Page 21 of A Taste of Vanilla

I pause. The last little knife.

Not sorry, or I love you, or no, don’t go.

Butdramatic.

I look back at him.

Maybe I’ll have regrets later. Maybe I should have yelled at him earlier. Maybe I should have cursed him out. Or maybe I should have thrown the pastry after all.

But instead, right now, I smile. Just enough to let him know he has not won the scene he wants.

“No,” I say. “I’m single.”

I walk out.

The reception area is still empty. The elevator ride down lasting approximately nine hundred thousand years.

I stand alone in the mirrored box, staring at myself beneath the bright overhead lights that make my skin look far too pale and my eyes too green and my mouth too soft.

My left hand looks naked.

I flex my fingers.

I do it again.

No ring, but a pale indentation reminding me that it existed.

My chest tightens.

I press my lips together so hard they hurt.

The elevator stops at the fifteenth floor.

A woman in a gray suit steps in, her eyes glancing at me before quickly looking away with the panic of someone trapped with a stranger on the edge of a breakdown.

I smile at her.

She stares at the coffee splattered on my boots.

“Rough morning?” she asks weakly.

“My fiancé slept with his secretary,” I say.

Her eyes go wide. The elevator rings, and I walk out.

Behind me, she says, “Oh my god.”

The lobby is brighter than when I arrived. People move through it carrying briefcases and iced drinks.

I walk past the fake plant. Past the reception desk. And past a security guard who looks like he wants to ask me if I’m okay but values his life enough not to.

Outside, Baltimore hits me in the face.

Heat, traffic, horns, someone yelling near a curb. The smell of exhaust and coffee.

The world has the audacity to continue.

I stand on the sidewalk with empty hands. No coffees. No croissant. No ring. No future that made any lick of sense.