special

magic can be obvious, sparkles raining from the sky and big colored explosions. or it can be simple, in the warmth of a strangers' hand.

“Suzy?”

I turn, feeling the redness of my eyes, the grease on my hair and the ache in my heart like they were the only things left of me. Jason-the-bus-boy, looking awkward, shifts his bin from one arm to the other.

“What table?” I ask, feeling tears like a weight in-between my eyes.

“No table,” he says, coughing and sliding the bin onto the counter. “You just...uh...you look a little down.”

I shake my head, the urge to cry and hit someone—preferably Dimitri, but I wasn't in a mood to be exclusionary—a solid thing on my mind. Because everything had been going perfect. We'd been rebuilding, but then...

“Just had a rough day.”

“It's a breakup, isn't it?” Jason guesses, smiling a little sadly.

The laugh this startles out of me is derivative and harsh, and Jason-the-bus-boy flinches like I'd insulted him, which I suppose I have. I feel guilty, but 'breakup' is such a terrific understatement it's almost funny. He left me with every bit of evidence I was sane, every reason I was only barely scraping by in a s****y apartment in Jersey instead of living in a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. He left me with no way to describe how beautiful he was, so handsome it was okay to leave your life behind.

“Yeah...I guess you could call it that.” It's insulting to agree with Jasons' poor choice in vocabulary, but it helps somehow to make it normal. Make it something reasonable, that you can three-way call your friends about at 4 AM and cry about.

Jasons' phone beeps in his pocket, shattering the moment of peace I was creating. He grimaces as he reads the message on the screen.

“Hey, I gotta go. But if you ever need to talk, uh...here.” He hands me a paper slip with a string of numbers. I look up to decline, hand it back, but Jason-the-bus-boy has already left, maybe anticipating this, so I only can stare dumbly at the paper in my hand. It's grease-stained, crumpled with the numbers slightly faded, and I can't help but wonder how long he's had this in his pocket, if he had been too nervous to give it to me. Or even if it was meant for me, originally.

I rub it in-between my fingers, and flimsy layers of paper napkin slide apart. The cool smoothness of the thing hums with everything Jason is—normal, caught up in tiny highschool dramas, redundantly commonplace and flatly unspecial.

But there's something magic in the fading warmth from his pocket and his nervous hands on that little piece of paper.