"You know what I want to do?  I want to dance in the middle of the freeway.  All the cars rushing around me.  I want to stand in that…what do you call it…the meridian, and dance.  My feet in the grass.  The cars rushing by.  Summer, blue skies."

"Where the hell's my green sweater?  What have you done with my green sweater?"

"Don't you think that would be nice?"

He threw something on the floor, a sweater but not his.  "Seriously, where is it?  Deb, you're crazy, you know?  You'd get arrested in a minute."

"But what a minute."

He held her gaze for a moment.  His eyes were still the same—light blue, but dark circles beneath now, as though he were the one who hadn't been sleeping.  She thought that was funny and so she laughed, and he turned away and began going through the drawers again.  She watched the arch of his back, the weight he'd gained in their year together pressing against his shirt.  You would think he could afford a new wardrobe, what with his promotion and all.  Perhaps he spent it all on that girl, Carrie or Mary or Sherrie or whatever her name was.  She stopped laughing.

"Since when do you keep your sweaters in the dresser, Nick?  Check the fucking closet."

He went to the closet.  She saw his sweater before he did—dull green with yellow horizontal stripes, definitely not a pattern for a man on a weight-gaining streak.  She didn't say anything, though, neither about the poor taste nor the location of the sweater; it took him a few seconds to find it.  He skipped over it once, and seemed to find it the second time only by happenstance.

He packed the sweater without comment.  She licked her lower lip, tugged at her robe.  She'd been in the shower; her hair was still wet, and now it was getting cold.  Never walk around with wet hair in winter, she chided herself.  She was going to be sick for a week at least.

"Nick," she said.  He continued rummaging through the drawers, looking for odds and ends, stragglers.  The fan whirred overhead, clicking every few seconds.  She winced each time; it was like a fork hitting a glass.  Nick had promised to fix it.

"Nick," she said again.  "How is she?"

He heard her; she knew he did, because he straightened for a second, then went back to his foraging.  Never a good actor; that's what she liked about him.  There's something to be said for a man who couldn't lie.  Not even when he was cheating; had to be up front with it.  For the best, was how he'd put it.  For who's best, she'd countered, and then the fight had come, and then the fear, and the sirens.  His leaving was inevitable after that.  She blamed herself.  Never any control.

"You let yourself go when you dance," she said.  "That's what I like about it.  You just lean back and do what feels natural."

"When was the last time you danced, Deb?"

"Last night."

"Feel like dancing lately, huh?"

There was no enthusiasm behind his venom; an accidental spray of poison, unintentional.  He glanced at her in apology and left the room.  She felt an impulse to run after him, to throw herself before the door and tell him he wasn't leaving, or if he was leaving he was going to kiss her goodbye first, and if he wasn't going to kiss her goodbye first he was at least going to have the decency to say goodbye.  But he wasn't leaving—his bags were still there, actual bags, garbage bags.  Maybe he hadn't gotten a new paycheck yet.

He was back a couple minutes later.  She couldn't see why he'd left; he had taken nothing out of the room and brought nothing back into it.  He didn't look at her, but went to the closet and began going through the things.  He was rummaging around the top shelf, pushing items aside.  A jewelry box fell, hit the ground, the lid flew off.  "Shit," he said, but his apology stopped when he saw the gun.

He stared at it, she stared at him.  Time stretched, stopped.  You can tell when time stops; it doesn't happen often, but every now and then a moment comes along that's worthy of closer consideration than most.  Many of these moments revolve around guns.  Especially guns that have been fired.  It was an old revolver, what caliber she didn't know.  It had belonged to her father, and she'd inherited it upon his death.  A valueless thing, she'd been told, but when you live in the city a gun is actually quite valuable indeed.  Perhaps not much good up in a closet, but it had once been in her nightstand, at her mother's request.  Keep it handy, Deborah; you never know when you may need it.  When you don't need a gun, Deb had decided, was when your boyfriend told you he was cheating on you and suggested that he move out.  That was a very bad time to have a gun, especially a loaded one, especially when your hands trembled and you couldn't see clearly and the world had been thrown just a fraction off its axis.  Especially then, you do not need a gun.

Nick bent down, carefully.  He picked the gun up by the grip with two fingers, titled it, looked into the cylinder.  What he saw made him frown, and he put the gun back in the jewelry box and put the box on the top shelf of the closet.  He didn't look around any further.  Whatever he'd been looking for, he was leaving it behind.

He went back to the dressers.  She got off the bed and went to the radio she kept on her writing desk.  Not that she'd done much writing lately.  Too much to write about, perhaps.  But the radio was good.  She turned it on, caught the end of some local car dealership ad, the jingle over-produced and catchy.  She waited, the tune ended, and without any prelude an old Sam Cooke song began to play.  She smiled, and for a second everything vanished, and when it came back in the next heartbeat, it didn't matter as much as the melody.

"Let's dance," she said, turning to him, her hips already swaying.  "One last dance."

He glanced at her after a moment, watched her.  He shook his head.  "I don't dance."

"The great thing about these old songs is, they only last a couple minutes.  Just a couple minutes."

"Debbie."

"Come on," she said.  "Everybody loves to dance."

"I don't dance."

"We met at a dance, you ass."

"Do you remember me dancing?"

"I remember you soaring."

Something that may have been a smile slid across his face, vanishing as soon as it reached his eyes.  He turned away from her, to his bags.  He muttered something, but the music was too loud and she didn't hear it.

She moved, curled her toes in the grass, listened to the hum of the cars beneath the melody.  Time not stopped, but slowed.  Only two minutes, but she would make the most of them, with her eyes closed and her hips swaying back and forth, one two three, lips mouthing the lyrics, even those that weren't there.  She knew this song by heart.