This isn't weird.

Three Dots

 Ben didn't hear from Millie the next day, or the one after that. Or the one after that.

An entire week passed without a single call or text, then another. Sometimes, when he found himself staring at his phone, mindlessly scrolling through their earlier messages, three dots would appear in the bubble next to her name. What felt like an eternity would pass as he waited, breath held, for a new message to appear. But every time the ellipsis would simply vanish, and his heart would sink.

His phone rarely left his hand. Every morning, the very moment his eyes opened, he checked it for any sign of contact. He went about his days with a paralyzing fear that if he let it out of his sight, even for a second, he might miss a call. It had become a problem at work, but his supervisor didn't take long to consider him a lost cause, and gave up on trying to get him to put it away. They both knew he wouldn't be there much longer, anyway. He stopped showing up halfway through the second week.

Indigo was out of the house more often than not as of late, and Ben found himself sometimes going entire days without speaking to another human being. Wednesdays were the hardest. He still woke up early, despite having barely slept the night before, half expecting her to text that she had already gotten them a table. He knew very well that after what he had done, they would never go back there again, but he still couldn't shake the irrational hope.

The third silent Wednesday was the one that broke him. He sat alone at the kitchen table for hours, staring at his phone and drinking coffee until his body felt jittery and sick. When the coffee was gone, he went to the cabinet and retrieved what was left of the bottle of Scotch he had shared with Millie all those months ago. He returned to the table and filled his mug, and when it was empty, he filled it again. By the time the bottle was empty, his phone still showed no signs of life.

Despondent and lonely, he replied to a different set of texts, ones he had been ignoring for weeks. The waitress accepted his weak excuses about working overtime without question. She came over straight away, and brought with her a full bottle of cheap vodka. It went a long way toward helping him get through her latest round of sob stories, and everything else they did.

He regretted it immediately, but the next night, when the drunken, crushing loneliness became too much to handle, he texted her again. It became a regular thing. A sickening, shameful, regular thing.

He had never felt more alone.

At the end of week five, tipsy from a morning of solitary day drinking, Ben gave in and sent Millie a text: Hey. I miss you.

Her response didn't come until nightfall: You too.

Nothing more.

The following weekend, Millie made an unexpected return to game night at that Tavern. She wore two French braids, the way she had the night they met. He was thrilled to see her, but he was disheveled and already drunk, and he could see at once that it made her uncomfortable. She greeted him with a halfhearted hug and sat next to him as she always had, but she avoided his eyes and what little conversation they shared was stiff and devoid of their usual rapport. She bristled visibly at the conspicuously familiar way the waitress spoke to him.

It was, perhaps, worse than not seeing her at all.

Later that night, lying alone in the dark, Ben stared miserably at his phone. Three dots appeared, then disappeared, then reappeared again. They blinked in and out of existence for nearly thirty minutes before vanishing for good.

He texted the waitress.