Worlds Apart

Chapter 9

"Hey, Max? It's past five if you wanna head out," Max heard Ashley's voice from across the room.

Breaking her focus from her computer, Max looked up at the clock and saw the time. 5:04.

"Oh, okay - thanks for letting me know. I totally lost track of the time," Max replied.

She supposed she was at as good of a breaking point as any, so she might as well stop now. Max clocked out, logged herself out of the system, closed all of the applications she had open on the computer, then shut the computer down.

"I'll see you tomorrow, then," she told Ashley, along with any of the rest of her co-workers that happened to be listening. Max pulled her jacket off of the back of her chair.

"See you tomorrow. Great work today, Max," Ashley told her.

"Thanks," Max smiled as she slipped on her jacket. She then picked her purse up off of her desk and slung the strap over her shoulder.

From Stark Industries, it was only a couple of blocks to the subway, which worked out great for her, since it was particularly cold out that day. Her jacket didn't seem to be quite heavy enough for the temperature, so the shorter amount of time she had to be outside, the better. Her apartment was also not that far from her subway stop, and she was feeling pretty thankful for that right now.

When she stepped onto the subway, she shook herself off in an attempt to repel the cold from her body and took a seat in one of the last remaining open seats. Settling herself in, Max wrapped her arms around herself and slouched down in the seat to keep the heat trapped in.

It was about a ten minute ride from where she got on to the one by her apartment, and by that point, Max had warmed up enough that she was afraid to get off and step back out into the cold. Every time the doors had opened up at the stops in between, the outside air made its way in and would remind Max what was waiting for her in just a few short minutes.

When it finally got to her stop, Max mentally prepared herself for what was about to come and wrapped her arms around herself as she stepped off the subway. She walked briskly through the underground and up onto the streets, continuing on towards her residence.

She hadn't planned on slowing her pace, but that changed when something a block away from her apartment complex caught her attention. A noise. It was faint, but the familiarity of it drew her attention away from her task of getting home, and she stopped to listen in.

"I'm taking pictures in my mind
So I can save 'em for a rainy day
It's hard to make conversation
When he's taking my breath away,"

Max smiled. Someone was either listening to the radio or playing a CD, or something, because "Stay Beautiful" by Taylor Swift was being played somewhere off in the direction of one of the other complexes down the street.

It had been forever since she'd heard this song. She had never been the biggest Taylor Swift fan, but she had heard a fairly decent amount of songs by the artist, and never turned the radio off when she came on it. Max actually liked the songs she did know very much, and the only reason she wasn't a full-blown Swiftie was because the amount of songs this woman had released intimidated her. She was a very busy person and thinking about having to catch up on all of the songs she'd released in the last decade made her more hesitant to try.

Continuing her walk back home - she would've stayed to listen longer, but she felt like she was going to start turning blue soon - Max suddenly had a thought. What if she started now? If she remembered correctly, there were only one or two albums by Taylor out at this point, and that seemed very doable. Here in 2009, there was no pressure to learn the probable hours and hours worth of songs. In fact, it wasn't even possible for her to try to go through all of them, since most of Taylor's songs hadn't been released yet.