How It Almost Happened.

"You sound down," she told him.

"No lower than usual," he lied.

They'd known each other for ten years; knew the jabs and the counters; expected them even, or else something felt wrong.

"Let me amuse you with my latest failure," she pressed on. "You'll laugh and say you told me so."

He waited for what part of him expected to hear: the part that always assumed the worst, that knew that people don't change as much as they'd have you think otherwise.

"I'll do no such thing, but continue," he replied, crossing the fingers of his mind.

"I moved in with Brandon," she said as though dropping a predictable bomb of self-abasement, "for three weeks. Then he told me he couldn't be with me again, that I had to get it together. I got a bill for twenty-days' rent and utilities in his handwriting a week later." She waited for the laugh that wasn't coming. Even the cynics cringe at friends' failures.

His eyes narrowed in familiar sympathy. The road they'd known too well was upon them. "I'm sorry to hear that. He stopped deserving you a long time ago, Shayla," adding her name for emphasis. He almost hadn't done it at first for fear of it sounding too forced. Something else prevailed, though-- some opposite of pride.

"But I still believe in karma," she proclaimed with lifted spirits. "He was hospitalized right afterwards for an infected spider bite."

"Strange," he said. "The same thing happened to Melanie when she left me four years ago."

They paused to absorb the irony. It filled their souls like manna from hell.

"So do you want to meet for coffee?"

"No."

"Me neither."

And they went about their days comfortable with the knowledge that the other was still alive, still the same, and as shameless as clockwork for varying reasons.