The first time I saw her, she was crying. Mascara suited her better in smudges, dark and grimy, under her eyes, than combed through long lashes. I’d liked how she hadn’t bothered to smear it away. She accepted her vulnerability, and so did I. I liked it.

My pity wasn’t wasted on the countless criers who would look better dead than with a printed frown and swollen eyes. She cried like spring, blooming and new. And to my pleasure, she cried a lot. When sitting alone in her bottom floor apartment, all curled up and reading the same book, over and over. The times when there was no mascara to show me her pain, but the sorrow in her sobs, the small shake of her shoulders was something to coddle, encourage.

She’d spent her Sundays walking a chocolate lab puppy with blue eyes. Green parks and wet lawns never looked more vivacious than when she strode through them. I knew she was a good person, if not by the books she read, then by the way she always had a little plastic bag peaking out of her sweatshirt pocket. She always left her path cleaner than it was before. I’ve always been quite the opposite.

I’d follow her sometimes, and once, on one of her soggy walks, I got the chance to hear her talk. After I matched my feet with hers, placed my steps in her footprints, she didn’t even recognize me. I asked her what her dogs name was, and her voice, slightly out of breath, answered me, “Marty,” and I think I stiffened in my pants. I think it was the unexpected rasp to those two syllables, but I wasn't sure. It was always hard to tell, with her, because there was never anything about her that didn’t make me want more. Touch, feel, taste her every move. I made it, in a way, my goal to do so.

She liked her wine, red and dark, and as the months passed, so did I. Any night of the week we got drunk on it together. Her with her Marty, perhaps sometimes a man, and me, alone and in love. I only wished she cried more. She looked the best when alcohol induced sadness lifted her eyebrows, with her mouth creased in a frown.

I was with her when she ordered his favorite drink at the coffee shop. She sounded broken, fragile, and I was in heaven. I was there with her the night before, when he’d had enough, said his dues but not, Goodbye. Before he left, he scratched Marty behind the ears, said something cute to him, and didn't look at her when he left. She cried herself to sleep, that night, alone. Marty, he slept on the hardwood floor, outside her bedroom door. I hated him too, goddamn mutt. He got to hear her cry.

Once, when the world was blue as it faded from night to dawn, I took what was mine, what had been mine for years. It wasn’t such a hard thing to do, so long as I was patient. I was. I’d watched for the opportunity, and one night she forgot to lock the back door, I saw. Pity. Pity, it truly was a pity. I’d grown to love watching from afar, but it seems I’ve grown to love the taste of her tears more. They’re mine now.

In the dark, she’s cold because she doesn’t like the blanket I’ve given her. Her sobs wrack her frame, and I imagine how good she’d be now. Cold, mildly compliant, and crying. She’d look away, but I’d see them, the shining tracks on her cheeks.

No, not now. I scratch Marty’s ears, asleep at my side. No, not yet. She hasn’t given me it all. She’s still got fight in her. She still cries.

She still cries, but she won’t last long. They never do.