Three Words Too Late

The baseball game droned on from the television I'd left on for company—bottom of the ninth, two outs, the announcer's voice low and hypnotic. I sat on my fire escape with a glass of whiskey, watching the city smoke rise like ghosts against the night sky, thinking about how I'd ended up here.

She'd called herself my fox when we met at that tedious office party five years ago—clever, beautiful, sharp in all the ways that made you forget to look for teeth. I should've known. You don't get to be that cunning without leaving something broken in your wake. But I was thirty-two and lonely enough to mistake danger for excitement.

"You're like a cat," she'd said once, running manicured fingers through my hair. "Always landing on your feet. Always surviving."

I hadn't felt like I was landing on my feet when I found the texts. When I realized the promotion she'd "helped" me get came with strings I couldn't see until they were wrapped around my throat. By then, she was already gone—boxed up her things, left me with an apartment that felt too large and a career that smelled like compromise.

The baseball crowd roared from the living room. Someone must have hit a home run. I swallowed the rest of my drink and watched a stray cat pick its way along the alley below, moving with that particular feline confidence that comes from knowing you have nothing left to lose.

Some things you don't survive. Some things just hollow you out until you're walking around looking like the person you used to be, wondering what you traded away and why the price never seemed high enough until it was too late to demand a refund.

The television cut to commercial. The silence pressed in like the weather about to break. I set the glass down on the concrete and went back inside, leaving the night air to the city and its secrets, to the foxes and cats and all the things that hunt in the dark when no one's watching anymore.