100 Yellow Doors

november 26th, 2019, 11:22 p.m.

Julien was good at being alone. He had to be, what with the life he lived—get too close to the wrong person and you had to watch them wither away, years draining off their life like wrinkled petals falling from a dying rose. After a long enough time, the silent mornings and nights and the strange distance of walking down a street where no one knew your face, let alone your name, grew commonplace. Yes, he thought. He was good at being alone.

But Julien was not good at being lonely. He was not good at handling the empty echo of his footsteps in the halls, answered by no one else's. He was not good at handling vacant cell phones, screens going without notifications for days on end. He was not good at filling the gaping, open-mouthed void that yawned inside of his chest.

The days all spiraled together, like one never-ending film with no play or pause option. Drinking wine in the living room, watching awful Lifetime movies and laughing and crying to himself. Folding laundry, throwing it down on the floor, folding it again. Re-reading all the books on his bookshelf for third and fourth times. The Stranger, Camus. Lolita, Nabokov. Twilight, Meyer.

He thought of Iman, sometimes. Of what she was doing, what she had for breakfast, which sweater she was wearing today. He let himself think briefly about calling her—hearing her voice again, Where did you go, Julien?—but extinguished the thought as quickly as it had come.

He missed the cat. An hour after Beck's surprise appearance, Julien had realized that Fritz was gone and Ringo was gone with him. It was more an unconscious realization than a conscious one—a sudden awareness of the negative space at his feet, the strange emptiness of the couch without Ringo's hair all over it.

That night, Julien lay on the kitchen floor, blinking up at the glare, when his phone rang in his pocket.

He knew who it was without a glance at the ID. "Miss Kozlov."

"Mr. Morales."

He shut his eyes, letting out an easy breath until the world above him ceased its spinning. He knew what he needed to make it stop, to make it all stop—but more importantly, so did she. "I missed you."

"I knew you would," said Sera. "I've been thinking of you since you left, you know. I have a surprise for you."

Admittedly, that gave him a jolt. It was the most alive he had felt in hours, if that was at all something he could feel like anymore. "A surprise?"

"Dress nice," she said without an explanation, not that Julien had truly expected to receive one in the first place. "I'll see you in a bit."

Twenty minutes later, Sera and Julien stood on Julien's front stoop, impervious to the late November cold that enveloped them. Julien was in a dark suit—dark jacket, dark dress shirt, dark shoes and dark belt, no tie. After gazing at himself in the mirror for ten minutes, pulling at his skin, wondering at this body that was doubtless his but felt like someone else's, he'd decided to gel his hair back, too. Even so, he had the odd feeling that the entire get-up was something Fritz would wear, but he didn't let himself think about Fritz.

It was easier to think about Sera, who stood in front of him, a smoldering cigarette rested neatly between her dainty fingers. Her dress was a sultry scarlet, clingy at the waist and hips, puff-sleeved that tapered at the wrists. Cold red-blond hair tumbled down one shoulder as she shifted, digging in her purse for something.

A moment later, she silently offered him a box of menthols. Julien took it, leaning in for a light.

"You look princely," Sera said with a grin, taking his hand and guiding him away from the townhouse, heels clacking upon the concrete sidewalk. "Like something out of a fairytale."
Julien let out a self-deprecating chuckle, taking a drag from his cigarette. "Some fairytale this is."