The door was slightly ajar.
Probably, probably, it was all making her head hurt. She kicked the door closed. It didn't have the same effect as it would have if it had been wide open. Her feet trembled in her boots.
"I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry."
But she wasn't sorry.
She danced around the point, a bitter-looking butterfly.
"You were always a crybaby," he said, laughing.
But she wasn't going to let him see her cry she wasn't going to let him see her smile even. Her whole body was shaking now.
He was on the other side of the door. Whispering words she didn't want to hear. She could barely make them out but the lollipop barely began to dissolve in her mouth before she slammed her hip into the door to try to scare him away.
He wouldn't move, he wouldn't move, the words she probably spoke were making her fingers go numb and as a result her hip started to hurt. She locked the door.
Doors were a strange focal point of her life at this point. He would come to the door, he would go through the door, she would open the door and close the door, the door may have been everything.
"I'm not going to leave until you let me in."
"No."
But he just laughed.
Doors, doors, doors. She started to cry. But no, it might have been her conscience's fault that she wouldn't open the door.
Her hand rested on the doorknob.
"There's no point in this anymore."
"You're just going to lock me out until we both die?"
The answer she couldn't give. Here was nothing. Here was someone who was desperate to the point of coming to her door every night it seemed, and she couldn't do a thing.
She looked through the keyhole. His eye reciprocated the gaze and she noticed a certain blankness in it. That blankness, she thought, may have occurred to her at some point in her life as well.
"No."
"Well, let me in."
She peeled a Post-it from the stack and wrote in almost illegible handwriting. It may have been her nerves getting to her, but she stuck it on the inside of the door, unlocked it silently, and went down the fire escape like the day the apartment complex had almost burned down.
