Birthday

She takes the bus back home, which she's never done before, so she's nervous about that in addition to being weak from the thing she's just had cleaned out of her belly.

The bus smells like urine, and she thinks that she might fall asleep, but every time the bus rocks around a turn or slides to a stop with a hydrolic hiss, her insides lurch. So much lurching, she thinks, for being so empty. She stays awake and even gets off at the right stop before she climbs all those stairs up to the apartment and falls down on the bed.

He comes to get her hours later, because it's her birthday, and she's dressed up and put on make-up, and not even just a little mascara and lip gloss. She's got her game face on tonight.

He takes her to some dark restaurant and requests a booth scrunched into the corner, which she sort of likes because it feels cozy and safe. What's wrong, he asks her, and she cocks her head to the side. What, she says. You look like shit, he says, and she almost tells him that she's saved them, that she sacrificed for them. We made a mistake, she'd told him. We fucked up, he corrected her.

She lets the hair fall in front of her face so he doesn't have to look at her, and they talk a little bit about how work was, what he did that day.

Listen, I brought you here for a reason, he tells her. She looks up at him without moving her hair, but he doesn't wish her another great year. I saw her again, he tells her. We made a mistake, he says.

You fucked up, she thinks, but she keeps it behind her hair. So, she says, what will happen.

He waves away the waitress who comes and starts to ask if everything's okay with their food.

I have to be with her, he tells her. I can't just leave her.

He can't just leave her.

And I can't let her take care of it by herself, he tells her. I wouldn't want her to do that.

She doesn't look at him anymore, just brushes the hair completely out of her face, and she slides up out of the booth and pulls her purse, which almost gets stuck but hits his water glass, which spills and shatters on the floor, and she walks out of the section of the restaurant and into the lobby, and the floor is moving under her feet as she walks but she doesn't fall down, and when she pushes the glass doors open in the front of the restaurant and runs outside into the fluorescent parking lot lights which blind her, she slips and falls hard on the ground.

That hurt, she says.