For a moment neither of us spoke. She had taken up smoking, was practiced in exhaling through her nose. It was cool, I admit. She leaned hard on her elbows, took a moment to glare at me, and jammed her cigarette violently into its ashtray. Music from a neighbor’s stereo was stirring somewhere outside.
“It’s a terrible thing, what happened,” she sighed, lighting another cigarette.
I couldn’t disagree, but I said nothing. She had painted her apartment this odd shade of light blue. Through the haze (she had been smoking all night), the walls took on a dinghy, worn look – like a discarded Tiffany’s bag.
“What did you expect,” she said abruptly, pissed that I wasn’t listening. “You left. I had to stay here. I threw out all your shit and painted over your poems. They were good, really good. But they had to go.”
My eyes burned from the smoke, and from fourteen hours of driving. I swallowed the rest of my martini.
“I write fiction now,” I said in a way that I found impressively detached. Then I walked to her desk and unearthed a Sharpie from under a pile of cords, papers, and letters (unopened) from me.
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