She comes in like a thunderstorm, stilettos tapping out a beat like a bass drum, shoulders squared by the cut of her blazer. Her hair is tied in a ponytail, golden blonde with a touch of red and just like you remember, and you can't help but think of the way it felt between your fingers, the way it looked splayed across the whiteness of your sheets. She is beautiful, like this, but she is beautiful always.
You do not spend much time in this office - more so lately than usual, if you're being honest, but the reason for that is painfully obvious. There are papers scattered across your desk; patent applications, reports, forms that require signatures, memos that require action. You miss when things used to be neat and tidy when you walked in, how folders used to be colour coded and how post-it notes used to tell you what to do. You never did learn how to run a company.
"Good morning," you try. She looks up from her phone - her life, you remind yourself, and it hurts you now to think that you helped make her like this, "You look nice."
The words are flimsy, but they burst with all the things you want to say. She looks up, and her eyes are blue, so blue, lined in sharp, black lines. Her mouth is an angry slash of red.
"Thank you," she says, and her smile is soft, but her eyes stay hard. You wonder if this is the way you made her - she is an awfully good actress, but you have been playing this game longer and better, and you can tell that her softness is slipping away from her. Did you do that? Did you take her softness?
"How are things here?" You ask, like this belongs to you still, like you are anything more than a name.
She collects the papers from your desk, like she always does, and piles them nearly in her arms. You follow the line of her jaw when she looks back to you, and remember what it was like to kiss her, to breathe her name along her skin. You miss the way she used to shiver. You miss the way her body moved with yours, bathed in the blues and reds of sunrise.
"Busy. We signed a new contract with the D.O.D., so I've been trying to settle that, make sure that legal gets everything right. Government contracts are big deals. You remember."
You do. You nod, "Big deals."
She shifts her weight to her other leg, and you wonder what went wrong. You wonder why you sleep alone. You play the music in your workshop loud enough for the glass doors to shake, waiting for her to step over the threshold and turn it down. You blow the speakers out. You crack the glass. You turn the music off yourself, now.
The room is quiet, because you both don't know how to fill the silence between you. Sometimes, it hurts you to not know what she's thinking - does she miss you the way you miss her? Does she sleep alone and wish that you are there, that you are curled around her like she is the moon and you are the tide?
"I've got to get back to work," she says, finally, when you think you might scream something at her. I love you I love you I love you—
"Right," you say, and you understand, you really do. She is more than just yours to covet, "No, I understand. CEO life."
She smiles, and you can see her teeth, the way she used to smile when you circled your arms around her in the kitchen and danced with her, when you kissed her like it was the first time all over again. You return it. You feel sick.
"Thank you," she whispers, and she turns a little, "I'll see you, Tony."
Your diaphragm threatens to declare war on your lungs, and it's like breathing with your head under water for a minute.
"Yeah, Pep. Sounds good. See you."
Somewhere along the line, you knew this would happen. It either happens, or it doesn't. You love her, you love her, you love her.
She leaves like blue skies and a gentle breeze, like the calmness in the eye of a hurricane. Her shoes are muffled kick drums. You cannot have her back.
Small talk is a godsend, and you will take your miracles in small doses.