Notes: four is unlucky.
I.
The night is deep by the time he arrives. The snow does not fall under the bus stop, but she still sits there, silently, in the secrecy of night.
She doesn't say anything. He sits next to her, close enough to touch, but not quite. Her fingers, splayed out onto the cold bench, come just short of where his land.
The snow continues to fall. His long eyelashes are caught with snowflakes, dusting white onto his usually honey brown eyes. He does not look at her. She turns to look at him.
"Where are we going this time?" she asks, an old ritual, practiced.
"You'll find out," he tells her.
She smiles, and turns to watch the poster on the other side. If she watches it long enough, maybe it will change.
She does not see him squeeze the tears out of his eyes. She does not see him stare at her hand, at her face.
He turns away before she can.
The minutes tick by. He says nothing. He does not apologize. She does not ask for one. He's here; that's apology enough.
The bus comes; they board. It's the last bus before the next day, 11:56 PM on the dot. It's two minutes late - not enough traffic to make it later.
The inside of the bus is an acute change from the outside. The bus driver, seemingly, prefers it warm. She sheds her coat. He does not.
II.
She slides onto the bench a couple minutes after he came in, the park bursting with the anticipation of spring. It is cold out, the morning barely crested over the horizon.
"I loved you once, you know," she says, offhandedly, a greeting.
He freezes, for a brief second. He's been married six years, divorced four. Her, married nine. "How long ago?"
"Oh, fifteen years or so. Never did anything about it."
"Me too," he admits. "It hardly matters now, does it?"
"No, but I'm glad to know."
She grasps his hand for a brief second, before letting it go. "Remember all those bus stops?"
"I tried to pretend they were dates."
"Me too."
He does not look at her. He looks straight forward. "You said you didn't want to date me, once, all those years ago."
"When?"
"To your parents. I don't know. I overheard you."
"I lied."
Silence. They've never needed noise to express themselves. She lets herself, just once, to pretend that they had said something, that something had happened, that her nine years of marriage were to him.
She finds she does not like it. She fell out of love with him a long time ago, she does not need to think like this now. She prefers how both of them ended up.
He does not.
III.
It's not enough. It'll never be enough, but still she stresses about all the small imperfections that he will not care about.
Her hair. The small pastries she picked up from the bakery on her street corner - her favourite bakery, his favourite tarts and cakes. The way she's dressed.
She worries she's too blatant, that he'll take one look at her and realize. She can't lose him; she's known him as long as she's known herself. She's loved him too long, in any form, to let him go.
She watches the windowsill. Her house is always as welcoming as she can make it, not just for him but for everyone else. She knows she pulls him along by his hand to whatever next destination she can think of. He returns the favour, but with less of himself than she manages.
The windowsill is white; it's been white since she bought the place. Her parents still frown at her living alone, and her uninterest in anyone. They call him a nice young man, ask why she does not simply date him.
Her heart breaks every time, but she maintains that she does not want to date him.
A knock on her door; two quick knocks followed by a longer one, and then a single ending knock.
She opens the door. He stands there, almost embarrassed. He spent too long preparing himself to walk to her apartment building, only three blocks away. He changed his outfits twice. He bought her favourite pastries from her favourite bakery.
"Come in," she says.
He hesitates, before walking into the calculated warmth of her apartment, with just enough personality leaking through for him to recognize her in the walls and corners.
"I brought the raspberry-chocolate cake," he says, "from your favourite bakery."
She laughs. "I already got your favourites. I'll put that in the fridge."
He tries to feel appreciative. He does not.
IV.
He's across the country, in some kind of mandatory business conference that she does not know about the details. For a second, she wants nothing more than for him to come home to her every day and tell her about his work.
But he still calls her from across the country, the phone obscuring the nuances of his voice. He tells her about the two museums he's visited so far - one museum that he insists she'd love, and by the sound of it, she would. He offers something, in his voice, that doesn't make it to his words.
She doesn't dare to reach.
In corollary, she tells him about the thunderstorm a couple days ago, the rain pouring down fast. Neither of them live on ground floor - hers is eighth floor, his ninth - but she'd heard of some minor flooding in the suburbs. She checked his, too, she tells him, and he had no flooding. Of course not, eighth is too high.
He thanks her. She laughs it off, her laugh off through the phone. She laughs a lot, he notices. She laughs too much in his presence, she notices.
"You laugh a lot," he says.
A pause.
"What's the matter with that?"
"No, it's nothing." He doesn't want her to get upset at him.
"Okay, then."
The conversation tapers off of that.
Before he hangs up, though, he tells her this: "Meet me at the bus stop near your building. Midnight, the night before the third day I'm home."
"I will," she promises. "Call me again in three days."
"I will," he promises.
While he's at his conference, he misses her. He imagines telling her that. He imagines her face, just once. He imagines telling her he loves her.
He does not.