The ceremony started with the bath but ended with her on thel rug, the same candles as just a minute before, but now cross legged, still just as naked. She said the same prayer for him as she had the night before, and the night before that. Always his name in repetition, a singsong of five letters, two syllables that rolled off her tongue with the most intimate of utterance in what had become a ritual of perpertual hope.

And like usual he lay in his bed, only 12 houses away, three blocks, about thirty windows and, same as the night before and the one before that, he soundly slept, cheap whiskey chasing away the dreams of a love he once almost clutched, of a woman not her.

And even farther across town, two interstates, a dozen red lights, and among the higher priced apartments, another man sat amidst the presses that made his trade, an impressive collection of the latest innovations in paper imprintation. He was too poor to afford a home of his own; he slept on the couch that was just as rightly his, a solemn gray one of tweed and buttons and three hard cushions.

But he had his cover, the same blue one he’d shared with her just two years earlier, and he had the same feather pillow they’d bought together when she was still his. As he grasped the two, hoping desperately to fall asleep despite the cocaine in his veins, he remembered again, like each night, that she said she stayed up late, and though he doubted all her words, and each of her actions, and the very blue of her eyes, he thought that this might still be true, that maybe she was still the insomniac she’d always been, and that he might for once hear her voice.

Pushing aside the arm of a girl brought home from the bar just up the street, he found the phone with great difficulty, first knocking over the secretary’s business cards, then kicking a shoe across the room. But, standing, he fingered the receiver, his eyes, notably without his glasses, the black phone a dark blur. But the numbers were the same as they will always be, and soon enough the seven digits were dialed, and with the first ring, he wondered if he should hang up.

And she, still cross-legged and naked on a rug atop a cold wooden floor, heard it in the distance. Still 14 lights and two interstates away, she couldn’t imagine who’d it be this late at night. The only chance, her friend Lila, or maybe a random drunk dial for her roommate, or even for her. Insistently she counted them down, first one ring then two, soon enough five, and finally with the sixth, she rose, and with feet that were still asleep from having lost circulation for so long, she stopped in the kitchen, picked up the phone, first dropping it, then pulling it up by its cord, breathing a quick hello? Before giving up altogether.

He was silent.

In fact, after the third ring he’d quit listening and instead stared at the girl lying on his couch. She was naked, her arms still in loose binds, her long hair covering much of her breasts. She was pretty enough, he just didn’t care, and as he questioned the whole affair, a voice out of nowhere, Her voice, the sweetest hello, and shocked, he dropped the phone, looking around to see if she stood in some forgotten shadow.

She didn’t. And with his quiet, she hung up the phone, suddenly cold where she was once so warm, and without pause she walked away from the kitchen, making the eight steps to her room, feeling embarrassed without any reason why.

And in the kitchen he sat, a boy she’d seen around forever, smoking a cigarette after fucking her roommate, quiet in the corner of an unlit room, plotting his quick escape.  And hoping that with enough time, he could ask out the girl that just ran into the room, blonde hair swinging around her breasts as she picked up an empty receiver, her pale ass bright in the dirty light of the neighbor’s single bulb.