He fell silent as he lay on his bed with his phone to his ear. He wasn't really tired, but he made his voice take on the characteristic of exhaustion as he talked to her. He guessed he could just say "I don't wanna talk about this anymore. Good night,"....but then she would've felt worse....and so would he.
The whole idea was to break it off with her...make her believe everything he said. Knowing how she felt about him, it shouldn't've been too hard, and it wasn't. He could hear her strangled breathing on the other end of the phone, and as much as he wanted to take it all back and comfort her, he forced himself not to; it wasn't part of the plan.
She's too quiet... he thought. But then again, she always does this. It's like tradition for...us... he closed his eyes at that last word. Us. It'd meant so much at one time. Now, it was like a curse; a reminder of what he'd had just...and was about to lose. Damn it! This wasn't his fault; his parents were to blame.
How long had it been? He'd lost track of time, but it couldn't have been more than ten minutes. When he glanced over at his clock and read 2:13 am, he squeezed his eyes shut and hesitated before saying, "Juli, I have to go. I have work in seven hours...I'm sorry." And then he hung up as fast as he could. Ick. I hate calling her Juli... It feels so wrong... he complained to himself. Juliet had always been what he'd called her whenever they were together. Everyone else called her Juli, but he and she were more intimate than that. Calling her by her real name made him feel a sense of ownership somehow....
For half an hour, he lay there staring up at the shadows on his ceiling. How interesting they were... At one moment, they took on the shape of a weeping willow floating through spaghetti...and then everything was just a blur of lines. Was he hallucintating from stress? Nah. Not him. It wasn't physically possible.
He flinched when his clock beeped three times fast, signaling the hour of three in the morning. Work was going to be hell, he was sure. He sat up slowly and pulled himself out of bed with a grunt. After staggering to his door and down the hallway, he was able to make it into the kitchen. The bread box was still open from when his mother had taken her meds. Good thing Lucy didn't get ahold of anything.
He felt around for the smallest bottle and finally got the cap off after the sixth try. He popped the sleeping pill in his mouth, put the bottle back, and shuffled back towards his room. That should do the trick, he thought as he closed his door a little too loudly and rolled on top of his covers.
He fell asleep in precisely thirteen minutes and forty-seven seconds, but just before he lost all consciousness, he imagined Juliet in his arms one last time.
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