Happy birthday

"Happy birthday," I told him. We stood in the corridor of his soulless apartment block with its sterile white walls and prison-inspired window grilles and decor and I had nothing in my hands but my heart.

'Don't get me anything' he had said earlier, over the phone. And so I hadn't - not something that I had to spend money on, anyway.

I found the pretty black box stashed in a corner of my house, dug up a ribbon for it, then dug out my heart. I put my heart into the box, all of it, and tied a bow, accenting the blackness of the cardboard container.

Now I offered it to him as we stood there in the winter cold, the unheated building chilling our bones to their marrow. He looked at it, then at me, and half put his hand out, open.

And closed it at the last moment and pushed the box back to me.

"Take your heart back," he said, closing my outstretched fingers around the box. "I don't need it."

A bubble grew in my chest and refused to deflate. There was an ache high in my belly as I swallowed and asked him: "do you want it?"

And his delicate brow crinkled and his lips quirked, and he shook his head.

"Keep it," he said. "There are others who better deserve it."

And I looked at him, standing there before me swathed in a winter coat, his pale skin battling the snow outside for the title of the fairest in the land, and I swallowed again and managed a smile. The clouds cleared for a moment and shaft of weak sunlight grazed his cheekbones, illuminating the face I had come to know and love in the intimacy of dim yellow lamps on someone else's couch. I held that smile and I looked at him and said,

"I will."