He is the safe guy, not that he really has a combination. He isn't very good with numbers and figures and turning so many dials with so many rotations and lefts and rights and ups and downs. But he is the one girls trust, the one who the boys trust even more.

And it's not so much about the loneliness because he is used to empty rooms and the smell of cold draping in through closed windows that are all too deserving of baseball bats. It is more about convincing her to go back to someone else, someone that isn't him, when all he wants is her to stay, to be something more blunt than elbows to the throat, gasping for air, coughing up bits of maybes and Isupposes onto carpets already stained black and white though never gray.

"I'm happy for you" says the boy named Reluctance.

He is the safe one. The one who won't slip her liquid oblivion in a bottle and leave her crying under the gaze of thousands of wet tiles, squares upon squares that chant "Embellish uniformity". The one she will come back to again.

And again.

And again.

And