Katya peaked around Jayson and smiled bashfully before striking a weird pose in some joke of a gesture. Whether it was intuition or the knowledge that he had ignored all those calls after breaking her heart or that Katya was just that transparent, Mikhail didn’t know, but he certainly knew that his ex was fucking furious. Her surprise and subsequent movements were aggressive, even as anyone else would probably perceive them as playful...Katya was livid.

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Their timing couldn’t have been more impeccable, at least as far as the line was concerned. Anything’s bouncers had started to let people in, no longer concerned about maintaining a line outside the doors for the purpose of appearances. And yet, the club wasn’t so crowded that they couldn’t let a three-guy-to-zero-girl ratio slide by every once in awhile. The overall breeziness of the situation put some pause in Mikhail’s step and he had to fight the temptation to run. If Jayson hadn’t pushed him forward, he might’ve discovered a way back.

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The scene in front of the mirror was absurd. Just wanting to touch up her mascara, Katya was finding reflective real estate hard to come by. Nipples were being forced back into tube tops as breasts were pushed together and back out. Faces ducked in close to the glass and everyone clucked away in the background. Spectacularly bedecked fingernails flicked at specs of makeup gone astray. Elbows flailed with more fury than the numerous turns of various lipsticks.

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Despite the constant typing, the Office of Emailing People (OoEP) was a cushy job for anyone who didn’t give a fuck about words. The entire gig was built around brainstorming sessions in the morning that tried to discover new loop-holes in the legal language surrounding spam. Equally as time-consuming, the afternoons were spent circumventing the morning’s laid-out illegalities with clever scams. Some days, Mikhail was writing persuasive paragraphs about the financial benefits of a perverted pyramid scheme. Other days, he was a Nigerian prince. And then there was the completely non-sensical part of his job.

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Mikhail walked out into the main terminal alone. The relative stillness of the bathroom behind him was long gone, lost in the movements of too many people. They were all striding along on an infinite number of paths and he could’ve followed any number of them. They moved in and out in different directions, theirs and others, but with only a general sense of destination. It was a long waddle towards a place, not a purpose.

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A little reluctantly, Mikhail decided to break his seal. He knew it’d be a long night of restroom excursions the second he did, but there was no reason to delay the inevitable. There was a scale in which he rated all the paralyzing moments when piss so consumed him that his teeth swam, but this one barely made the top 100. He was thankful that it didn’t because even as early in the night as it was, there was a healthy line waiting for the #720’s sickly men’s room. Sans Jayson and Chevy—who were still too proud to pee—the wait gave him too much time to look at the dilapidated existence that surrounded him.

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The boys walked silently through the bar’s heavy plaster doors. Mikhail braced himself for his first encounter with the #720’s main terminal in several months. Turning the corner past Low was always his cue to turn up the charm. The party was around that corner. Each step had the potential for conversation. The light was harsher there. Bars and clubs, big and small, would clamor for his attention from both sides of the corridor. In their flat-screen-sized windows, blinding neon signs advertised anything a man could want, unless he wanted to see inside the club; that part of the screen was tinted. Along the path a slew of freestanding and rotating advertisements, mis-planned garden plots, fake plastic trees, and other such “city betterments” would stand in his way or distract him from whatever goal was at hand at that moment. And the ceiling would loom over everything. It was all familiar to Mikhail, but it was still something that he had to mentally prepare himself for.

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The first time Mikhail broke up with Katya was only a few weeks after they had begun to see each other, barely enough time to be considered an official couple in the first place. It was before he’d go back to her for a much longer and intense session, a second time around. Before he was backed into any sort of corner, when things still felt free or, at the very least, without dire consequences. It was before she began demanding changes in his life. Before he realized how deep in it he actually was. At that early stage of their first dance-less dosey-doh, Katya seemed good for him.