'til the road and sky align

[ CHAPTER TWO: Specks ]

The universe allows only five possibilities out of an infinity to find The One - your One. Max has gone through six.

The first girl to take Max's heart was Samara Mizd from second grade. She was number one, and his first kiss.

Elvie Cruz was number two, and her brother, Angel, was a close number three. Neither of them lasted long.

Number four was Hana. That's as far as he knows about them. They were kind of mysterious.

And Yale? Well, college was number five. Enough said about that.

Number six is a Dunkin' Donuts on the corner of 26th and Jupiter. It's a tiny coffee shop, selling coffee, donuts, coffee donuts, and whatever other shit DD has nowadays. It's jampacked when twelve o'clock rolls in, and the rush doesn't die until four.

It's exactly like a throwaway class Max took in college -- right up to the point that it fills up so quick, that there are two options:

1. Keep standing, look like an idiot, and unsuccessfully try to smuggle a smoke or two in; or

2. Share a seat with a beautiful stranger that's too busy with a boring book.

There's an option three, of course, but before Max can even turn to rush out the door, the stranger (if Max can allow himself to call the man that) glances up from his important, business book, or whatever, and zeroes in right on Max.

The universe allows someone, maybe, like, three seconds to run away from something shitty like this. --or something. Max isn't a scientist. He's just fucked.

It's different from meeting an old acquaintance after thirteen years. Alex isn't just an acquaintance. Or maybe they are now - just two specks of life traversing an orbit set into the earth, maybe once having intersected on a fixed point that they both had forgotten in North Carolina. Yale always said shit like that: math and science-y shit that no one around him understood.

Yale looks away first. His book is a bigger speck on his orbit than a guy he saw at a train station a few days before. (Four days, thirteen hours, and twenty minutes, to be exact. Max wasn't keeping track or anything. It's just something he knows in passing.) He looks just as well-pressed and respectable as he did then. His eyes, though, are sunken and darker.

He has a cup of coffee on the table. Untouched.

Someone nudges Max's shoulder. "Excuse me," they say. Max startles. Was he just fucking standing there the whole time? Just looking like a total idiot in the doorway?

Shit.

He turns, and exits the way he came. No, he isn't running away. No, no, no, no. He's just. . .relocating.

Meeting once is just as big as an accident as dropping a pen - happenstance, or serendipity, or kismet, or something. Meeting twice starts to become something; orbits and specks, and all kinds of other shit, colliding, growing into this clusterfuck of feelings and memories that were all supposed to stay hidden.

Max turns a corner into a smaller street. He hides next to a dumpster, and smokes down three cigarettes quicker than he ever has since he was twenty-two. (That's saying something.) It's a bitter taste in his mouth, and a shaky feeling behind his eyes.

Many people have told him not to romanticise smokes, drugs and alcohol. Did you know what he did? He became a teenage rockstar.

Then he fell in love.