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Paul’s death was so quiet.

Maybe that’s what was so sad at first. He died exactly as he should have died, quietly, without a speech, without a surprise or a sarcastic comment to lighten the moment, without a woman at his side and without a prayer or a dream for the future, without any witness to see him for what he was: a sleepy,  slightly drunk, unemployed naked college graduate with an undiagnosed heart condition. Maybe it was the death he most feared, but it was the death he could not avoid, alone, at night, confused, afraid, waiting for the terrible moment to pass.

A week before Paul died we sat in his living room and he sang to himself, “I’m Sergeant Pepper’s lonely heart’s club band.” We had shared a joint and planned to leave soon for a party at Claire’s. Paul sat up on his couch and I relaxed in his rocking chair. I watched the bare wall over Paul’s head rock back and forth, closer to me, then farther, closer, then farther.

“Lucy in the sky with diamonds,” Paul droned out of tune. “I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in, and stops my mind from wandering…” The songs disappeared altogether and he continued in a speaking voice, “I like law Jack. How Œbout you? You gonna keep your job or go to law school? That’s what I might do. Be a lawyer.”

“Or conquer the universe?” I asked, my eyes still fixed on the rocking wall.

“Yes, conquer the universe. No, you can’t. I’m going to conquer the universe.”

“I’m going to conquer the universe,” I said, and Paul smiled and rolled his slender shaved head back on the couch. “Why don’t you fall in love first,” he said, almost to himself. He stared up at the ceiling and after a few minutes of silence he mumbled, “I’m going to conquer the universe Jack. And stop my mind from wandering.”

Claire’s party started at eight but we didn’t get there until nine-thirty.  Claire opened the door and Paul shouted, “Hello Claire,” and then I shouted, “Hello Claire,” and we pushed our way in.

Claire wore jeans and a light tan t-shirt and sandals. Her chestnut hair draped behind her head and her left hand clasped a beer bottle when she opened the door.

“How’s the job search?” she asked Paul, followed by a friendly, inviting smile, but he walked right past her without answering.

It was one of those intensely casual parties we attended whenever invited. We always had a bad time, but we went. They reminded us that we weren’t suffering alone. The music was always just so loud with only a few hard drinkers and lots of good will and warm hugs from all our old college friends who couldn’t bear to part, let alone move to a new city. Some had jobs, and new friends from work appeared from time to time.  Some, like Paul, were unemployed and looking for something new, and either broke, living off of savings or off of help from parents. Maybe they were laid off, or maybe like Paul they quit. Maybe they quit to make some sort of statement, like when Helen Ruben quit her job at the local NBC affiliate because she thought the station was pro-war and anti-choice. And what really got me was that even after she quit they would rather have had her back than hire me away from the newspaper even if I was ten times better a reporter than her. Because I was twenty or thirty times uglier and the news director at the television station didn’t give a damn about whether Helen could report or not or what she believed in. She looked good. So I was just not the right person at that time, even if Helen did not want to come back. And anyway, after a month with no pay check, she came back. I’m still at the paper covering commissions: schools, planning, sewers, solid waste and parks.

Ernie Fine quit his first job out of school, as a copy editor at a small technical book publisher, because it was a horrendous job with a horrendous boss and horrendous working conditions and terrible pay. Ernie quit his second job, at the public library, because he was bored out of his mind. But he didn’t give up. He didn’t leave town and head for the lights and jobs in New York or Boston or Chicago or L.A. He found something else, at a coffee shop, and like us all, he stuck around.

Paul quit his most recent job, as a baker at a bagel shop, because he said it was time to quit. That was it. It was just time. It was too bad, because I liked the bagels and the job market was tight.

Some of our friends had never held jobs. They went right back to school either because they couldn’t find a job or more likely because they didn’t want one and they wanted to delay repaying their student loans. They had new friends from graduate school and some of these new friends were much older than us. But they behaved no different than typical 23-, 24- and 25-year-olds, and they seemed  more pathetic, destined to lives of futile, academic pleasures, and I think what frighted me most was that this sense of enhanced doom was only because they were older and closer to what awaited us all.

Everyone at these parties seemed to know each other or at least to know friends of friends. There was this incredible web of connection. There were the exes: the ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends and a couple of ex-husbands and ex-wives, so many of whom still managed to be cordial. There were the currents: current boyfriends, girlfriends, lovers, mates, sex partners, and a few husbands and wives and every now and then a sibling. And all these lines crossed and twisted and commingled. And there were the smaller, less well-defined groupings and associations, the quasi-gangs, like Steven, Hillary, Emma, David and Alex, who were neither exes nor currents but always came into a room together, gathered around each other and told each other jokes, and then left together for whatever it was they did afterwards.

Paul and I were also something of a micro gang with no territory or business, an informal partnership that ended with Paul’s quiet, unremarkable death. We were best friends and we stuck together.

Sandy Carmichael wore a tight fitting short black dress that night, with spaghetti straps and no shoes. She leaned on the shoulder of her fiancé, Jerome Williams, a computer science doctoral student who didn’t deserve a wife with such a hard body but maybe was just right for her soft, moderately inquisitive, rote, repetitive, loop-di-loop intellect. As usual, she was over-stylish and underdressed, a sheer pleasure to observe and no doubt to behold and ravish but an exquisitely uninspiring conversationalist, even for the briefest, most impersonal greeting.

Paul slept with Sandy once during our freshman year and I still count that as one of the things I most envy about Paul. But if she feared that Paul or I would bring up the subject in front of Jerome as we made our way to the liquor, it was impossible to tell from her super-charmed, in-our-face welcome.

“Hi fellas,” she practically shouted in that cutesy pseudo-southern drawl with a  smile equally false. Van Morrison was singing from speakers somewhere of a brown-eyed girl.  But Sandy’s sparkling sky blue eyes were enough for me. She momentarily hypnotized me. “How you boys doing?” she asked, bouncing from left foot to right foot to left foot. “Jerome has been working so hard these days I just don’t know when he’s gonna find time to marry me.”

Jerome smiled.

“That’s too bad,” Paul shouted.

“So sorry,” I said. Sandy redoubled her smile and was about to say something, but we quickly turned and sped to the table next to the kitchen. The table was lined with gin, vodka, and whiskey bottles, and Paul poured a little of each over ice into two plastic cups and then we separated to mingle in Claire’s small, cramped living room.

All I remember after that is a conversation with Hillary Bloom that started out about Nietzsche. I had trouble following her and then she said something about Sartre and one of those French deconstruction contractors and she said something in German that flew right past me. Ubermints und Bundesheartsgethrob, or something like that. It was two long words that sounded so sad and painful, like angst, only with lots of syllables.

During our sophomore and junior years I had a terrible crush on Hillary, who four years after graduation still dressed in such lovely dark printed skirts and shirts with deep-scooped necklines and  a slight bit of makeup dabbed on her lips, eyes and cheeks. She worked for a stock broker next door to the newspaper, so every now and then I saw her at lunch and I had been thinking about asking her out. I really wanted to ask her out and I wanted desperately to control myself in front of her even though I could barely stand. The liquor was mixing ferociously with the marijuana. I tried to keep cool, but she was saying all this stuff about the will to exist  and the lack of will to exist and the existence of the will and the wall between the will and the I and the you that I can never know, and it all frightened and confused the hell out of me and turned me off completely. I mumbled, “A tragedy,” and her sweet face brightened and she said, “You mean the pull of the  Apollonian and Dionysian,” as if suddenly we were having a conversation in Greek. “You know the city dump will be full in three years,” I said and I began to sweat profusely. I could feel the stains growing under the arm pits of my white dress shirt as I rubbed my thick cheeks. I became more and more disoriented. Hillary’s mouth slowly detached from her face and formed words that no longer had any recognizable sound, let alone meaning. I said, “That’s not right, Hillary. That’s just not right. How can that be right? I don’t get him. Okay, I just don’t get Nietzsche. And I don’t get stocks. Or bonds. What the hell are junk bonds anyway?”

She smiled politely and brushed a wisp of her shoulder-length blond hair from her face and then she turned to talk with someone else.

The evening ended at Paul’s. He had pulled me up from the corner of Claire’s dining room, where I had slumped and passed out some time after the conversation with Hillary, and somehow Paul had helped me stumble back to his apartment. I slept on his couch.

Paul and I had considered living together, but we both needed our own space. And besides, Paul was usually involved with someone and he couldn’t very well have me around at night.

We spent Paul’s final night at his apartment, just hanging out listening to music and drinking beer and wondering when either of us were going to say something that mattered.

“I’m waiting for the spark,” I said, “or a dream. I’ll take genius in a dream if that’s how it has to come. As long as I remember it.”

“Maybe you’ve already dreamt genius, but forgotten it,” Paul said.

“God, I hope not,” I said.

For days Paul had been talking about asking Claire out to dinner.

“Do you think I’m ever going find love Jack?” he asked me for the hundredth time. “Do you think I’m ever going to meet someone I want to spend the rest of my life with? Claire is great, but I know she doesn’t think much of me and I don’t think I want to make her like me. It’s got to be animal, you know, instant. Either she sees something in me or she doesn’t, you know Jack? That was the problem with Elise, and with Jane. I spent so much time trying to convince them that I was the one. One night after Elise fell asleep I realized what was happening. I mean, it was so clear cut with me. I would have died for her. But Elise, maybe she went on vacation with me, and maybe she lived with me. Maybe she would have married me, had children, and spent the rest of her life with me. Maybe she would have died for me too. The things is, that’s not what she wanted. That’s what I wanted. And that’s not it, you know Jack. That’s just not it.”

Paul always had a way with really great, intelligent, caring, confident, gorgeous women like Elise. And these women always started out not liking Paul at all. Elise had worked with Paul at a book store while we were in college. At first she wouldn’t talk to him very much at all. But he persisted until she would say hello when she saw him at work and then later she would wave to him on the street and smile at his quiet jokes about himself or about the customers or professors or mutual acquaintances and then finally she agreed to eat lunch with him and she found out that they read the same books and subscribed to the same magazines and enjoyed the same movies and music. She was an anthropology major and he was an English major and she became Paul’s cause, which he slowly fought for until he had conquered her heart, mind and soul. Elise and Paul were inseparable for three years and we all spent lots of time together until Paul could not stop wondering what had changed and she could not stand his sullen, incessant depression.

About six months after they broke up Elise started calling me, trying to get  me to go out with her, and lunch or dinner every now and then was fine but one night she asked me to come home with her. And I had craved her so much while she dated Paul and even more after they broke up. He had encouraged me, said she would be good for me.

But I couldn’t,  and I declined her invitation. It just didn’t feel right sleeping with my best friend’s ex-lover. Elise broke down in tears when I said no thanks. I was flattered. No woman had ever begged me to sleep with her. She was crushed that I turned her down, and embarrassed. So I did go back to her apartment that night because  she was so depressed. She missed Paul and she was sorry she had put me in such an awkward position. She hoped our friendship wasn’t ruined. We made popcorn and stayed up late and watched TV , laughed together and comforted each other, and I slept on the couch and felt really great the next morning. But we didn’t see much of each other after that.

Paul was not handsome in any traditional sense. Above and beyond his many unremarkable traits, like his small ears and his freckly face covered with fine blond razor stubble,  Paul  was skinny and pale and sickly looking.  He didn’t shave regularly until junior year and until he shaved his head a few months before he died he kept his long stringy hair in a narrow pony tail so that in the summer, when he walked around in sandals and loose baggy pants, he looked more like a hippie freak back from a trip to India than like the only child of a Connecticut insurance executive.

By junior year in college Paul had already had five serious relationships, counting Elise, who he began dating that year. There was always a point in his relationships when it became obvious that sex had evolved into something quite important and quite frequent and apparently quite exquisite. One of them would have that glow, and would tug on a hand, and then they would leave hastily and promise to spend more time with me on the weekend. Or next weekend. Or Tuesday. Some time soon.

The night he died Paul pestered  me one last time about dating.

“I don’t know what it is Jack,” he said. “You look okay. You talk okay.”

I said I was waiting for the right woman. He said I was just scared of rejection.

I said goodbye to Paul at about midnight and walked home, a bit buzzed and enjoying the sound of my shoes on the sidewalk. It took me half an hour to walk home. The streets were quiet but still electrified with the lingering energy of Saturday night and occasional passing cars, silent couples walking arm in arm, and small gangs of drunk students headed to a second or third bar. So it was not thoroughly peacefully quiet until I got back to my apartment and closed the door behind me. I breathed slowly and stood for a moment in the darkness until my eyes adjusted to the dim light of a street lamp below my window. I closed my eyes and saw Paul reclining on my couch, watching television, smiling. I opened my eyes and turned on the lamp on the end table next to the couch. The light was bright and forced me to squint for a few moments.

I tossed my leather jacket on the couch, kicked off my shoes, unbuttoned my shirt and blue jeans, squeezed my toes into the soft beige carpet, and then I pressed the button on my answering machine to hear a new message.

“Jack,” a voice whispered. “Help.”

I don’t know why he called me instead of an ambulance. The medical examiner who signed the death certificate said it wouldn’t have mattered if Paul had called an ambulance or even if an ambulance had been parked outside his apartment, waiting for his call. He would have died anyhow. He would have died if it had happened in a hospital with a team of cardiologists around his bed, waiting. It was a massive heart attack, and three minutes after he called me he was probably dead. He might as well have had his head shot off by a cannon. He had no chance.

Some time back Paul told me that heart disease was in his family. But both of his parents were still alive so I didn’t think much of it. Heart disease was in my family too, and skin cancer and breast cancer, and my father used to talk about some distant uncle who was a famous serial killer. Paul said his father’s parents died when his father was very young.  The grandfather was 28 when he died in his sleep in the early 1940s. The grandmother died of cancer a few years later. Paul’s father had already made it into his 50s. He had triple bypass surgery while we were in college. Paul was 24 when he dropped dead.

It took me a minute to recognize his voice on the answering machine. I immediately called him, but his phone was busy, because he had dropped it. He had crawled from the bedroom to the couch in the living room and grabbed his phone off the floor and called me and then he dropped the phone and fell to the couch and my answering machine disconnected our call. The autopsy showed a bad bruise to the skull where Paul’s head hit the oak floor after he slid from the edge of the couch.

I hung up and waited five minutes and called back. The phone was still busy, so I tried Jane’s number. It had only been a month since Paul and Jane had broken off their year-long relationship. Paul had wanted to move in with Jane, but she wasn’t ready to see him every night and every morning.

“He’s got to get himself together first,” Jane told me over lunch a few days before they broke things off completely. “He has no direction at all. I can’t give that to him.”

“Maybe you can,” I said. “Maybe you’re just what he needs.”

“Maybe you are,” she said sarcastically. “But not me. He doesn’t  need me.”

It wasn’t clear to me that they had broken up for good, even if Paul was talking about Claire all the time. Paul and Jane still stayed in touch and I had a feeling they would get back together. I thought maybe Paul had called her after I left. Jane’s phone rang six times before she answered.

“Hi Jane,  sorry to call so late. It’s Jack. Did you talk to Paul tonight? No? No, nothing is wrong, it’s just that he called me a little while ago and now his phone is busy and I was wondering if he had called you. Sorry about this. How are you? Good, yeah I know, it’s tough. I guess you just have to be strong. Paul? He’s kind of depressed, but you know Paul. Yes, we should stay in touch. I know this is strange. Yes, I hope we will see each other, this shouldn’t ruin our lives. You’re absolutely right. Well, I guess it ruins your life no matter what. Yes, I know what you mean. You’ll get over him, and we can still be friends. We don’t need Paul as a medium. I agree. Okay, let’s have lunch some time, maybe get our friends together. That would be nice. Sorry to call so late. Okay, bye. Good night.”

I called Paul again but the line was still busy, so I called Claire.

“Hello Claire, this is Jack. Yes, Jack Jones. Fine thanks. Listen, sorry to call so late. Did Paul call you tonight? No, nothing is wrong. I’m just trying to get in touch with him. I don’t know why I thought he would call you. I thought he mentioned your name. Yes, I know it’s late. Sorry to bother you.”

I called Paul’s number a third time and it was still busy so I decided to drive over to his apartment. It was a seven minute drive and I got there at exactly ten minutes to one. I knocked on Paul’s door but he didn’t answer so I went downstairs and walked across the street and called him from a pay phone. The line was still busy so I walked back upstairs and knocked hard on his door. He didn’t answer. I banged harder and shouted his name and then I put my ear to the door and listened for a sound but didn’t  hear any. I banged again and shouted his name and Paul’s next door neighbor, Mr. Braun, opened and peered out of his door and didn’t say a word, just watched me shout while I banged on Paul’s door.

I quickly worked up a sweat and was panting slightly when I stopped. I leaned against Paul’s door and turned to Mr. Braun and said, “I was just over. The phone is busy and he’s not coming to the door.”

Mr. Braun, a tall, gray, lanky and incredibly friendly and polite old man, held his frayed robe closed with one hand and with the other hand rubbed the stubble at the end of his chin.

“Maybe he left the phone off the hook and went to bed,” the old man said softly.

I dropped my arms to my side and looked at Paul’s door and thought for a moment, wondered if Paul had ever gone to bed with the phone off the hook. But of course he hadn’t, and I remembered his message on my answering machine, his frail, choked plea for help.

“I think he’s in trouble,” I said. “May I use your phone?”

Mr. Braun let me into his dark apartment, which was smaller than Paul’s and smelled like medicine. I called nine-one-one and a minute later a police car arrived followed by an ambulance. Another police car arrived and the officers knocked on Paul’s door for a minute before they agreed to knock down the door. We found Paul lying face down and naked on the floor.

“He’s dead,” one of the emergency medical technicians from the ambulance said just seconds after touching Paul’s throat. “Maybe an hour at the most.”

I said that I had been with him an hour before and that I came back because of a message on my machine.  An officer asked me if I still had the tape and when I told him I did he said someone might come  over to pick it up, but that never happened.

Four other officers snooped around Paul’s apartment while I was questioned. Out in the hall another officer was questioning Mr. Braun, who was shaking his head and wiping tears from his eyes.

“Any drugs involved?” the officer asked me.

“No, just a few beers.”

“Do you know if the deceased was HIV positive?”

“I don’t know.”

“Notice anything unusual about him tonight?”

“No, he was normal.”

“Depressed?”

“Yes, a little. But that was normal.”

“What was he depressed about?”

“A woman.”

“Uh huh.”

The officer gave me a questioning look.

“What was her name?”

“Look,” I said. “He was just a little down. They broke up a month ago. But he was down a lot.”

“You have a name?”

“Jane Simmons,” I said, and I gave her telephone number, and then the officer asked, “Did you and the deceased have a sexual relationship?” He asked it in such a cold, heartless way, as if he was hoping I would say yes so that he could say, “Too bad.”

“No, just friends,” I said.

He scribbled into his pad.

“Next of kin?”

“His parents live in Hartford, Connecticut. Robert and Joan Weiss.”

“You have the number?”

“No,” I said, “but I know they’re listed. Greenview Boulevard,” and the officer looked up from his pad and said, “You think of anything else, give me a call,” and then he handed me a business card and walked back toward Paul’s body.

The paramedics stood beside the body, now partially covered by a white sheet, while a coroner felt Paul’s cheeks and skull and hands and raised and lowered his eyelids and stuck a thermometer under his armpit. A police photographer was taking pictures and two detectives were also examining Paul.

“Take him downtown,” the medical examiner said to the ambulance crew in a droning, overworked voice. “And try not to forget the ice this time.”

“Yeah, yeah,” the two men from the ambulance grumbled. They lifted Paul’s shrouded body onto a stretcher and rolled him through the living room and out the door and that was the last I saw of Paul. The coffin was closed at his funeral in Hartford.

After Paul’s body was wheeled out there was nothing left to do but go home. I knew I should make some calls, but it was so late and I was so tired, so numb, so unsure of what I would say to anyone, to Jane, to Claire, to Elise.

There were no new messages on my answering  machine.  I knew Paul’s old message was still there and my hand moved to press a button to replay the message. But then I pulled my hand away and reached for the phone. I dialed the first few digits of Elise’s phone number, but then I hung up. I turned off the light and went to bed. In bed, alone, with nothing but a thin white cotton sheet and the well-insulated silence of my apartment around me, I wept.

I called Claire as soon as I got out of bed Sunday morning. She was shocked and promised to call some of our other friends. I called Paul’s parents and talked to a relative who said the funeral was Monday. He gave me the address. Then I called Jane. The police had already called her and she was upset and didn’t want to talk.  I called Claire back and asked her to visit Jane.

Elise also cried when she heard the news, slowly at first, and then she lost control for a few minutes. I felt so bad talking to her, and I realized how much she loved him and missed him. She sobbed on the phone and we could hardly speak. She brought more tears into my own tired, salty eyes, and I asked her if she would like me to come over. She said yes, so I drove over to her apartment.

Traffic was light through town but I nearly got into two accidents on my way to her apartment, and both would have been  my fault. I ran a red light and nearly hit a woman pushing a stroller, and then five minutes later I veered left and nearly hit a garbage truck head on. It was about eleven when I got to Elise’s apartment, which was across the street from a golf course on the north edge of town.

She opened the door in her nightgown.

“Sorry I’m not dressed,” she said, then sniffled. Her eyes were red and damp and the hairs at the sides of her face were damp and stringy.

“That’s all right,” I said, and I stepped in.

Elise looked terrible, but her apartment was immaculate and I hesitated when I entered the living room. I didn’t want to soil it.

“Sit down,” she said, and I sat in the recliner in front of her television.

“Wow, color TV,” I said as she sat on the floor in front of me. She gave a week smile.

“I can’t believe he’s dead,” she said. “I always hoped one of you would call.” She began to whimper and to shake. “Not like this,” she said between sniffles, and I kneeled down beside her and held her in my arms and rocked her.

She was soft and sweet and my heart raced and my head began to swell. I closed my eyes and went on rocking with Elise and finally my breathing stabilized and I was able to hold her and comfort her and comfort myself, and I began to think about Paul.

Until then I had not really thought about him. I was too busy calling people and thinking about the shock that he was dead, that all of a sudden he was gone, but I had not until that moment, when I was rocking with Elise, begun to think about Paul, about the friend I had lost.

I thought back to the night before, to our progressively drunken conversation in his apartment, and I could remember so little. I could remember things he’d told me days, weeks, months and years before, but I could remember almost nothing of what we said the night before. It was one of the few times I ever saw him naked. He had a small, round, hairless ass, like a child’s, and the body reminded me of a child, and I was sorry that a child had died. It seemed vaguely tragic, but then I couldn’t fully work through the tragedy. Was it inevitable, and obvious from the very beginning that this was how it was going to turn out? Had he struggled against forces greater than his own will to survive and do good? Was he misguided and mistaken from the start about some aspect of life that he erroneously regarded as fact and finality?

Maybe, maybe, maybe. His immortality? Had he misjudged that? Maybe was the best I could do. And I wondered if I too was headed for an untimely, premature and utterly unavoidable death. Paul’s quiet departure offered no catharsis, only uncertainty. In life we understood each other. Now I felt lost, as if I was looking at myself through someone else’s eyes.  I couldn’t get rid of the image of a naked body slumped face down on the floor, or the image of the white sheet that later covered the body. Then the body was just a white lump, no more alive than a rock or a pillow, and it was hauled away like a sack of potatoes. Was this Paul’s body or my body? I couldn’t tell. It was covered by the sheet.

It was a long time before I said anything to Elise, who stopped crying but held onto me.

“Will you go with me tomorrow to the funeral?” I asked, looking into her eyes.

“Yes,” she answered, and then we held each other again.

The funeral was  in Hartford. We held hands and cried at the grave and we held hands in the car on the way home. We held hands that night, after dinner at a cheap Mexican restaurant, when we walked along the golf course and filled each other in on the past year. We hadn’t seen much of each of her. She laughed at the tales of my many failings with women, laughed more bitterly at Paul’s breakup with Susan, and she asked about my work at the newspaper and about the trip Paul and I took to Italy and Greece the previous summer.

“Isn’t Venice magical?” she asked softly, squeezing my hand harder. We were looking at the sunset behind a rise on the golf course, but as we strolled I shifted my head and looked at Elise. It had been a hot day and when we got back from the funeral she had changed into some loose white cotton pants and a blue tank top. The light made her golden skin glow and her long brown hair blanketed her shoulders. I wanted to kiss her on the cheek and run my hands through her hair.

“Yes,” I said, returning my gaze to the reds, blues, purples and yellows that filled the sky and changed with each of our steps. “Venice is magical.”

But it wasn’t until a moment later, when we stopped to stare at the light, that I understood magic. Elise leaned over and kissed me on the cheek and she ran her hands through my hair. And Venice became just a sinking city as magic coursed through my blood. Magic was all around us, in the air, in the trees, in the exhaust fumes, in the clipped carpet of the golf course, in the tips of our fingers and in Elise’s warm, sweet breath. It was everywhere.

We crossed the street and headed back to Elise’s apartment. This time I knew Paul would understand. He always wanted  the best for me. He was a good friend.