Kai

You weren't friends. More like a habit—smoking together after class, walking each other to the subway, sitting silently with headphones on, on a bench in a snowy courtyard. You knew he had a girlfriend, he knew you had a boyfriend. It was safe.

It was snowing so hard that evening that the streetlights were drowned in white sleet. You came to your place—just to warm up, simply because his minibus had been cancelled. He sat on the floor by the radiator, pulled off his wet socks, and I tossed him my dry ones. He caught them and laughed—shortly, hoarsely.

"Listen," he said suddenly, looking not at me but out the window, where snow was beating against the glass. "Does it ever happen that you're done with someone, but they still stay? Well, under your skin."

You didn't answer. You just watched the vapor from his disposable cigarette melt into the air.

He left when the snowstorm died down.

Yesterday he wrote, "Let's meet." You read it and deleted it. And today he's standing under your windows, and it's snowing again, and he doesn't raise his head, he just stands there, and you don't know whether to go downstairs or turn off the light.

The snow covered his shoulders, but he still didn’t leave.