You Must Be the One

Maroon- Risk 1/3

And I lost you
The one I was dancing with
In New York, no shoes
Looked up at the sky and it was maroon

Maroon, Taylor Swift

Alternate Universe

He could rehearse what he wanted to say until he was blue in the face. Give him a script and he'd memorize every line, word for word. The feeling behind the lines, too. It was never a problem.

Real life was decidedly harder. No amount of practice was going to be enough. Being skilled in the word department was of little use when it was one sided. When he would not be able to gauge what the reaction would be.

That wasn't entirely correct. If he tried hard enough, he probably could anticipate what she'd say in return.

And it was all along the lines of bad fucking timing. Things that should have been out in the open years ago. Too little, too late.

Memories tend to flood in late at night when he's trying to fall asleep. It's not usually the big ones, either. Those don't flutter around his brain because each of them are engraved on his heart; their wedding day, the rainy April morning Alianna was born, buying their first home. Even the ones he'd rather push to the back, the darker times of push and pull and then silence...those aren't the memories that come to the forefront.

They say you don't forget the little things. The tiny slices of life that make up a relationship with someone you really fucking loved. Those are the kind of things that keep him up. Those are the two a.m. thoughts that hit like a battering ram until he's forced to answer the question that's been haunting him for the last three years.

What went wrong?

The night before, the remembrance dejour was the tiny apartment they'd shared in New York ten years before. Truly a glorified walk in closet with a hefty rent every month and not much to show for it. But they were happy. That much he knew.

"It has character," Stefani would say. Didn't matter of she was talking about the dull grey paint job or the old furnace that was constantly going out. She always made the best of everything, even when he couldn't see it.

And somehow, she managed to make it beautiful, just like she did with everything. She had repainted and brightened up the place with plants and her artwork and hosted dinner parties and filled the miniscule space with her so that it became enormous. Might as well have been a palace.

The best part was the rooftop. They were the only ones who used it and it became a haven of sorts. There were many a summer night party up there with cold beer and music and dancing, but mostly, it was just them, watching the sun set across the Manhattan skyline. Watching the first snowflakes of the season gather up speed in the whipping wind and land gracefully in their out stretched hands.

"Dance with me," she often asked of him. It was absolutely a rhetorical question because he wouldn't think so refuse, but she would also pose it the same way and smile with her whole face when he took her hand.

Sometimes there was music and sometimes there wasn't and it didn't matter either way, really. Their bodies would find a rhythm (just like they did in other capacities) and they'd move together as the sunset painted them on the canvas of the paved surface.

Even when they both moved forward in their careers, made a little bit of money, she was afraid to leave. At the time, he'd thought she was being dramatic, overly sentimental, maybe. In the end, it hadn't been too difficult to convince her that they worked hard and deserved a nicer place for their efforts.

It was funny how retrospect worked the more time that elapsed. He could see now that maybe moving from that apartment was when it all began to unravel. Why couldn't he ever leave well enough alone? They hadn't expected to stay there forever, but he had ignored her reluctance in favor of wanting her to have the best.