Anna plopped onto Eddie’s secondhand couch, ignoring how it sagged and threatened to swallow her between the two middle cushions. Conversationally, she said, “I got fired today.”

All noise from the kitchen ceased.

“Well, not fired in so many words,” she amended, a rueful smile tugging at her lips. She stared up at the water-stained ceiling (Eddie’s upstairs neighbor had left her bath running unattended more than once). “Cassandra’s husband called me this morning and said I wasn’t needed for the day. But he sounded all weird, so I asked if I should go in tomorrow. And he said I wasn’t needed at all anymore and then he hung up on me.”

The teakettle chose that moment to begin its wail, but a click and a slam shut it off before it really got going. Eddie poked his head around the wall separating his miniscule kitchen from his equally tiny living room. “Cassandra’s husband,” he repeated.

Anna nodded, too weary to fight the tears she could feel building.

“Called you.” Eddie’s voice was toneless. “He doesn’t even work there, does he?”

“Nope. Pretty crummy thing to do, huh?” she said lightly. She closed her eyes; the tears stayed put. “Cassandra didn’t have the decency to talk to me herself, and neither one of them wanted to talk to me to my face.”

“And you, sweet little coward, let them do it,” Eddie finished, and breathed a laugh through his nose. Renewed sounds of employment issued from the kitchen. “Did you at least get your last paycheck? That’s state law in Colorado. They have to pay you right away if they let you go.”

“No,” she mumbled. The center of the couch finally claimed her, like a glacier tipping into a canyon, and the frame bit into her thigh. “They’ve got twenty-four hours.”

“Asshats,” he growled. It sounded as though he’d slammed the mugs for their tea on a tray. “Bet they called you so they wouldn’t have to pay you until next pay period.”

“Yeah, I thought of that,” she whispered. Now the tears slid free, hot and then icy as they soaked into her hair, the collar of her shirt. She didn’t mind that Eddie called her a coward – she was a coward when it came to conflict. Anna preferred to avoid arguments.

She’d worked at the mom-and-pop coffee shop for a grand total of three months, elated to have found a day job right after high school graduation. Although she was a good worker, never arriving late or leaving early, always keeping busy, able to prepare customers’ orders without mistakes, she and the owner of the little shop, Cassandra, didn’t get along. Anna figured it was a personality clash. Life was like that. She did her best not to let the natural antagonism between them interfere with her job. She may not always jump when Cassandra snapped her fingers, but the customers liked her, Anna, and she thought she’d been doing okay.

But the phone call this morning. Her face burned as she thought about it. Of all the stupid ways to be fired! All the stupid, cowardly, sneaky, shitty, bitchy –

“Hey,” Eddie said over her head, interrupting her thoughts. “No crying, sweetheart.”

Anna’s eyes flew open. She struggled to sit up and wipe her cheeks clean at the same time, failing to do either. Instead, she sank helplessly into the decrepit couch’s innards and knocked her glasses flying.

“Crumb!” she yelled when a spring stabbed her butt. “Dammit, Eddie, don’t laugh – ouch! Help me up, this hurts!”

But he was laughing in his breathless way, through his nose, as his big hands extricated her from the carnivorous couch and settled her in one of the more stable corners.

“I can call them for you,” he offered, the wide white slash of his smile the only clear thing in the chocolate-brown smudge of his face. “I’d even go with you to pick the check up if Cassandra or her husband get nasty.”

“You can’t call them,” she said with a heavy sigh. Then she ran her hand over the threadbare couch cushion and wiggled her toes into the carpet. “Crumb. Do you see my glasses anywhere?”

“Why can’t I call?” he asked, and started searching (she assumed as his fuzzy form shifted in her sight like an underwater creature). “I’ll tell them I’m your brother.”

Anna laughed. “Thanks, but no thanks. Just leave it alone. It’ll work itself out somehow. I think this was a karmic hint that I need to get a real job, get away from the food service. Maybe I’ll apply to some office temp places.”

Everything in Eddie’s apartment was brown. She squinted at him, trying to bring him into focus. From the shag carpet, to the painted walls that looked like chocolate milk left standing too long, to the battered furniture gleaned from dumpster rejects, it all seemed like Willy Wonka’s chocolate river through her myopic eyes. It was a comforting place to be, despite the racket from the highway and the vague threat of bathwater rain from the tenant upstairs. White-skinned Anna liked to think of herself as a lone marshmallow floating in all the chocolatey goodness.

“What, you got something against a ‘brother’ brother?” Eddie teased before slipping her glasses over her ears.

She sighed in relief as the room resolved itself into its components instead of the chocolate smear. She hated not being able to see properly. “Of course not. I just don’t think me saying you’re my brother would go over very well.”

“With them or with you?”

Anna raised her eyebrows at him.

“Ah, well,” he said, scratching the back of his head. His nappy hair waggled. She grinned, because the crazy tails reminded her of Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons. She loved Eddie’s hair.

In fact, she loved everything about him.

He grinned back, and then swooped on the tea tray. She watched him for a moment, her best friend, her sanctuary. They’d been friends forever; their parents lived next door to each other. When she decided not to go to college, so had he. When he decided to put the band together, she joined. She spent more time in his apartment than her own, playing video games and eating Chinese until the wee hours.

“Well, what?” she prompted, unwilling to let the subject drop. She scooted forward and put her hand against his arm, enjoying the feel of his bicep through his shirt sleeve.

“I’m a party concerned. Want honey?” He nudged a packet toward her, intent on the tray. He filled two chipped mugs with steaming water, his big fingers performing quick, delicate twists that tied the tea bag strings to the handles to keep the bags from sinking.

“That’s true. You are. Thanks.” She accepted the honey, but Eddie caught her hand before she could open it. He turned to face her, his dark eyes very close.

“I could be your boyfriend instead.”

Anna’s lips parted in silence. Eddie, just as silent, pressed his lips to hers.

Life was like that, too. Eddie and Anna – they didn’t need words. She kissed him, pouring all of her love for him into the simple act, happiness crashing through her as his big hands twined through her hair.

But that, of course, had been before the accident. Before Eddie died.

Anna sighed heavily through her tears, burying her face in her old plush cow. The toy belonged to bygone years of childhood, and it had witnessed too many sleepless nights to count.

Although she and Eddie had spent several happy months as a couple, from September through March, the time blurred until she could no longer pick one significant moment from the next. She liked to revisit her memories, going over the remaining intact moments repeatedly to make them stay. She squeezed her eyes shut as tightly as she could, her arms locked around the stuffed cow, desperate to remember the feel of his mouth moving against hers, but it wouldn’t come.

She pulled her knees in, kicking her blankets to the floor.

Did the grief never end? The aching, hollow regret hit her at strange times – driving in to work, checking her mail, turning on the TV – and it made her gasp with the suddenness of it. She’d be doing just fine and then, wham! the tears would fall and she’d collapse into herself, shaking with the knowledge that Eddie was never going to share in anything with her, or with anyone, ever again.

Somewhere in the apartment, her cell phone rang. She opened her eyes and listened as the ringtone played its thirty seconds and then shut off. A minute passed as she contemplated her bedroom, blue-hued from the outside lighting to her building. Her apartment was never dark; if she could remember to buy fabric for curtains, she might be able to fix that. It didn’t seem important until she wanted to sleep and had to do so while the venetian blinds at her window threw stripes of light and shadow across her pillow.

She tried to return to her waking dream, to live a few more moments with Eddie, but her cell buzzed as it received a new message notification.

Grumbling, Anna pushed herself off the bed and, leaving her glasses on the nightstand by the dull red glow of her alarm clock, made her way by memory to her purse, which hung from the back of a kitchen chair like always. She fumbled inside for her phone, flipped it open, and pressed the key that took her to voicemail.

Or it would have, if another incoming call hadn’t changed the selection from “Inbox” to “Answer” just as she pressed it.

“Crumb!” she exploded, staring in horror at the “call connected” text blaring from the phone’s little screen.

“Anna?” the phone chirped. “Are you awake?”

Too late to pretend a technological error and hang up. Quickly, Anna scrubbed her cheeks dry, gulped a breath, put the phone to her ear, and said, “No.”

The person on the other end chuckled, and Anna closed her eyes. Rob. It was Rob. Please, please, no, make it go away.

“What do you want?” she asked, hoping she sounded sleepy rather than harsh.

“Livy said you haven’t been sleeping, so I thought I’d check on you. Friends can do that, right?”

Damn Livy and her big mouth, Anna thought to herself, picturing her friend’s huge grin. Why she had to go blabbing to Rob . . .

Before the accident, Rob had been in the band as well, the brother of a high school girlfriend of Anna’s. Rob was the kind of guy who glittered. He was long, lean, golden, and possessed a pair of teasing, happy-go-lucky green eyes. After the accident, at his suggestion, he and Anna tried to “find something” together. Big Mistake. The memory of the last time she’d seen him, when she’d given herself to him and then run out on him, haunted her. She heard it now in his voice – though the anger had come earlier, he was still hurt, and he wouldn’t let her go. She swayed on her feet.

“It’s two a.m.,” she said. Her tears thickened her words.

“You weren’t sleeping,” he said gently. “Why don’t I come over? It worries me that you’re there alone all the time.”

“I have work in the morning.” She sank awkwardly to the floor, and the night-borne shadows beneath her kitchen table reached out to claim her. “I’m going back to bed.”

“Come on, Anna,” he started, but she interrupted him.

“Please, Rob. Just leave it alone,” she gasped, and snapped the phone closed. It slipped from nerveless fingers, clattering against linoleum.

She sat on the floor for a long time, until she drifted off to the imperceptible lightening of the world outside.

What happens when the one soul meant for you has departed this world? Do you simply wait . . . alone . . . forever?

A/N: Did I mention already that this story is a bunch of fluff and nothing? The original version most certainly is (but I wrote it years ago and lost control of it - I wonder if that's ever happened to anyone else). Then I tried to "fix" it and overcompensated. "Demon's Rift - Redux" quickly became bogged down with too much serious writing. I hated it, and it died.

So here we are again, back to the fluff and FUN of writing for the sake of writing and enjoyment, with no ulterior motive in mind. I hope you enjoy it! Please (and I do mean pleasepleaseplease) leave me a review and let me know what you think!