He stood in the kitchen, motionless in a puddle of late-afternoon sunlight, for ten minutes. He only moved when the kettle whistled and shrilled, and discovered when he was pouring the boiling water over the teabag, smelling the sharp bite of the black tea he'd gotten used to in Russia, that he didn't want tea at all. It struck him as a metaphor. Metaphor for what, he wasn't sure.

The phone stared at him, its single red light unblinking. All he had to do was pick it up, he told himself. Seven digits. Well, ten now, since they'd run out of area codes and the required ten-digit dialing had been imposed, and really, he was thinking of all of that to keep from thinking about what he really wanted to think about, which was the person whom he was most decidedly not calling and should have been.

The longer he put it off, the worse it would be. There'd been bad words -- on both sides, he had to admit; he was no saint himself -- and really, maybe he was better off giving it some time. Let it go for a little while longer, until they both forgot. Except that was the coward's way out, wasn't it? And the longer they waited, the more it would harden over; the more it would take to fix it, eventually.

He got as far as dialing one-three-two-one before he dropped the receiver back down on the cradle. The mug of tea smelled like early Russian mornings. He picked it up, touched his lips to the rim, and set it down again untasted.

One. Three. Two --

The doorbell rang as his finger was brushing over the one.

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