Hallelujah

I sat at that make up table, staring at my crazy eyes so hard they seemed to warp in the mirror, the image becoming less opaque...

The only noise inside the car other than breathing was the clicking of my nails against the handle of the door. I leaned against the window, watching fog grow lazily from my nostrils. The fog didn't disappear, instead little beautiful knives of ice crystals formed from the condensation. It was barely five degrees out and we were stuck in traffic.

That's New York evening rush hour for you. The traffic was further slowed by snow, steadily growing heavier over the three hours we'd been in state.

The silence was close to maddening.

"Cady! For fuck's sake, stop tapping!" I jumped at the gruffness of Matt's voice, the sudden explosion.

"Sorry," I whispered, staring straight ahead. In my peripheral vision, I saw his hazel eyes turned toward me as the car inched forward a few feet. "I didn't mean to aggravate you, honey..."

"It's.. alright..." I glanced at him and he looked right back at me, neither of us said anything. We moved a few more feet forward. I kept my eyes trained on Matt's face, wondering when everything had gone so -- quiet.The words to the question formed on my tongue, but I kept them in and must've started tapping again, for Matt turned to me so suddenly that I flinched. He didn't say anything. The silence pressed in so hard it felt like I was close to choking. I managed to get out a very quiet,

"Matt?" He turned to look at me again, face devoid of any expression at all. "Do you remember when we were first dating?" I whispered it, afraid that if I talked too loud, everything would just shatter around us. Matt nodded almost imperceptibly.

"What about it?" His voice was soft also, rough. I wanted to say more, but the words all sounded wrong. It was more fun back then. The love seemed to run so much deeper. We smiled at just a drop of a hat. Together we'd become quiet, prone to random screaming matches, to wondering what the fuck went wrong with us. I envied all those couples around us, those who still could feel like life was perfect, that they'd be happy forever. My eyes drifted down to the white gold ring on my hand, the crimson stone whose shimmer had seemed to lessen over time. A single tear slipped out of my eye, falling onto my wrist. "Cate.." His voice made me jump: I'd forgotten where I was. I looked up at him.

"Do you ever wonder if we'll make it?" My voice was shaking. Matt blew a big breath out of his mouth, staring straight ahead and turning on the windshield wipers to clear the snow. "Matt?"

"I still love you-"

"And I you.. but I sense a 'but' coming."

He turned his head to me again, an expression not written on face, but etched in his eyes. It was pure pain. "But..." He paused again and I felt more tears well up. God damn it all if I ruined my mascara again today. I did my best to keep them hidden. Which was stupid, he could see them. "Please don't make me say it, Cate.."

"Are you-" I couldn't say it either. "Do you think we should?" I looked down at my ring again, staring at that dying shimmer.

"Just.. for a while. We need a brea-"

"A break.. You're on tour. What the fuck am I supposed to do, go back home and wait for you to love me again?"

"Ah.." He hadn't been expecting this to happen so soon either. "I still love you. I'm not saying a permanent separation, baby-"

"As of right now, I guess I'm not your fucking baby anymore." I grabbed my purse and gave him a meaningful look, a look that said I'd wasted my last three and a half years with an asshole. His mouth was pressed into a hard line. I wrapped my fingers around the door handle and felt my heart rip in two, bit by bit. "See you around, Matt." With that I stepped out and weaved across two more lanes of unmoving traffic before getting to the sidewalk, turning a corner and walking away without knowing where I was going.

I was just running from myself, from the nagging demon in the back of my mind telling me that this part of my life was over. I wiped furiously at the tears on my cheeks before they turned solid in the freezing wind, pulling the engagement off my numb finger and stuffing it in my coat pocket. Should I go to the airport and wait for the snow to clear to go back to Vegas? No... they probably wouldn't want me back. Should I go stay with Aria? No, she had her own life, it'd be horrible to impose and be a heartbroken hindrance.

I leaned against a building for a few seconds before sliding down and landing in the soft fluff of snow, ignoring how cold I was, how hard I shivered. After all, my outside finally matched my inside...

My phone rang a few minutes later, jarring in the muffled silence that comes with any snowfall. Had it been anyone but him, I'd have ignored it, trudging toward oblivion until it was impossible to move

"What do you want, Brian? I'm trying to freeze to death here." My voice sounded monotone, hard to recognize, but at least it wasn't shaking.

"Matt and you are fighting." I shook my head, refuting the fact Brian sounded so very sure of.

"It's not a fight. He broke.." No, that wasn't right. "We're not together right now." There, that's sounds less... malignant.

"WHAT?!"

I almost laughed, a strangled squawk escaping my throat instead.
"What, please don't tell me it was unexpected."

"He didn't say anything about what happened. He just told me you got out of the car and he needed me to make sure you were okay."

"Well I'm not. There, now shut up so I can get hypothermia and die already." It was now my voice started to crack and shake with a mixture of tears and cold. Tears threatened to bubble up again but I blinked them away, holding tighter to the phone.

He sighed. "Cadybear, where the hell are you?"

"I'm on the corner of-" I glanced up. "there's snow on the sign."

"Oh yeah, that helps so much, Cady. Seriously, where are you?"
I squinted and just barely read through the white-out to tell him the number. "Okay, lucky for you, I'm only a few blocks over."

"Okay... see you then." I flipped the phone shut without another word and put it back in my purse, staring at the blurred lines of buildings for what was probably only five minutes. In my frazzled state of mind, it felt like an hour that I sat crying quietly in the biggest snow storm to hit New York in five years.