The notification light on Royce's phone blinked in the darkness of his Brooklyn apartment. 1:30 AM. Like clockwork. Maria's name lit up the screen, same as it had every night for the past ten months. Outside his window, the city hummed with its usual late-night energy, but inside, his stomach twisted with that familiar knot of suspicion.
"Baby, I just got done hanging with April," Maria's voice came through, sweet as honey but leaving a bitter aftertaste in Royce's mind. Maria and her sister worked the same morning shift at the hotel together, 8 AM to 2 PM, then she'd would leave from there to go to her second job from 3 to 10. That was almost four hours ago.
The ceiling fan spun on low above him as he sat up in bed, running a hand over his face. "Your sister April? The same April who's supposed to be at her man's spot right now? The one that cool with the dude downstairs?"
The silence on the other end was longer than the line at Par-rains on a Saturday afternoon.
"You know I love you, Royce," Maria finally said, her voice doing that thing it did when she was trying to change the subject. But Royce had been born and raised in these streets – he knew defiection when he heard it.
"Nah, Maria, you're not getting the point," he said, his voice rising with the frustration of ten months of late-night calls and circular conversations. "When you get off work at 10:00 PM, I don't hear from you until 1:30 AM or sometimes after 2:30 AM. And all you can say is you're hanging with your freaking sister?"
It was in downtown traffic when April herself enters the picture. Royce had taken down his Facebook profile picture with Maria. When Maria seen that he took the them down she immediately tells her sister that Royce changed his profile pic and unfollowed her.
April's text came through faster than the RTA a good day (which is to say, still pretty slow, but she got there). A whole paragraph about keep my name out her mouth and how she'd been dating some guy for two months – the same one Royce had seen her with when she'd jumped out of that car and ran upstairs like she was training for Marines.
"What the hell does that have to do with your sister always calling and wanting to see me at 1:30 AM in the damn morning?" Royce texted back, but the mystery just kept deepening like a pothole.
Valentine's Day. Royce had done it proper – a dozen roses. He'd brought them to the hotel where she worked, proud as any man who thought he was doing right by his woman. The roses sat at the front desk, their petals slowly curling inward as the hours passed by. No call. No text. No thanks.
He didn't hear from her until the next morning when he was picking her up for work, like those roses hadn't even existed.
Royce stood at his looking out his window at the maze of light and thinking this 1:30 AM mystery, has gotten out of control.
Ten months of watching the time on my phone go past midnight, then 1 AM, waiting for that call. Ten months of "I'm with my sister" when her sister was supposedly somewhere else. Ten months of loving someone who only seemed to remember he existed in the wee hours of the morning between last call and sunrise.
His phone vibrated again – 1:37 AM. Maria's name bright white on the black background you can see from the next room.
Royce stared at it, watching it vibrate on his nightstand mean while outside his window, the Brooklyn night carried the endless sounds of sirens, late-night laughter, and the distant rumble of trains. Each sound a reminder for that in this city of eight million stories, his was just another love story that had its suspicious after dark.
He let it ring.
Sometimes the hardest part of being in a big city isn't the rent, the rats, or the rush hour – it's knowing the difference between real love and the other kind of love at 1:30 AM.
The End