"My name is Kyle and, what can I say? My life is the definition of shit…"
A young man stood at the edge of a bridge, the city lights of Los Angeles smearing across the wet pavement below. Rain fell in a steady curtain around him. He typed the words slowly, deliberately, into his phone — a final message to no one in particular, or perhaps to everyone who had never thought to ask.
This was a suicide note. The question was what had driven Kyle to write one.
"Damn it. Another shift?"
Kyle muttered it under his breath, green eyes dull and glassy under the store's flickering fluorescent lights. He pressed a fist into the edge of the counter like it might anchor him to something. His back ached. His feet throbbed. His brain had gone somewhere quieter and darker, a place it had been visiting more and more lately.
The minimum wage wasn't the problem. The extra shifts weren't the problem. The problem was that Kyle had agreed to all of it — had asked for it — and somewhere between the agreeing and the doing, the life had drained out of him like water through a cracked cup.
"Kyle."
Nate appeared from the back room, already wearing his jacket, keys jangling from his finger like a taunt. He was a cheerful guy, Nate. Kyle found it exhausting.
"Boss wants you to close up."
Kyle hadn't even realized he'd zoned out. He blinked, refocusing. Nate was watching him with mild concern, the kind that doesn't go far enough to actually ask anything.
He pressed the keys into Kyle's open palm.
"I'll leave you to it," Nate said with a grin, already halfway to the door. "Try not to have too much fun." Kyle didn't find that funny.
He stood alone in the empty store, listening to Nate's footsteps fade and the door click shut. The silence settled over everything like a second skin. Kyle moved to the register and switched on the security lights, filling the aisles with that pale, clinical glow that made everything look slightly worse than it was.
He'd been working here for two years. In the beginning, it was supposed to be temporary — a bridge between where he was and where he wanted to be. But bridges required effort. They required forward movement. And Kyle had stalled somewhere in the middle, feet frozen, afraid to look down.
He was in his mid-twenties. He thought about going back to school often, the way you think about things you don't actually believe you deserve. A real education. A real job. A real life. These were other people's things.
Los Angeles had a way of reminding you of that constantly. Every corner turned revealed someone more beautiful, more successful, more certain of their right to exist here. The city of stars, they called it. Kyle couldn't afford to look up long enough to see any.
He settled behind the register and stared at the door.
The thought drifted through before he could stop it — what it would look like if a bullet came through that door instead of a customer. Just one. He didn't chase the thought, but he didn't entirely let go of it either. It had been visiting him regularly now.
Thunder cracked outside, rolling in low and heavy from the distance, and Kyle surfaced. He blinked at the ceiling. Right.
And then it started to rain.
He remembered his umbrella the moment the first drops hit the window. He'd left it at home, on the hook by the door. He'd even looked at it on his way out.
He laughed. Not the warm kind — the hollow, disbelieving kind that escapes when things stop being surprising and start being absurd.
"Zeus!" he shouted, his voice booming through the empty store. "Is that how you face me?!"
The line was from one of his games. He played it to feel something. It worked, sometimes. He had his fist raised at the ceiling, mid-theatrical-declaration, when the door swung open.
Kyle dropped his arm.
She stood in the entrance completely drenched — dark hair plastered to her neck, rainwater trailing off the hem of a black dress that clung to her in ways Kyle immediately had to work to stop noticing. She shook the water from her hair in one sharp motion and stood there for a moment, not acknowledging him, not acknowledging anything. Her back was to him. She looked like someone who didn't explain herself often.
Kyle said nothing. He had learned that women like her, if there were women like her, generally preferred that he not.
She moved into the aisles after a minute, slow and purposeful, as though she was browsing a boutique rather than a convenience store on the verge of permanent closure. Each step left a trail of water across the linoleum. Kyle watched it spread and thought, distantly, about the mop he'd have to get.
She returned with an armful of snacks and a pack of cigarettes. Fifteen dollars and change. She set them on the counter without making eye contact.
Her bag hung from the crook of her elbow. Kyle glanced at it without thinking, some designer name he didn't know, the leather dark and unbothered by the rain. It probably cost more than what he'd make this month. He didn't register this consciously. He registered the angle was wrong to read the label properly.
"That'll be $15.56, ma'am."
He found a smile from somewhere and put it on. Customer service mode, it required almost nothing of him at this point; it was its own kind of autopilot.
"Here."
She extended her debit card and a scent hit him. It was rich, warm, completely intact despite the downpour. Kyle reached for the card and his eyes moved without his permission, dropping briefly before he caught himself and looked away.
She noticed. The look she gave him could have etched glass.
He swiped the card quickly, returned it without comment. She wasn't going anywhere, neither of them was. The umbrella display had been empty for three weeks and the rain outside showed no sign of mercy. They were, for the foreseeable future, stuck with each other.
"Do you need a chair?" Kyle offered, because it seemed like something a decent person would say.
She stared at him as though the question had been deeply offensive.
She pulled a cigarette from the pack and brought it to her lips. Kyle clocked it immediately, her hand reaching toward her bag, the lighter, all of it, because he'd already looked toward the corner where the camping fuel sat on a shelf twelve feet away.
"Ma'am." He kept his voice even, and pointed to the sign on the wall, bold black letters on yellow. "No smoking inside the store. You'll need to put that away, or step outside."
He said it the same way he said everything lately. It was flat and certain, like someone who'd stopped expecting it to matter.
He had no way of knowing that it would.
That moment, the cigarette, the sign, the words, would become the hinge on which the rest of Kyle's life swung. He just didn't know it yet.