeeded in getting an arm around her after an evening of what might appropriately be called cat-and-mouse with her obvious nerves. Sixty seconds ago she’d been lifting her face towards his. Thirty seconds ago a violent banging on his door had startled her directly out of his shitty little bed and sent her scurrying in alarm towards the door. Fifteen seconds ago she’d asked if this was his girlfriend, only for Elaine’s horrified reaction to reassure her that this, at least, was not the reason this had all gone belly-up.

He watched her go on her deerlike legs - watched her hold up her phone as she went and suspected that she was deleting him from the app or perhaps the app from her phone entirely, having never actually given him her number - while feeling his hand assume the instinctive shape for holding a weary cigarette like a fraying lifeline before remembering there was none there, and Elaine, at last, made a consoling noise.

“She was way too hot for you anyway,” she said. “Out of your league.”

“Yeah, I ******** noticed,” he said, trying to keep both the rage and the despair out of his voice and succeeding at neither. “I was aware.”

“You were ignoring your phone.”

“Yeah, no s**t. Take a guess why.”

“You told me any time,” she reminded him. This was true. He had, when she’d lent him fifty bucks that he probably didn’t need as badly as he’d thought he did at the time, and was now regretting. It was too true even for him to argue, and so he didn’t.

That was the shape of it, anyway: to come close, and be pushed far. Over and over, until for want of thwarted affection he felt himself inwardly gnawing on the bars of his bodily cage. It would have been bad enough if it had only been his pathetic romantic overtures that were getting curved, but the world was not so kind as to merely limit him to the most tolerable of his denials.

Walked into work. Cheryl at the cashwrap. Grim look on her face.

“You aren’t ready for the backroom,” she said when he was already on his way there and halfway out of his coat. She joined him as he stood with his hands in his hair, looking aghast over the wreckage.

“What the ******** happened?”

“Owner came down,” she said.

“I thought he was dealing with Roanoke this week.”

“He was. But he came by and decided that everything was running too smooth so naturally it all needed to be overhauled, and I reckon he lost the taste for it about an hour into ruination.”

“This only took him an hour? This is going to take an entire shift at least. Where the ******** did he move the - holy s**t, why is it there?”

“He did at least say we could put it back if we didn’t like it. Generous, right? And my back’s still out,” she said cheerfully. “So you might wanna put that nice coat right back on, because you’re going to be back here in the cold all day.”

There was no arguing with this. He looked with numb resignation at the shape of the incoming hours, the chill already seeping into his arms.

“I need a hug,” he said, but Cheryl - and god bless her - only took this for a meaningless cry of exaggerated despair, and patted him on the shoulder.

What else?

His nail tech, as he insisted on calling her, was bent over his fingers, applying some sort of organic, meandering design to them with a tiny little brush. When she bent down he could smell the ammoniac reek of her roots bleaching out.

That was their arrangement: he got her roots sorted out and touched up the back of her fade, and she practiced on him.

“I got into this to pick up girls,” she was saying.

“You mentioned that once,” he said. He could not remember a time when he chewed his nails, and only knew in some abstract sense that he had, and that this had been his means of avoiding it. He wondered how he’d afforded it then, if he hadn’t been bartering.

“Thought I’d be holding some cute femme’s hands and getting paid for it,” she continued, with an accusatory air of lamentation.

“Hold my hand, if it makes you feel any better about it,” he said, pretending like it was a joke.

“Maybe if you’d let me do tips and some pink,” she said.

“Not unless you want me to make it look like a rack of carpet samples on the back of your head,” he said, and she motioned for him to put his hand back under the lamp, where he looked dully at the blue gleam - like an old rave floor, he thought; he knew but could not recall the press of bodies on every side - and then at her own hands moving over her brushes, looking far away from his.

Fingernails still had that weird, tight feeling that they always did afterwards, and he was never sure if it was because she was learning or if it was normal. Guy across the sidewalk was giving them a look - Kay not even sure how he’d noticed them in the dark - and acting cagey.

“You said you were masc,” he said skeptically.

“No I didn’t. You assumed. You said you were open minded on that score.”

“No I didn’t. I said I wasn’t hating on anyone.”

“You also said you were six foot two.”

“And you said you were five foot ten.”

There was a pause, hostile on the guy’s side, exhausted on Kay’s.

“I’m not even into guys,” said the stranger in a tone of arrogant, defensive panic that was instantly recognizable. This was never going to have happened, and Kay hated himself that the relief was not unmixed when it arrived - that it arrived, even, in unsteady waves between other feelings.

Over to Elaine’s, instead, after a quick text and an Uber he couldn’t really afford, where he sat at her bar and tried to eat her leftovers around a tooth that was troubling him with alternating ice and fire and starting to radiate out into a throbbing headache. She was lecturing him about something, again, but he’d tuned it out five minutes ago and only dropped back in when he realized she’d asked him a question. He rewound the last few seconds while chewing like his mouth was a minefield - and right now it was - and formulated a vague enough answer.

“I don’t know. Maybe two or three weeks. It probably just needs to be yanked.”

“You OK with that?”

“Are you paying for a crown?”

“No.”

“Then yeah, I’m OK with that.”

He felt, rather than saw, her look of pitying contempt. Maybe if he could have the luxury of bursting into tears at that moment - and the tooth had him closer than he’d been in a while - he could have fallen on her pity enough to get her consoling arm around him. He’d seen her give hugs to other, more fortunate favorites, and he imagined that they were good ones, even if he couldn’t imagine her tolerating his weakness long enough to let him cry on her unless he was paying her money he didn’t have, and was in fact instead borrowing from her. He tried, for a moment, but no tears came. They almost never did, and only in inadequate, unsatisfying ones and twos.

He closed his eyes slowly, fork suspended in midair as he found himself too worn out to even complete the motion of lowering it back to the food.

“Bite down on it?” she asked, and it wasn’t so much with sympathy as it was with an “I-told-you-so” condescension that she could never entirely keep out of her voice around him.

“Yeah,” he lied. She was putting her hair up, treating him like a little brother who was annoyingly refusing to get out of her room. Getting ready for a night out to dance too close to too many people.

Hard to party with a toothache. Hard to get himself into some sort of crowded noisy club in the nail-lamp lights when he had no car and no fare and no cover and an early opening shift the next day. Would have been a relief to move around a little, a relief to bum something off someone and feel the Great Connectedness of All Mankind through a film of vape and smoke and sweat and perfume.

“Don’t smoke in my house,” she said before she left. He didn’t bother reminding her that he’d already quit (again). There was a convenience store within walking distance and a lack of fortitude in his heart that she clearly perceived. He did not, however, smoke in her house. He didn’t smoke at all, which is how it was that a few days later Maus - and not Kay - had not been smoking when he finally had someone throw herself into his arms, only for her to sob out her confusion and fear in a way that had robbed him of all the relief he might have found in them.

Only Maus, apparently, deserved an answer to his increasingly-desperate prayers, and only in a shape that made it more of a penance than anything. Kay remained bereft.

Tooth was temporarily abated when he finagled someone over to his s**t apartment after forty-five agonizing minutes of lackluster messages, but it might as well have been in full force. The finally, finally, thank God relief had been as inadequate and short-lived as his tears always were.

“I don’t know, man,” said a person who was a stranger to him and could not carry on a conversation, pulling away. “It’s - I mean -”

“You said you were fine with making out,” he said, not quite able to keep the despair out of his voice. The tone did not help his case. He watched everything wisp away like so much smoke. The ick, as the kids called it these days, he believed, was palpable.

“Yeah, but I didn’t think you meant like that,” he said. “Just kinda intense, you know?”

Kay felt it was enough that he had the decency to pretend like he needed to apologize for the night falling through. Felt like a big concession to even act like he was 50% of the blame, let alone all of it. He watched the headlights pulling out and driving away as they chased shadows across the walls of his shitty apartment and realized, numbly, that the ******** had smelled like cigarettes, and had somehow managed to leave it on his blankets despite only being there for a minute or two.

At the convenience store, with his hair still obnoxiously unrumpled, the change - rather than being put into his hand by the dead-eyed cashier - dropped down an automatic plastic slide on the side of the register. Some sort of precautionary measure against a generation of minimum wage employees who couldn’t do basic math, probably. His fingers were cold when he fumbled it out of the impersonal and unresponsive tray, and colder still when he stepped outside, unwrapping the pack on the walk back across the street.

His neighbor was on the little square of concrete that passed for a front stoop, ensconced in her own smoke. Would it count, if he asked for a light? Would the uniting kindness of the smoking species, bent towards him in that gesture of brotherhood, be enough? Could he wick from it some sort of connectedness? He unfolded a short mental film of her seeing in some moment of cosmic empathy the desperate, animal desire for nearness in his eyes, and leaning out to take him into her unjudgmental arms. Maybe he’d even, finally, ******** cry a little.

She saw him, waved on her way back inside while he was still halfway across the street, was gone by the time he got back to his own shitty step and lighting his own on a lighter that hadn’t seen service in weeks. He had stood here on that other clear navy blue night and watched his ill-fated romance totter away on her platforms while Elaine, undoubtedly, stood beside him and wondered how he’d managed to lure that elfish creature into his shitty little room. He, too, now wondered - had wondered then, and half-charmed her by saying so in a way that was clever and funny and flattering - and then decided with a distant numbness that it was because God was feeling especially inclined to laugh at him that night.

What was there to do, after all, but laugh with him? So he did, huddled into the jacket he only kept for smoking in, replaying the last run of failures in his mind and embroidering them with better details while he worked his way through two cigarettes - each drag like a needle in his tooth - culminating in a single, silent laugh to himself at last.

It’d be worth it, when he could tell -

Well.

Again, the strange blankness of a wall in his mind. Tell who? Someone’s name had lived there once, or many someones. Gone now, along with whatever closeness they might have offered to a man who was not Kay Little.

Still. It was funny to be the punchline of a repeated cosmic bit. He could always admit when something was funny, and it was. But it was starting to get a little worn out. He hated, more than almost anything, people who rode a ******** joke into the ground.

His phone made a little chirrup. It was the sound of elevated expectation and inevitable disappointment, and so he ignored it, listening instead to the night noise of the busy city, wherein thousands of lives kept shingling themselves together in unexpected ways.

Mel - her motives probably mistaken - had suggested that the city was full of people who might like him. Didn’t matter much, he supposed, if this was the way things were going to go. Maybe this, too, was some sort of cosmic penance. Before - when he had been someone else, or even just someone at all - he knew, even if he could not remember, that this had not been a frustration he was often subjected to. Something had changed when he had. But his nights on the other side had been sleepless for reasons worse than a cold bed.

Always a silver lining, he thought, and it wasn’t even a lie, this time.