I wish to God that I didn’t have that milkshake last night. I wish that I’d just had some Dr. Pepper, maybe made a fucking float. No, no, I needed a vanilla milkshake. Vanilla. Vanilla.

Oh, fucking hell.

She still smells like fucking vanilla.

I want to throw the milk against the wall. My hands are twitching with unadulterated rage. I want to throw the milk in her face, drench her in it, drown out the smell of vanilla.

My head is caving in. I’m having trouble seeing anything but her. Can’t smell anything but the vanilla, either, but then again, I could never smell anything but the vanilla. Her vanilla.

Fucking hell.

I want to put the milk back and pretend I don’t know her. I want to grab the milk and make her love me again.

I want to get the hell out of here without any more emotional scars inflicted by her than I already have, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Oh my God. I want to fucking die right now. I just want to disappear.

She’s smiling. Why the hell is she smiling? Stop fucking smiling, Clarice. This isn’t a smiling occasion. God, if I could, I would wipe that smile off your face, but I could never hurt you.

Not like you can hurt me, at least.

And see how I used your full name? I’m trying to keep everything casual and light.

Nothing between us was ever casual, ever light. We were intense from the second we locked eyes. It’s fitting that now I’m being bombarded with all the feelings that have been dormant for the last two years.

The last 26 months, 12 days and three hours.

And whom the fuck am I kidding, they haven’t been dormant. They’ve been raging and driving me completely insane since she left, without her presence to quell the storm she always inflicted upon me. I don’t know if I can even pretend to be phlegmatic with her standing two feet away from me.

But she’s smiling, and she’s trying to keep things casual and light, so why shouldn’t I do the same? I can’t say what I want to say anyway.

"Hello, Kevin."

My heart absolutely stops. It’s been 26 months, 12 days and three hours since I’ve heard her voice. 26 months, 12 days and three hours of my trying to somehow not hear her voice echoing in my head. Now I hear "Hello, Kevin" and "I need some time to myself" superimposed over each other in a horrible, dissonant symphony. I close my eyes and duck my head into my chest. I clutch the hair on my forehead.

"Clarice." I don’t look at her face because I know what’s there. She winces slightly at my usage of her full name-never once in the course of our relationship had I ever referred to her as Clarice. She was always Clara, Clara, my Clara. She’s not mine anymore, so I can’t call her that. It’s not the same anymore.

God, I would give anything, anything for it to be the same again.

I can’t feel my heart.

Go away, Clarice. Get the hell out of here-take your key lime pie yogurt (I didn’t have to see it, I know what it is, oh God, Clarice, I know you better than I know anything) and say you’ve got to go. Just leave, go to the deli, let me go home unscathed. Don’t break my heart again in the dairy aisle, Clarice. Say anything else and my heart is going to spill from my lips just like the milk would spill if I threw it down with all of my strength, which is looking quite appealing right now.

I could leave. I could walk away with my milk, pay for it, go home to an empty apartment with vanilla air freshener and vanilla candles and little hints of her that she didn’t care about enough to put in her suitcase, like me. Then again, I absolutely can’t. I could never leave her.

She was the one who always did the leaving. I was the one who did the accepting.

God, I can’t think about this now. I can never think about this again. I’m being absolutely ripped apart in three minutes. Clarice, your power over me scares the hell out of me, just please leave.

You won’t, though; you never did what I wanted. You always did what was best for me.

Was leaving me best for me, Clarice? I don’t think it was. I don’t think that being shattered into shards of what I used to be was exactly best for me, excuse me if I'm still bitter, excuse me if I still love you. Excuse me if I can’t help myself. You were the only one who could ever help me, Clarice. Where have you been?

"How have you been?" she asks. Such a weighted question. How have I been? I’ve been heartbroken for 26 months, 12 days and three hours. I’ve been sick to my stomach because it hurt so badly. I couldn’t walk for almost a whole day after you left. I curled up and burned a candle, vanilla, on our bed. It set the sheets on fire, set my jeans on fire, the scar is still present on my leg.

You wouldn’t just scar my psyche, you had to mar me physically, too, huh, Clarice?

I’ve been trying to get over you. Yesterday I was over you.

Yesterday I wasn’t standing face to face with you in a supermarket over three million cases of milk and two years of separation. I want to be back in yesterday, when I could be reasonably sane pretending I was over you, but even this fleeting moment is something I wouldn’t give up. Never, Clarice. Anything you’ll ever offer, I’ll take. Whatever and whenever it is. I’m hating this moment, it’s burning me like acid, and I’m loving it, loving your smell, sweet vanilla, loving staring at you. You were always so beautiful; you’re only more beautiful now that I can’t touch you.

I can’t touch you.

God, do I want to touch you.

"I’ve been," I say, and I’m trying to finish the sentence. I was going to say ‘me’ but I haven’t been myself, I’ve been a shell of what I actually am since you shut the door.

"I’ve been breathing, I say, and it’s mostly true, even though sometimes I couldn’t breathe when I realized that you wouldn’t be sleeping next to me. I’ve been mostly breathing, Clarice. Does that appease your fears?

"Good." She forces another tight smile, flicks her hair behind her ears. It’s shorter now, still curly, she looks more adorable than she ever did but I can’t touch her, won’t even try.

"How have you been?" I, in turn, force in a monotone. Where have you been? Why haven’t you been with me? With whom have you been? Why did you leave? Why didn’t you come back? Where did you go? Why haven’t you been with me?

"Fine," she says, but she hasn’t been fine and I know it from the look in her eyes. Blue, blue, azure and cerulean eyes that I can’t look all the way into because I’ll fall and I won’t be able to walk out of the store like she’s going to walk away in a few moments. I want this over. I want this to last forever.

"Oh." I’m a fucking writer, for God’s sake, and that’s all I come up with.

"Would you like to get lunch sometime?" she blurts in a rush. My shock must be palpable, because I feel my entire body start and blanch at her words and she looks down, uncertain. "I mean, well, I’d just like to-"

I don’t let her finish her sentence. Her words, whatever they would be, would slice through me and leave me dead right here, on top of the milk, and I’m sure the grocer wouldn’t be too appreciative of rotting carcasses in the dairy aisle. "Okay."

"Okay," she says, and she’s a fucking writer too. Why do we render each other speechless? Remember when we were a team, Clarice? Remember when we were going to conquer the world? Remember when we were going to do it together? What the hell happened to you and me and a pen and paper and nothing else? What the hell happened to us?

God, Clarice, I wish I knew. I wish you would tell me, because I feel so stupid and I’m not fucking stupid, I’m a graduate of USC with a degree in Creative Writing just like you, and you were always smarter than me, but I’m not fucking stupid.

"Okay, um," she says, and blinks with clarity. She pulls out a pen and a paper from her purse-god damnit, that’s Clarice, with her pen and paper always, ready to scrawl her complete and utter brilliance over the page at any given moment when the voices, the voices we both used to hear, don’t you remember, Clarice? start talking to her. In the middle of the mall, in the middle of dinner, in the middle of the night, she’d grasp frantically for a pen and paper and write and write and write until her hands were shaking from the effort.

I used to, too, when I could write. You took that, Clarice, you took my talent, my drive, my inspiration and my heart and soul.

I don’t carry a pen and paper anymore. I haven’t for 26 months, 12 days and three hours. Anything that would come out would hurt too much, and I have nothing left to give anyway.

"Give me your phone number."

A lump builds in my throat. You of the frighteningly absorbent memory, you of the mind of which Einstein would have been envious, you don’t remember my telephone number. For three years, Clarice, it was your number too. We shared it, we shared everything, but you took it all and now I’ve got nothing. I’m nothing.

I write it on the paper hastily, clenching my jaw because I don’t want to cry all over my milk and because I know that if I cry now I won’t stop. I couldn’t hurt you like that, Clarice. I wish you had a similar block when it comes to me.

She smiles again, tightly, just lips. "It was nice to see you again, Kevin," she says, and stares at me for a second. She peers at me like she’s reading my soul, only she’s got that, so there’s nothing left to read. Her eyes go hollow and she nods once. "I’ll call you," she says, and walks away.

God, the sight of her walking away kills me, it always has, in reality and when I see it in my dreams every time I sleep. I hardly sleep anymore and it’s been two years.

Somehow I manage to make my way to the checkout, stumbling and teary-eyed, and I make it home though I can barely see the road. I toss the milk in the refrigerator carelessly-I hope it pays for what it just did to me, damnit, and even though it’s completely utterly irrational it’s a comforting thought. I could use some comfort.

I make my way to the couch, by the phone, where I know I’ll wait until it rings and I hear her voice again.

Why the fuck does she do this to me? How the hell does she still hold my entire world on a string, yanking me around like I’m some little puppy dog, trailing at her heels, desperate for scraps? Why couldn’t she have just walked away? Why can’t I be over her? Why did I have that fucking vanilla milkshake?

I want her to be here, again, making Spaghettios and laughing at my newest story. I want to be able to write again without sounding like a seven-year-old. I want to be able to feel something, anything, that’s not heartbreak.

But mostly, I just want my Clara back.

When she doesn’t call, I’m not surprised. If there was anything I learned about Clarice Malet in the five years I knew her, and ‘know’ seems like a weak word for my understanding of Clarice, it’s that she avoids all potentially painful situations. To her, I’m the fucking bubonic plague.

It hurt her as much as it hurt me to leave me; I saw it in her eyes, but she still left. I have no idea why. Well, I have ideas, but they’re not right. I can’t help feeling that, with how well I know her, I should know exactly why, and I think I do. I just can’t think it to myself, even in vague thoughts in my head. It’s so fucking frustrating. It’s on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t find the words.

Finding the words is what I do. I’m a fucking writer, for God’s sake!

I’m not a writer anymore. I’m a fucking journalist now, writing for Rolling fucking Stone magazine about music-God, Clarice, we love music, don’t we? Do you still love music, Clarice?-meeting bands, going to concerts. It’s a fucking dream job, except it’s not my dream job. I want to be an author, a novelist. I want to write the fictional prose that will change the world, and I’ve got the talent to do it.

Or I used to, before Clarice decided that I didn’t need it anymore.

We were going to write and write and write, we were going to take over the world with our words, Clarice and Kevin McCannon, after she married me. We were going to be the best fucking writers ever born. Pulitzers, Nobel Prizes, we were going to win it all.

Instead, she took my talent, inspiration and any desire to write without her and who knows what the hell she did with it. We didn’t have a divorce agreement. We weren’t married. She shouldn’t have taken my stuff.

I want my fucking stuff back, Clarice. You could have at least called me. Dropped it off on my doorstep in a box. I know you still know where I live-where we lived for three years together, remember?

Do you remember anything, Clarice?

I remember everything.

I remember when I could write, I remember when I was happy. I remember when I was writing my third novel and you were writing your fourth and you teased me, called me slow, but really it was just you’re a better writer than I am. Maybe it’s because you don’t give a fuck about grammar. I don’t think you’ve used the word ‘whom’ in your life. I was your editor.

I remember when I didn’t have an amazing job that sucked horribly, I remember when having backstage passes was actually exciting. I remember when I cared enough to love music.

I remember when I cared enough to love anything. Spaghetti tastes like air and nothing else is much better. I love writing-that’s not past tense, Clarice, I’m still in love with words and syntax and language as much as I’m still in love with you-but I have a feeling that that’s not going to be happening for a while.

You could have fucking called, Clarice.

That afternoon, Daniel calls.

"So I’m at the baseball field," he says, and I could hear a baseball crack against a bat. "And you are decidedly not here, my friend."

"Fuck!" I curse, because I’d been hoping it was Clarice, and because Daniel and I were supposed to go to a Dodgers game.

"Did I interrupt something, man?" he asks, and I can hear the smirk on his face.

"Fuck off, Drake," I say, because I can’t call him Danny and tell him to fuck off in the same sentence.

"Gladly, sunshine. Where the hell are you?"

"Where do you think I am, genius? I answered my fucking home phone." I’m frustrated at myself and at Clarice, and, per the usual, I’m taking it out on Daniel.

"I was just wondering why, given the fact that we’d planned this outing for three months, and I reminded you of it last week, and you’re not here. Also, you haven’t called me in a week, and usually you call me every night." Daniel’s phone doesn’t, for some completely insane reason, make outgoing calls.

"I hate baseball, Danny."

"I know that. And you agreed, you agreed! One game a year, man. It’s all I ask." Daniel loves baseball more than any other sport and owns a Dodgers season pass. Once a year, I’ll go to a game with him, just so he doesn’t have to go alone.

"I know, Danny, I’m so sorry, I just…" I never make excuses to Daniel. He sees right through them so easily that it’s not even worth the mental energy.

"Are you all right, Kevin?" he asks.

Flippantly, I reply, "Am I ever?"

"Kevin." It’s the voice he uses when he wants me to cut the bullshit and tell him the whole and complete truth.

It’s a voice that always kind of scared me, and it’s a voice that always cut right through my bravado and left me vulnerable and emotional like a twelve-year-old.

"Hi, Danny," I manage, voice quavering.

"Kev?" This time it’s a question and I know he dreads the answer.

"Hi, Danny," I repeat, and take a shaking breath to hold back tears.

"Jesus Christ, Kevin," he says. Daniel always says ‘Jesus Christ’ when he’s stressed or pissed or worried, and right now I sense all three.

I can’t say anything else.

"Fifteen minutes. Fuck! Twenty minutes, fuck the red lights, I’ll be right there, man, hang on." ‘Fifteen minutes’ is what we say instead of ‘goodbye.’ From my house to his apartment, it’s fifteen minutes, and it just kind of stuck.

Daniel really would skip the red lights too. He’s an illustrator for Rolling Stone-I got him the job-and a freelance painter. He is absolutely the most talented kid I've ever met, even though he’s not a kid anymore, he’s 25.

The same age as Clarice.

I met him at a party, where I was hoping to see Clarice, two weeks after the beginnings of our freshman and junior years. Clarice had brought her best friend in the world, David Drake, a music performance major from UCLA, and his twin brother, Daniel, an Art History major at USC with us, had tagged along. While Clarice and David (whom she called ‘Davy’) had a familiar-seeming argument on reincarnation, Daniel and I stood there, looking lost.

Being older and allegedly wiser, I felt I should open conversation, and so I said, "I’m Kevin McCannon."

"Daniel Drake." He shook my hand. Clarice hadn’t introduced us. She never performed normal tasks like those-she believed if people were supposed to meet, they’d do it on their own.

Never was I more glad for Clarice’s philosophy than at that party, because I’d never had a best friend before and had Clarice introduced us, I might have never gotten the chance.

"Hi, Danny," I said. His eyebrows furrowed and he shook his head vehemently.

"No, no, it’s really just Daniel."

An argument I’d heard as often as Clarice had apparently heard her reincarnation one. "Okay, maybe, but I’m going to call you Danny."

"Seriously, I like Daniel."

"I think this is going to be a beautiful friendship, Danny."

He sighed with exasperation and looked over at David. "Tell him, tell him I’m Daniel." When he felt passionately about something, Daniel tended to repeat seemingly-meaningless two-word phrases like ‘tell him’ and ‘you agreed.’

David’s eyes boggled. "Have you lost the ability to speak with strangers? Did you forget your name?"

In a voice eerily close to a whine, Daniel said, "He’s calling me Danny."

"Don’t argue with him." Clarice spoke up next. "He calls me Clara. I wasted a week trying to talk him out of it. He’s pathetically stubborn, Daniel. Just appease him."

Then, in a moment I remember as clearly as I remember my first meeting with Clarice, Danny turned to me and did something no one else had ever done to me before.

He said, "Okay, Kev."

Completely stunned, my jaw dropped dumbly and my eyes widened so that I thought they might roll free of their sockets. Daniel grinned smugly, David smiled proudly, and Clarice’s own eyes enlarged in awe.

"Yes indeed, Kev," he said, clapping me on the shoulder. "I think this really is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

From there, we bonded over music and books and the fact that we annoyed the hell out of each other in a way no one else could while understanding each other in a way no one else could.

When Clarice left, Daniel moved in for three months making sure I ate, slept, took showers and remembered to breathe. If not for Danny, there is no doubt in my mind that I’d be dead, which makes me feel like a complete jackass for missing the baseball game. For all Daniel’s done for me, the least I could do was watch a fucking baseball game.

A key turns in the lock, and I know it’s Daniel because he never bothers to knock. "Jesus Christ, Kevin," he says, running in in such a rush he almost forgets to shut the door. I check the clock. It was eighteen minutes.

"Hi, Danny," I say for the first time that day, but the sight of him, ubiquitous paint smears and wire-rimmed glasses, concerned and worried and freaking out, I’m closer to crying than I have been in three days.

"Jesus Christ, Kev," he says again, softer and full of concern. I tip my head back against the top of the sofa as he sits next to me.

"26 months, 14 days and 5 hours," I murmur.

"I am going to kill her," he spits, then follows with a salve of, "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, Danny, I’m stupendous," I manage in a caustically sarcastic tone.

"Hey," he says, and it’s a warning tone. Daniel never did anything to deserve that.

"Sorry," I sigh, and scrub my face with my hands. I continue for a few moments, but then Danny lifts my hands.

When I open my eyes, he’s looking right at me. I draw a deep breath, because I know I’m going to be talking so much I’m going to forget to breathe, even though Daniel was always good about helping me remember.

"I needed milk. I made a milkshake the night before, so I needed milk," I start, and stop. It doesn’t sound right, the words don’t ring lyrically, but they haven’t for a long time.

Danny’s still just looking at me.

I close my eyes and keep going.

"So there I was, trying to figure out the difference between vitamin D and 1 because it never bothered me before but it just occurred to me that I should probably know that, and finally I just said ‘fuck it’ and grabbed some 2 just to spite myself-" Daniel laughs at that-"and I turned around and there she was."

"Clarice." It was less than a whisper, an affirmation of what he already knew was true.

"I almost threw away the milk and ran, but I was never the leaver in our relationship, you know? And she wouldn’t leave either, even though she never had a problem with that before!" My voice hit a slightly hysterical note. Daniel just kept staring at me silently.

"She asked me how I’d been, and I said breathing, and I asked her, and she said ‘fine.’ She hasn’t been fine, Danny." Daniel wouldn’t know, since Clarice had cut contact with him, too, when she left me-guilty by association, I guess-and David wouldn’t tell him anything.

"She asked for my phone number-she doesn’t remember my phone number, Danny!-and said she’d call me. She wants to go out for lunch and she hasn’t fucking called! It was all bullshit. This is all such bullshit!" I clutch at the short blonde hair on my forehead and breathe heavily. Danny pats my shoulder.

"It’s okay, man. Just breathe, Kev. Come on. You’re okay. It’s okay."

I cry a little, and Danny doesn’t care. He never cares. I’ve seen him at his worst too.

"I wish I hadn’t seen her, Danny," I say finally.

"I know." He does know, too; I cried on his shoulder for months after she left.

"Thanks, Danny," I say finally, and stand up even though I don’t know why.

"Anytime, Kevin, you know that." He accepts my hand-up and I pull him into a standing position too. "You gonna be okay?"

"I’ll be breathing."

Daniel smiled. "I’m proud of you."

I look down. "Stop it, jerk," I say, grinning. "You’re gonna make me cry again."

"When you’re weak and defenseless, I feel more powerful. We’ve got a masochistic friendship." He claps me on the shoulder. "So anyway, I guess no game today."

Wryly, I reply, "No, thanks; I’d rather sit around my apartment and think myself to death."

"Death over hanging with his best friend. Kevin McCannon, you’re morbid." He claps me on the shoulder again, and I think he might do that to make sure I don’t break. Daniel always worries too much.

"I’m seriously fine now, Danny. Thank you."

He nods, appraising me silently, then shrugs. "Want me to stick around?"

"Is there any proper way to answer that question in the negative?"

"Ha, ha."

"I’m fine, Danny."

"Alright," he says skeptically. "I’ll call you from the game."

"Danny, I’m not going to kill myself, I don’t need a babysitter."

He freezes slightly at my declaration, and so do I, but Daniel can save any moment. "You say that, and maybe you’re right, but your mom dishes out the big bucks for this job and there’s no way in hell I’m quitting when I’m saving up to buy a pony. I’m almost there, too."

By the end of the sentence, I’m laughing so hard, not at the joke as much as just Danny, there are more tears rolling down my cheeks. I want to thank him for making me laugh, but Daniel knows I'm grateful and doesn’t like me to say it out loud. He does what he can, he says. Daniel doesn’t think he should be thanked for a couple lame jokes and a listening ear.

I do, though, so I ignore his wishes and simply say "thanks."

He nods. "Okay, so I’m going to be horribly late, and I should go. Take care of yourself. Eat dinner."

"Watch the grease!" I call after him as he leaves.

Alone again, I flop bonelessly on the couch, the phone catching my gaze before I can close my eyes to sleep. It sticks there and I can’t tear myself away.

I end up disregarding dinner.

She calls two months later, when she knows I’ll be at work, and she doesn’t say a word about being sorry for jerking me around. I wonder how much is her rampant procrastination and how much is her avoiding me, and I’m almost scared to admit to myself how much of it is really the latter. The former is a more appealing option.

We meet in Starbucks the next day because that’s what she said on the message she left. I take a two-hour lunch break and no one cares. They let me say and do almost whatever the hell I want anytime.

I hate it. I want rules, restrictions, someone to treat me like an equal.

Hear that, Clarice? That means you.

I’m a half-hour early, and I order a plain coffee for the wait. I don’t want anything vanilla. I want this to be as painless as possible.

I don’t know whom the hell I’m kidding, but there’s no fucking way I can stand to smell vanilla right now.

I get a two-person table and face the wall on the complete opposite side of the door.

There’s a mirror in the napkin holder so I can still watch, and I almost feel sleazy, like I’m lying somehow.

I don’t really need to look; I know the second she comes in the door. Airily, she breezes in, freezing when she sees me. Her face becomes a mask of guilt and pain, but she continues on to my table and sits across from me.

My heart stops the second I see her. She’s smiling tentatively, eyes sad, carrying the air of vanilla as usual. I want to cry.

"Hey, Kevin."

"Clarice." It’s fucking déjà vu. Pretend it’s like it was before, I tell myself, but that’s not going to work. If I’m pretending it’s like it was before, I’d be leaning in, ordering her drinks, paying for them, interlocking our ankles under the table.

If it were like it was, I’d be smiling. I’d be calling her Clara. I wouldn’t be on the verge of a fucking mental breakdown at the sight of her.

"I’m glad you could meet me," she says, and it’s completely sincere and heartbreakingly sweet in the just-a-touch-of-insecurity way that Clarice has.

"Yeah," I say, and I don’t fail to notice the passive phrasing. "I’m glad you could meet me." As if I were doing her a favor.

Clarice wasn’t passive; she never had been, and I hoped to God that nothing had done that to her, to Clarice, to my Clara.

She wouldn’t let that happen, my mind reasons. Then again the Clarice I knew never would have left me.

She never would have used passive phrasing. Clarice was nothing short of deliberate when choosing words: she never said anything by accident.

What the hell had happened to her? This couldn’t have been here two months ago, at least not to this degree. I could never miss something like this, something buffeting Clara so badly that she thought that I was doing a favor to her by simply meeting her for coffee.

I pretend to ignore it, but she probably knows that my nonchalance is feigned.

I let myself look into her eyes, and my head freezes halfway to my drink.

Her eyes, the eyes I’d so studiously avoided two months ago in the supermarket, appear completely dead. I choke on air at the sight.

Gone is the once-inherent sparkle, the life, the living blue fire that dwelled there when I

knew her.

Her face is dead; lips pressed together primly, void of the smile that constantly adorned them. Her forehead is wrinkled, and not with the concentration her inspiration required, but only with worry and fear. Even her ears seem to droop lifelessly from the side of her head, holding her curly hair back. It doesn’t look so shiny anymore. It doesn’t seem to bounce with ever movement she made, and then I notice it.

She isn’t moving.

Sitting completely across the table from me sits a total stranger wearing my Clara’s face.

Clarice Madeline Malet was never still. She was constantly bouncing, nodding her head to the music in her head, swing her legs, laughing, making emphatic gestures with her hands. She blamed it on her high metabolism, but I blamed it on her brilliance; with that much genius careening through her body, there was no way she could resist the velocity of the huge and profound thoughts and not move with them. I told her that one morning when I made her breakfast in bed-pancakes with hot fudge, strawberries, and whipped cream, just like she liked them, though she never ate the pancakes. That was my job, and I’d been eating one, musing on the chocolate flavor and watching her bounce on the bed, trying not to drip fudge onto the sheets, when the thought hit me. I immediately relayed my explanation to her.

"You’re amazing," she said, took my fork, and fed me pancake. I laughed and yanked the fork from her hands with my teeth, spearing a strawberry and feeding it to her.

Her eyebrows had wiggled once, and the overboard debauchery made me laugh again. She took the fork and replaced it with her lips.

We never discussed it, and I’ve forgotten it until just now. The comment came to me, however, as I watch her, still and drained of anything that could pass for life, staring at me with an expression I can’t read with words.

I seem to know what she’s saying, though. It’s unexplainable-our connection had been the one thing to which we’d never laid a label, because to do so was to cheapen it. It was a tacit understanding, just like the one you’re giving me right now.

A familiar lump fills my throat; my eyes fill; however, despite it all, your face is still sharp and clear behind my closed eyelids. My hand scrubs my face, trying to rid it of the truth of whatever you just told me.

Please don’t let it be true, Clarice.

Don’t let your spirit be broken, too. You’re the one thing that holds me together. What the hell am I supposed to do if you’re broken? You were always the one who fixed me; you’d never let me try and fix you.

Maybe, Clarice, maybe you’ve realized it’s my turn.

I open my eyes, now free of the tears threatening them a minute ago, and pray that what I just saw was a nightmare. In all the dreams I’ve had of you, and there have been too many to count, Clarice, literally, this is by far the worst.

But I wasn’t dreaming.

I can’t keep silent any longer, but I don’t know what to say, so before I can stop myself I end up choking, "God, Clara," out of my full, scratchy throat in a voice that makes me sound simultaneously 12 and 92.

"Kevin," she says, and her voice is unsteady, unsure, and I hate it. As much as I love Clarice’s voice in any tone available, especially saying my name, I’d never heard it uncertain, and I never want to hear it again.

There are tears in her words, in my name, and that’s not the way it should be, because now she apparently associates my name with pain, and I feel the knife she plunged into my chest twist a little more at the revelation.

I watch carefully as the tears spill over and her head tilts forward, toward me. I’m torn into pieces with indecision, but then again, Clarice could always tear me into pieces, whether with happiness or heartbreak. I want to hold her, but I want to hang back and wait until she tells me too; I realize she has too much pride to venture to such lengths and I want her to reaffirm her connection so that I don’t have to always be the one doing the work.

Not that I mind. God, do I not mind, but I think that if we would try this again, if it would work for good this time, she’d need to learn to reach out a little further.

I can’t touch her, because touching her makes me crazy; I have no doubt that after two years it would still set off fireworks so loud and bright I couldn’t see or hear anything else and didn’t want to.

Right now I get the feeling I need to be sane and focused, and if there’s one thing I’ve always been good at, it’s being whatever Clarice needs me to be.

"Clara," I say, not bothering to hide my rampant affection for her in the use of the nickname. "Starbucks might not be the best place for this."

She looks up in surprise, because I’m Old Kevin again, and that’s not what she expected me to be.

Two years ago, she would have thought nothing of my being there for her. I can’t and won’t try to say for sure exactly what it was, but to me and my few psych classes, it sounds like something had convinced her that she isn’t worthy anymore.

Rage runs through me at the mere notion that something, someone, might have persuaded Clarice that she ever had to prove herself, that she wasn’t good enough, that she wasn’t so far above perfect that even my writer’s brain couldn’t find words for her altitude save simply Clarice. I want to kill whoever it is, make him feel all the pain I’m seeing in Clarice’s eyes and all the pain I’m feeling by association, but that won’t help Clarice.

I can help Clarice. I can help Clarice by being Old Kevin, the Kevin she knew and still knows, because even though she changed in the two years of separation, the Kevin on whom she depended even when she wanted to pretend she didn’t.

I can help Clarice, and I do, because her eyes seem to sparkle a bit, though it might just be the reflection of the fluorescent lights against the tears. There’s no mistaking the smile, though, or the laugh that graces my ears, straight from her lips.

I grin in return and in relief, feeling a thousand-pound weight lift off my shoulders. It feels good, I feel alleviated, but it’s not the last weight resting there, crushing me, by far.

The other weights are questions: Who? What? When? Where? How? Why? Who was it? What happened? When did you become a shell of your former self? Where did you go? How did my Clara, my strong, resilient Clara let herself be broken? Why now? Why did you leave me?

I can’t ask these questions now, not when Clara’s almost about to cry and she's been broken and I’m fumbling for my duct tape and my superglue. No demands now, no questions asked: maybe I’m masochistic, but whatever Clara needs, Clara gets.

As we stand and I pay my bill, I don’t entertain the thoughts that should be overwhelming me. I don’t bother to worry about whether or not I’m doing the right thing, whether or not it’s healthy, whether or not it’s safe to be anywhere near Clara again. My emotions are running high and I’m being impulsive, but I know that my emotions will never be low around her, and she needs me now.

She needs me now.

She never needed me before; when she did, it was tacit, never teary and blatant like it is now. It’s such a heady sensation that I’m swept away in it, by her, and I can’t help but drift along in whatever direction she decides she should pull me.

I want to curse myself for being such an easy target, tapped and fallen right into the trap where he’d broken all his bones, but Clarice needs me, and there’s nothing more simple than that in the world, to me.