Clairvoyance, Unsound

📅 October 23-25 of 2017

【ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ ᴀʙᴜsᴇ ᴅʏɴᴀᴍɪᴄs, ᴀʟᴄᴏʜᴏʟ ᴀɴᴅ ᴅʀᴜɢ ᴜsᴇ, sᴜɪᴄɪᴅᴇ ɪᴍᴘʟɪᴄᴀᴛɪᴏɴs, ᴀɴᴅ ᴀssᴏʀᴛᴇᴅ ᴍᴇɴᴛᴀʟ ɪʟʟɴᴇss sʏᴍᴘᴛᴏᴍᴏʟᴏɢʏ】

Like most things in Kohao’s life, his relationship with Fawkes had started off reckless and impulsive and maybe that was the problem: The ball had really started rolling with her pulling his head back by his ponytail, with a black-lipstick-smirk and a “Yeah, I guess you’ll do tonight, pretty-boy.” 
...‘You’ll do.’
Kohao wondered how completely that had ceased to be true. 

He didn’t know when it had all started to fall apart, but as he watched his girlfriend from across the bar, it was all too obvious that it had: Fawkes was chatting away with a group of strangers tonight, so thoroughly engaged that it seemed it wouldn’t matter if he simply ceased to exist. They’d been on edge around one another all day already; the previous night he’d been trying to talk to her about how Ian relapsing recently was setting him off and she’d replied with something that basically amounted to “you’re not the only one with problems.” He’d slept on the sofa instead of in bed and she’d left quickly and curtly for work in the morning so he ignored all of her texts until afternoon. They were going out together in theory to make-up, but he was still wounded and she seemed to find his hurt feelings too frustrating to hang around.
With the randos across the bar, though, she wasn’t fed-up and frigid; she was laughing easily, her posture relaxed, as casually sociable as in the days before they’d started dating—which was where, maybe, Kohao thought bitterly to himself, they should have stayed. At least back then they’d truly been friends: Fawkes’s frequently-defiant raised chin had matched well with Kohao’s cynical eyes and his strut, and they’d fallen easily into kinship from there. They’d drink together, laugh, spit sarcasm at both one another and at the powers that be. Their arguments were more banter than actual bitterness, then; they resolved more often with laughter or begrudging agreements to disagree than anything else.

She’d sometimes leave bars with a pretty girl on her arm whereas he’d stumble into a bathroom stall or climb into a car with a strange man and they’d crack jokes at each other’s expense over the nights they went home with one another. He’d smirk and tell her she looked like a man and she’d punch him in the arm and say that he looked like a dollar store brand Taylor Swift, and it was meaningless and it was fun and it was fine. 
But things had escaped both of their control, somewhere. Their friendship ran too deep, they grew too close. He cut his hair in 2016 and she didn’t make a joke about him looking too much like a man now, the way he’d expected her to. No, she’d raised her eyebrows and asked, “Making a change, or needing one?”
She spent more and more time in his head after that and he spent most nights of the following spring in her bed, and by the time they’d made things official six months ago, they were both out of control and caught in this riptide relationship. 
Or that’s what it felt like to Kohao, there, on that October night: Drowning.

He watched as Fawkes glanced up from her conversation just long enough to roll her eyes over the fact that he was watching. He raised his eyebrows pointedly before turning away and throwing back his drink. The vodka seared his throat like cigarette smoke but he just flashed three fingers to the bartender. Three more shots. Three more bullets in Fawkes’s gun to his head. Her bright, not-for-him smile caught his eye again, and he ground his teeth against the surging tide of abandonment that burned in his veins and behind his eyes. 
Things had twisted, somewhere, and this was how he and his girlfriend operated, now: As opponents, fighting for one another’s affections. They’d become nothing more to each other than petty arguments and hurt feelings and silent, challenging eyes from across a seedy bar that glinted “prove you care” in the Morse code of reflected neon lights. It was agonizing, and Kohao turned his back on the battlefield as a soldier disenchanted, to down his shots, one after the other. None dulled the angry ache of his heart and he had no interest in playing the game tonight: No desire to rise to the bait and sell himself to another man. Instead he wordlessly paid for his drinks and didn’t bother to look at his girlfriend as he strode past her, out of the bar and into the cold October air, a deserter.

He was only a block away when she caught up with him, swift footsteps and a confrontational tone announcing her arrival as she fell into step beside him.
“What's your problem?” she half-snapped, tossing her hair out of her face. There was an undercurrent of hurt in her voice, as though he’d wounded her by not rising to the bait tonight, and the unfairness of it all set his teeth on edge.
“What's my problem?” he snarled, “What's your problem, Fawkes? Do you want to make me jealous or fucking suicidal?” He pointedly looked away from her to dig his cigarettes out of his pocket, wanting to feel the burn of anything except the anger in his chest.
“Don't be manipulative,” Fawkes scoffed, curling her lip in disdain as Kohao took a drag from his cig and wreathed them both in menthol smoke with a bitter laugh. 
“I’m manipulative?” he replied, venom flooding his tone; “I'm fucking honest, Fawkes. God. You just fucking—fucking do that shit, flirt with other people to set me off—Christ, talk about manipulation. Do you just not fucking care how bad it fucks with my head? Why even come after me? Why not fucking go home with one of them?”
Fawkes clenched her jaw as she bristled, her shoulders going rigid.
“I was literally just talking to people who haven’t been freezing me out all day! And don’t you dare act like you don’t pull some straight-up bullshit, Kohao Winters,” she snapped, “It fucking sucks when you’re having another damn meltdown where you feel like you’ve gotta force me to prove I still give a fuck about you—by making me pry you off of whichever guy you’re draping yourself all over—but you still treat me like a villain who takes your tantrums as it being an eye for an eye, when I don’t!”

The pair of them reached their apartment complex with impeccable timing; the distraction allowed Kohao to bite his tongue before the unnecessary cruelty of “Yeah, I guess that out of anyone, you’d already know that that leaves the whole world blind,” slipped between his teeth. Still, alcohol and anger simmered inside him, threatening to overspill as the pair made their way upstairs, towards their apartment.
“Well then, maybe you should have gone home with someone else anyway,” he said coldly, “Since I’m clearly a shitty, manipulative, melodramatic hypocrite.” He felt himself shutting down on her and hated every second of it, but he felt done with the night, with Fawkes, with the guilt and confrontation and everything. He shoved their apartment’s door open sullenly and stalked inside, while Fawkes let out a frustrated sigh at his back.
“God, don’t do this shit again,” she said, the exasperation in her tone all too clear, “don’t make me do the whole fucking thing where I tell you ‘no, baby, you’re not,’ even when you’re acting like this! I’m never allowed to be upset with you when you go cold on me, or get drunk or high and shut me out, and sulk and sleep on the couch for no damn reason! But I constantly have to prove myself to you and I shouldn’t fucking have to!”
Kohao ashed his cigarette in the kitchen sink before turning around to face her, feeling cornered and needled.
“So I’m just a fucking asshole because I never learned how to trust people to care about me?” he snapped.
“That’s not what I said and you know it,” Fawkes replied forcefully, “And I’m not ‘people,’ Kohao, I’m your girlfriend!”
Kohao forced a scoff through bared teeth.
“Yeah, and you're doing one hell of a job at it,” he sneered as he went to walk past her, down the narrow hallway to the bedroom; sick of dealing with her and sicker of dealing with himself.
Hurt flashed across her face and she snapped a wounded “Fuck you” as she shoved him sideways, forcing him to catch himself against the wall.

It was nothing but it was everything, because he was bottled up and pissed and neither sober nor drunk enough to deal with the echoes in his head that came with getting pushed around: His ears rang with the sound of lockers slamming and jeers off classroom walls, which narrowed his eyes and made his jaw clench.
“Don't put your fucking hands on me,” he said frigidly, his shoulders shaking with tension. He felt like a short fuse or spilled gasoline, and Fawkes was always, in some way, on fire.
She laughed in his face.
“God, fuck off with the intimidation, it’s so fucking old—”

It was a pin pulled on a hand grenade; his fist met the drywall next to her head with enough force to split his knuckles and cut her sentence short.
“You don't know fucking shit about me, Fawkes,” Kohao snarled, “You don't know the half of it, so don't fucking push me!” The scent of bloodied plaster dust combined with the threat in his own voice drove regret and fear into Kohao’s chest, so he spun away from his girlfriend and fled to the bedroom, feeling shaken up and sickened with himself.
Alone, new echoes were filling his head; no longer the sound of school hallways, but his own voice, his own fist meeting a wall. And it had been a wall, right?
“So don't fucking push me.”  That’s what he’d said. Why had he said that?

The implied “or else” was haunting, accusing, unforgiving. It pounded in Kohao’s ears like a panicked heartbeat, like bloodrush, like blood, like blood, like blood; and oh god he’d split his knuckles, hadn’t he? But it had been on the wall...hadn’t it? Feeling hot and smothered, he stripped off his shirt, ran the fingers of his left hand through his hair while staring blankly at his right. He felt untethered in some way and suddenly distrustful of himself, of his own memory.
“I wouldn’t hit her,” Kohao whispered to himself, trying to quiet his storming mind. The words fell empty from his lips, though, because he never thought he’d threaten to, either. But he’d undoubtedly done that. 
“So don't fucking push me.” 
“So don't fucking push me.” 
“Don't fucking push me.” 
His own voice haunted him. The doorway across the hall from the newly-dented wall led to the now-disused ‘kids room’ where Fawkes had used to let the children she’d babysit stay. Now he kept his guitar in there, and Fawkes hadn’t done any babysitting since he’d moved in. Kohao couldn’t keep his heart from freezing over at the newfound knowledge of why: Because what if a kid had been there tonight? He tried to resist hyperventilating but found his chest already heaving.
The blood on his knuckles spelled ‘violent’ and the ache of his arm rang through as ‘aggressive’ and every tattoo he’d chosen to get had been him branding himself with that truth, and maybe that was the only truth he had. 
Fawkes’s eventual appearance in the bedroom doorway managed to get Kohao to raise his head; he attempted to refocus his eyes though his vision swam with stress.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered hoarsely as she crossed the room. 
“Yeah. Me too,” she said tiredly, waving a dismissive hand and climbing into bed beside him before rolling over to face away.

He could take no solace in the fact that her face had been unbruised. His echoing memory reel skipped like a broken record and repeated, over and over. Sometimes he heard himself hit drywall and sometimes he felt his knuckles meet skin; sometimes all was quiet and sometimes children were jeering or screaming in the background, but maybe they were outside on the street and not in his head and maybe it didn’t really matter: It was just another fracture between fear and reality. Another distorted record of the pain he inflicted on those he loved.
“You don't know fucking shit about me, Fawkes; you don't know the half of it.”
Kohao stared at his bloodied knuckles and knew eventually he’d have to watch Seth die in front of him again.

—

It was no surprise that sleep didn’t come that night. He didn’t need the assistance of caffeine or amphetamines to stay awake this time around; self-disgust and anxiety were more than enough to deprive him of rest. His own voice rang in his ears, his sore knuckles and uncertainty taunting him with the notion that this type of regret was all there would ever be for him: That all he could do in life was wait until the memories he had of hurting his friends and loved ones outnumbered all the rest.
He chain-smoked out on the fire escape; killed a pack, overthought, and watched the stars fade in and out of the city smog. His lungs and heart alike were aching by the time the sky began to lighten. He could barely stand to look at Fawkes in the dim near-dawnlight of their bedroom, feeling his eyes were unworthy and his presence dangerous. So he scribbled a note for her that he was out buying cigarettes, walked out the door, and left. It was a safe assumption that she’d be busy for several hours at least, and wouldn’t notice if he was out far longer than it took to buy smokes: He knew that she’d be going to the gym early that morning to meet Athena, and that she had several tattoo and piercing appointments that day. She might even go clubbing that evening. 
The two of them would do what they always did after a fight; give each other space until they couldn’t anymore, until they collided again, until they spent a night exchanging breaths and pretending that ‘make-up sex’ was actually a thing that worked. And then it would start all over again.

Kohao wandered without any real direction; and getting lost in thought and getting lost along the city streets happened in tandem. He knew his usual course of action after a fight with Fawkes, the way he filled the avoidance period: He’d get angry, get wasted, go off. He’d call up Nick—who had only ever known him off his face—with the words “NICK. GUESS WHO HAS $300 AND JUST FOUGHT WITH HIS GIRLFRIEND? ME. LET’S GET FUCKED UP,” thrown down like an invitation. The two of them would lace a couple joints with ketamine or just bump it off Nick’s counter, maybe pop a molly or rail a few lines of coke if Kohao was running the show. Nick would try and fill the hole that heroin had left and Kohao would try to heal the void in his chest, too, and neither of them would acknowledge that it wasn’t working. And despite the appeal of a ketamine trance, the idea of repeating that cycle felt intolerable. 
Still, falling into the K-Hole might’ve been less excruciating than falling into his own head: The day wore him thin, with his flashback soundtrack on an unforgiving loop in the back of his mind. He couldn’t shake it and it left him feeling both hunted and haunted: Something dangerous, irredeemable, toxic; an anchor binding Nick to substance abuse, a constant threat to Fawkes; a kneecap to her altruism and a drain on every one of his friends. He scratched at the scars on his arms, like he might be able to claw the self loathing out from where it festered, burning, in his veins.
In his head, his knuckles seemed to be splitting against skin more often.

He lost over half the day to wandering and painful rumination, and when Kohao made it home not long after noon to an empty apartment, he threw himself onto the couch and into the pull of unconsciousness less due to his exhaustion and more because he was so desperate for escape. Sleep failed to rescue him, though, and he was plagued by nightmares wherein he played the role of the monster. He awoke to the sun having set, shattered at spirit and feeling as though he may have been better off if he hadn’t slept at all. He couldn’t bear to enter the spare room for his guitar or his journals, because getting too close to the dent in the drywall and thinking about the ‘what if’ of a child’s presence made his ears ring and his hands shake. So he answered thirst and anxiety and his empty stomach with alcohol and sat on the couch in the living room to stare blankly at the TV, which even when he eventually thought to turn it on, failed to deaden the chaos in his head. 

When Fawkes eventually got home, she went to follow their script; repeat their cycle. She joined him on the couch and turned the TV down; took his drink from his hand. She went to move closer and he couldn’t keep a choked noise from leaving his throat. She stopped short and he knew there must have been something haunted in his eyes, because concern shadowed her face when he looked up at her.
“I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely, his stress-smoking having sanded his voice down to a rasp, “I just...I can’t...I can’t tonight.” He didn’t know how to articulate himself; he could barely stand to look at her with how badly the guilt burned in his chest, and he feared his averted eyes would anger or offend her. 
Mostly she just seemed confused, though, and it weighed on him to know that the cause was likely not just that he was turning her down, but that he had apologized for a second time. 

There was a disquieted uncertainty that settled over the pair of them that night; he was breaking script and Fawkes was letting him, but the uneasiness in the air was palpable. He couldn’t look her in the eye and no matter how many glimpses of her he caught, every time he looked up he was afraid her face would be bruised and swollen to match his knuckles.
He tried to fall back into place as the night ended; tried following Fawkes to their bedroom at just a step behind her. Nausea swept over him as they drew level with the dent in the wall, though, and then their shoulders nearly brushed and he flinched away as though from a flame. His head spinning, he darted in the opposite direction from her; across the hall and into the bathroom, where he splashed his face with cold water, gulped it from the faucet, and tried not to hyperventilate. It was a losing battle and his mind grew incoherent with churning, jagged thoughts: 
I didn’t hit her—
—it was on her blind side, too, fucking psycho—
I wouldn’t have—
—“don’t fucking push me”—can’t say “I love you” because you’re not capable—People should run from me but they never do—
You just hurt them 
    I just hurt them 
You just— 
—I just— 
You—I—
hurt them. 

hurt them.

hurt them. 

kill them—

Kohao tore his gaze up from the sink drain only to meet his reflection’s clairvoyant eyes in the bathroom mirror.
          ...So save them.
There was no preventing it; tears finally started flowing from his burning, red-rimmed eyes. He hunched over the sink and clasped his hands over his mouth to try and stifle the sound of the dry sobs that racked his body. He couldn’t manage it.

He couldn’t bear to face Fawkes when he heard her walk in, but the tone of her voice felled him anyway.
“Kohao…” 

She said his name with the same sad disbelief one might find in the voice of someone discovering the body of a beloved pet; it was shock and heartache and Please-let-there-be-something-I-can-do, and it was unbearable; no-one else was supposed to know he was a corpse already. He felt the warmth of her hand before it touched his shoulder and he all but threw himself sideways to escape her comfort.
“Just leave it, Fawkes! Please,” he almost begged, his voice raw and pained and broken, even to his own ears. He couldn’t avoid looking at her, and the expression of heartsick bewilderment with which she met his vulnerability was both unfamiliar and excruciating.
“Can’t you tell me what’s going on?” she asked, stepping forward, “Please, just tell me what’s wrong—”
He shrunk back again instinctively from her outreach, crossing his wrists in front of his face.
“God, Fawkes,” he pleaded, the desperation of his words cutting his throat like glass, “Please, just go back to bed!”
For a moment she hesitated and just looked at him, biting the inside of her cheek, a hand still half-raised to reach out. Finally, she let her arm fall back to her side. 
“...Okay,” she said, then quietly turned and padded out of the bathroom with one last concerned glance over her shoulder. 

Kohao cried until his stomach ached after she left, but eventually the tears stopped coming. With his heavy heart acting as an anchor, he slowly pulled himself together. His turbulent mind hadn’t been silenced, but having a sense of purpose—however bleak—had made the constant, haunting reverberations of his past feel more like white noise and less like knife wounds. Even still, he found it difficult to enter the bedroom. His very presence seemed dangerous, noxious, and he knew restful sleep would be impossible if he remained there—but he still forced himself to lay down in bed next to Fawkes. She didn’t stir as the mattress shifted under his weight, and her breaths stayed soft and even.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. He stared up at the ceiling and knew that in sleep, she would never register his third, now preemptive, apology.

—

Kohao slept fitfully and only in pieces: He caught snatches of unconsciousness from which he was awoken repeatedly by fragmented nightmares, and by the time he felt the approach of dawn—even after only a couple hours—he welcomed the excuse to cease his attempts at resting. Stepping out onto the fire escape to avoid waking Fawkes, Kohao quietly took in the world for a moment.
The sun hadn’t yet risen, but the blue light of pre-dawn had begun to brighten the sky. Warm summer nights had been long pushed to the past by late October, but a true chill hadn’t quite sunk in. The temperature was probably somewhere in the high 50s: Not nearly cold enough to fog Kohao’s breath, but just cool enough to make the warmth of a lit cigarette welcome. After a couple minutes, a couple nicotine drags in the purgatorial autumn air, Kohao dialed Anarchy’s number; knowing his best friend would have gotten up for his morning workout not too long ago. Sure enough, Anarchy picked up halfway through the second ring:
“Kohao? Early morning for you, man, what’s up? You alright?” 
Kohao elected to skip answering the second question.
“Can you come over in a few hours, around ten or so...and bring some cardboard boxes?” he asked, his voice still coming out tired and half-haunted, despite his best efforts to speak normally, “I’m assuming you haven’t rented out my old bedroom yet.”
Anarchy gave some sympathetic intake of breath.
“Yeah, I can do that. You and Fawkes officially done, then?” Anarchy asked. The lack of surprise in his voice felt like additional weight on Kohao’s shoulders, and he tiredly sighed out a drag from his cigarette.
“We should’ve been done for a while and just haven’t known it,” he said heavily, “she’ll be finding out today, I guess.”
“Damn. You’ll be the one putting this thing in the ground, then?”
Kohao winced at the word choice.
“Do me a favor, ‘Key,” he said, “don’t phrase it like that. But yeah...” He trailed off for a moment and stared hollowly out over the city skyline. The sun still hadn’t begun to rise. “...I guess I will.”

The morning passed in something of a haze that coffee failed to cure. There was a fragile-feeling quiet that filled the apartment, where Fawkes seemed to take note of the fact that Kohao’s side of the bed had been cold and his eyes dull by the time she woke up, but she didn’t address it. He, too, failed to spur himself into speaking. He knew that things had to end, that he had to be the one to do it, that that was a necessary part of protecting his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend from everything to follow. But he’d been worn raw by the night and the conclusions he’d drawn from it, and couldn’t manage to rip off the band-aid before it was time for her to leave.
“...I only have appointments until 3 or 4 today,” Fawkes said, her voice uncharacteristically cautious as she lingered in the doorway, “And I thought I might not wait around for walk-ins that I don’t really need. So...I’ll see you this afternoon?”
Kohao looked up at her with the effort of pulling his head from underwater and forced a smile that he knew had little hope of reaching his eyes.
“...Yeah, I’ll see you then,” he replied. 
She hesitated for another moment, her hand on the doorknob, but finally she turned to leave.
“Wait, Fawkes…” Kohao suddenly scrambled to his feet and crossed the room to her, feeling selfish with every step he took. “...Have a good day,” he murmured, pressing a gentle kiss to her mouth. The relief in the smile she gave him before closing the door behind her only hardened the guilty knot in his stomach.

Anarchy arrived, cardboard boxes under one arm, not too long after Fawkes left. The way the sympathy in his eyes darkened to outright concern when Kohao opened the door to let him in made Kohao wonder just how fragile he looked, and he made an effort to straighten his spine and attempt to be less transparent.
“How are you holding up?” Anarchy asked as a greeting, stepping over the threshold to give Kohao a quick, one-armed hug before looking around the apartment. “Just tell me what to pack. I can go to the post office for more boxes if we need ‘em.”
“I’m...breathing,” Kohao said. “She still doesn’t know it’s ending. I’ll tell her this afternoon.” He, too, paused to tiredly look around the apartment. Realized he’d already ceased to think of it as his. “We won’t need more boxes. I haven’t really gotten anything new since moving in…Mostly we’ll just be packing clothes and books.” 
“...Should we start with the clothes then?” Anarchy prompted after a moment.
Kohao realized he’d been staring blankly at the video games shelved on the media center and shook his head to try and clear it. “Uh, yeah, sure...probably over half of these are mine, anyway.” He turned to walk toward the bedroom with Anarchy, who raised his eyebrows in cautious curiosity.
“...Is it okay if I ask what went down?” he said, tentatively, “Like...what was the final straw?”
They were drawing level with the dent in the drywall anyway, so Kohao hunched his shoulders, averted his eyes, and silently pointed to it in lieu of answering aloud.
Anarchy stopped to look and Kohao passed him, used the moment he had alone in the bedroom to catch his broken breath before Anarchy joined him, looking puzzled.
“Fawkes did that?” Anarchy asked, quirking an eyebrow as he folded out a box.
“No, I did,” Kohao responded, without elaboration, trying not to betray the fact that he was fighting not to vomit into his dresser drawer. Anarchy seemed able to read the finality in his tone, though, and didn’t press—just offered Kohao a gentle shoulder squeeze and comforting tone.
“You both seem to bring out the worst in one another, you know,” he said softly, “At this point, ending it really does seem like the right thing to do.”
Kohao swallowed hard. Ending it. 
“Yeah,” he said thickly, “I know.”

Despite not having felt like he had all that much to move at the beginning, packing up managed to eat away the hours. At long last, though, just past mid-afternoon, things wound down to the final stretch: Looking around, Kohao noticed that the apartment seemed visibly emptier. Achingly he wished he could take the dent from the wall, too: Pack it up with his posters, leave no trace of his presence whatsoever. Because it was the only thing left, Kohao realized; Anarchy had just gone downstairs with the guitar and Kohao found himself suddenly at the finish line, holding the last box to be brought down to the car; one final armload. He heard the door click open and turned around, expecting to see Anarchy. Instead, though, Fawkes stood in the doorway. Her gaze travelled from the box under his arm to the gaps on the bookshelves and the blank spaces on the walls where his posters had hung.
“...Kohao?” she said, the upward inflection at the end of his name not matching the knowing ache in her tone.
“...I’m sorry,” Kohao said softly, his throat tight with grief, “I...I don’t know what else to say. I don’t think there is anything else to say. We just...we can’t do this anymore, Fawkes, you know we can’t. It’s not working: It’s all pain. It has been for a while, now. And I can’t keep hurting you.”
“You’re just giving up, like this?” Fawkes demanded, shaking her hair out of her face as she stepped forward, more defiant than pleading: “Who says I’m hurting, anyway? Sure, we have bad shit here but we can talk it over first, at least! You’re just going to leave?”
Kohao slowly shook his head despite the hurt in her voice, his heart leaden in his chest.
“Fawkes,” he said, fighting to keep his voice from cracking, his knuckles tingling and a phantom pistol heavy in his hand, “When have I ever talked things out?” He finally met her eyes and tried to swallow the aching lump in his throat. 
“You deserve better,” he said softly, then gently brushed past her; dropped his apartment keys onto the kitchen counter as he left, and let the door click shut behind him for the last time.