It’s Michael’s favorite season of the year; or at least, it used to be. Snow is falling gently from above, piling on the windowsills of his apartment and coating the sidewalks. When he was younger, he used to pretend he was a dragon, watching his breath create great, billowing clouds of mist with delight. Now, he’s twenty two, and he doesn’t think he’ll ever quite appreciate winter ever again. Not when the very reason that made winter his favorite is now the reason he hates it.

Not with her gone.

It hurts him, even thinking about it. It’s only been eight weeks (and four days and six hours… but who’s counting?) since they decided to go their separate ways, but it hurts more than ever. It hurts because he knows what they would have been doing if they were still together. They would have been sitting at the rickety dining table, giggling madly as they tried to decorate poorly made gingerbread men, drinking out of the same cup of hot cocoa. That’s what they’d done the past two Christmas Eve’s; once as friends and again as a couple. Now, Michael’s laying on top of his bed, too morose to even change out of his uncomfortable work clothes, staring up at the ceiling and trying desperately not to degenerate into a moping ball of self-pity.

He wants to turn on a lamp, thinking that maybe the friendly yellow glow would cheer him up. As much as he loves snow, the cloud coverage leeches all of the color out of the room. Or maybe it’s just her absence. There was always color when she was there.

Michael wishes he could be angry. He wishes he could be furious, so mad that he’s throwing things and punching walls and unable to control himself. At least anger is a passionate emotion. All he feels these days was an overwhelming desire to lie down and try not to think about her.

His phone buzzes in his pocket, and he briefly considers ignoring it before reaching into his pocket and pulling it out with a sigh, squinting against the brightness of the screen to read the name of the caller. He nearly jumps to his feet when he sees that it’s her. This is the first contact either of them have had since the breakup.

Shaking, he slides his finger across his phone and answers. “Hello?” he asks, trying hard not to sound as pathetic – or as hopeful – as he feels.

There’s an awkward cough on the other end before he hears her voice. He almost misses what she says, awash in the warmth that her voice always brings.

“I left some things, uh, that I kind of need… do you mind if we meet somewhere to pick them up?”

His conscience goes to war. He wants to immediately say yes, because if he’s honest, he’d drop everything and run to her if he had to. He knows there’s fairly nasty snowstorm brewing outside, but the part of him that’s still attached to her – which is quite a significant part – reasons that if he leaves now, he can meet her and get back before the brunt of the storm hits.

But he doesn’t want her to know how absolutely wrecked he is over losing her. He doesn’t want her to know, because she sounds fine, and that kills him.

So he says, “Where were you thinking? I’m not sure if I’ve got enough time.”

It’s a lie, of course. He’s got plenty of time. He’s got too much time. He’s spent an unhealthy amount of his free time thinking about her, and while seeing her would give him something to do, it wouldn’t exactly help his futile quest to forget about her.

There’s another eternal silence within the span of a few seconds before she says, “The café?”

And ouch, Michael wishes it didn’t hurt as much as it did. He doesn’t want to hear her mention the name of what used to be their usual date spot, and he definitely doesn’t want to meet her there. He almost suggests that they meet somewhere else, somewhere not attached to their relationship, but he before he can formulate another rendezvous, he hears himself saying, “Yeah, sure. Meet you there in fifteen?”

She sounds relieved. “Yeah, perfect. I, um, I left a box under the sink in the bathroom… if you could bring that…”

He assures her that he will and then hangs up before he can say something stupid, like how in love with her he still is. It’s killing him, it really is, and seeing her is like injecting more poison straight into his bloodstream. It’s masochistic, the decision to go see her so close to what would have been their second anniversary together, but he forces himself to get up and trudges to the bathroom, refusing to acknowledge how freaking empty the apartment is.

Michael squats down and opens the cabinet under the sink and locates the box she’s talking about. It’s a small box, he can hold it easily with one hand. It burns in his hand; his own personal Pandora’s Box. He knows he shouldn’t open it, and he tries his best to resist, consciously leaving it on the console before going back to his room to grab a coat and stall as much as he can before finally grabbing the box and his keys, locking the door and heading out.

He beats her to the café, and he can’t help the smile that twitches at the edges of his mouth. It’s so typical for her to be late, always late. She was always late.

He berates himself for thinking about her and goes into the café, ordering a drink for while he waits. But she turns up right after he’s ordered, rushing into the café with fresh snow in her hair and on her eyelashes and sprinkled all over her dark grey coat, her cheeks flushed and lips red. She scans the café briefly before her eyes, a more startling shade of blue than he remembered, met his.

Michael panicked slightly, but he raised a hand towards her. She hurried over and sat across from him, and Michael wants to scream. The two of them are sitting at their usual date spot, on Christmas Eve, no longer a going concern.

Michael slides the box across the table. “Here are your things,” he says stiffly.

She looks at the box, surprised, almost as though she forgot the reason she’d asked him to meet her. “Oh, right, thanks,” she said, pulling it towards her, and Michael almost asks for it back, or at the very least, asks to look inside. He missed his opportunity, and now he might spend his entire life pining over her and her box.

They look everywhere but at each other, and honestly, there isn’t much to distract them; they’ve both been to the place a million times, both together and on their own with friends. They finally make eye contact, and Michael blurts, “Want coffee? I ordered myself one.”

Idiot, he thinks viciously, watching her eyes widen slightly with the suddenness of the offer. She just wants her stuff back, not a coffee date.

“Um, yeah,” she said. She waved over a waiter.

But before she could order, Michael had rattled off her order to the waiter, listening to her little squeaks of protest as he also insisted on paying. “No big deal,” he said, looking out the window and starting to realize, for the first time, how bad the snow was coming down.

But he couldn’t just leave. He hadn’t yet gotten his drink, and besides, he’d practically ordered her drink for her. He wasn’t even sure if that was still her favorite. He’d just… assumed. Another stupid mistake.

“How have you been?” Michael asks, and then immediately realizes his mistake when her expression falls. He wants to kick himself, and he swears internally. What kind of question is that? They just broke up and now he’s asking her how she is?

“Fine,” she says stiffly, her gaze determinedly fixed on the window. “You?”

Michael shifts uncomfortably in his seat, saved from having to answer right away by the arrival of his drink. He occupies himself with adjusting his cup exactly in the center of the saucer as he decides how to answer her. Should he be honest?

She probably wasn’t, though, given the way she’s refusing to meet his eyes, so he manages to answer, “Fine, as well.”

There’s an unbearably uncomfortable silence until her drink comes, and the waiter’s smile at them seems almost mocking.

“The snow’s really coming down,” she murmured, looking out the window still, taking a cautious sip of her steaming drink.

Michael follows her gaze and is alarmed with how quickly the snow piled up. Neither of them live very far from the café, but it’s starting to look like driving would be a dangerous endeavor.

“It is,” he agrees quietly, unsure what else to say.

He watches her fiddle with the box below the table and is alarmed to see tears spring into her eyes, right before he hears the lid slam shut. He quickly averts his gaze to his coffee so that she wouldn’t see him looking.

“Did you look at what’s in this box?” she asked quietly.

Michael shook his head. “No.”

She takes a deep breath. “Okay, right. Alright.”

She sounds disappointed, and Michael wants to scream, maybe throw his cup of coffee across the room because he can’t figure her out. “Why didn’t you just come by and pick it up?” he asked, the words flying off his tongue before he can stop them.

They finally properly meet eyes for the first time in months, and Michael wants to die. He wants to melt in a puddle or vaporize or just disappear. Anything would be better than seeing the pain reflected in her eyes. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs, knowing he should look away but reluctant to.

She holds his gaze for a moment longer before looking back out the window. “I think we’re going to be here for a while,” she says. “Might as well… chat.”

And he knows what she means. Everything between them is unsolved. There isn’t a single section of their puzzle that’s put together. “Might as well,” he agrees uneasily.

She sighs, looking down into her drink, and he wonders what she’s thinking. And that troubles him, because he always knew what she was thinking. He could always read her, easy, as if she were an open book. But now the book was closed.

“I left because…” she trails off, lips pressed tight together, and it takes Michael a second to realize she’s trying not to cry. “I left because you and I weren’t working.”

Now comes the rage Michael’s been longing to feel. It unravels, hot and pulsing in his chest, and his hand shake. “We weren’t working?” he repeats, trying to keep his voice at a relatively quiet tone. But he knows he’s failed when she flinches.

“No,” she whispers.

Michael’s furious, everything slightly tinted red, which he could have sworn only happened in movies and books. But he sees it, sees it now, as if the red from her lips has tinged everything. “We were fine,” he growls.

She shakes her head, looking terrified. “Michael, don’t you remember?” she asks, her voice breathless and desperate.

He pauses. “Remember what?”

“Why I left,” she says. “Why I decided to pack up and leave one night when you didn’t come home.”

He looks at her, confusion starting to morph with his anger. “I don’t—”

“I waited for hours, Michael, hours. On my birthday. My birthday! You promised that you had something special planned. You promised.”

Michael’s eyes wide. “I… I didn’t… I—”

How could he have been so stupid? The night he went out drinking, the night he and Calum had gone out and gotten wasted, was the night that he had a reservation for her favorite restaurant. How could he have forgotten?

Now she looks furious, but in her own way. There are tears in her eyes, and she says, “Michael, I love you, I really do, but… you didn’t even come home until the next day.”

“Shit,” he whispers.

She shakes her head, looking out the window, watching the snow fall. “I waited so many nights, Michael, waiting for you to come home. And I let it slide. But when it hit one in the morning and I realized that my birthday was over and I hadn’t gotten so much as a text message from you…”

“I love you,” he whispers, and she just shakes her head again.

“How can you?” she asks. “If you were going to go out and get wasted on the one day I really believed you’d come home?”

And Michael wants to punch himself, so filled with self-loathing the smell of his drink is making him sick.

He thinks back to the day, the day before he woke up and found himself alone with nothing more than a little note explaining that it was all over. He’d had a shit day at work, because his boss had nagged at him about something or another, and he’d been threatened with dismissal, and he was pissed off because he hated his job but he had to keep it so that he–

So that he could save up for an engagement ring.

He stares at the beautiful girl across from him that he’s broken so completely and he wants nothing more than to erase the past and start over. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s too late for that.” Her reply sounds half-hearted.

“Why? How can it?” He’s desperate.  

She doesn’t answer, so he switches questions. “Why didn’t you come back to the apartment?”

Silence.

“What’s in the box?”

Nothing.

Frustrated, Michael slams his hand against the table, and she flinches but continues to avoid his gaze. “Damn it, answer me! You don’t ever have to see me again after this, okay? But just, please, I need some answers.”

Her voice is cold when she answers. “I could say the same.”

Michael’s stopped short when she says that. “Yeah, you do,” he sighs, running a hand through his hair.

He explains it all, realizing how absolutely pathetic he sounds as he describes the situation, and just when he’s about to tell her why he stayed at the job, he stops himself, because he can’t tell her that. He can’t. The thought pierces him, and he deflates completely, looking dejectedly into his half-empty cup.

“I didn’t want to go to the apartment because I knew that if I went back, I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to leave a second time,” she says quietly, looking down at her hands, which were resting on her lap. “It still hurts, you know. It’s not like I wanted to leave. I just… I couldn’t take being left alone like that.”

Michael’s reply dies in his throat when she lifts the box and slides it across the little table towards him. “As for what’s in the box… You can see that for yourself.”

With shaking hands, he takes the box and slowly opens the lid. Tears spring to his eyes when he sees the first thing there: a Polaroid photo of the two of them at Disneyland.

He continues to shift through the box, his heart slowly tearing apart as he realizes that the contents of the box all have to do with the two of them together. A few more Polaroid pictures of the two of them. One of the mittens that Michael had attempted to knit for her a year ago. A little gingerbread in a Ziploc bag. And, worst of all, a little plastic ring that Michael had jokingly used to propose to her while they were out mini golfing.

“Why did you want this back?”

“Because I couldn’t leave without remembering the good times,” she whispers.

The roar of a snowplow makes them both look outside, and they see that the snow had nearly stopped, and the streets are being cleared.

“I think I’d better go,” she says quietly, standing up and reaching for the box.

Michael lets her take the box, and he watched her. He knows he should fight, he knew he should try to keep her, beg her if he had to, but he's petrified.

“I—”

“I’ll see you later, Michael,” she whispers, holding his gaze for a long moment before turning and walking out.

It's only when she was a good ways outside that Michael comes to his senses and jumps up. “Wait!” he yells, running outside and calling after her. “Wait, wait!”

But it's too late. She turns once more, her face twisted in pain, before she gets into her car and drove away, leaving Michael standing in the middle of the road, watching her drive away and take all of their happy memories with her.