First Draft - The End

So this is the last section of this particular story. I don't have a title yet, so any suggestions would be much appreciated. And no, Jordan, I'm not calling it "The Suckiest Suck That Ever Sucked." That can't be the title of every story I write.

Anyway, without further ado...
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"Timmy, are you ok?" she says. She only ever calls him Timmy if she thinks something's wrong.

She knows something's wrong, he thinks, before he realizes it's even her. Before he realizes that the voice is more than just his imagination.

“Why are you standing like that?” Kara says. “Did something happen?”

“Nothing. No,” he says. “It's nothing. I'm fine.” He realizes he should look at her so he straightens up and turns. To prove that he's alright; to prove that nothing's wrong. He sees her, and she's colored with concern. Her fingers are folded at her chest, and her elbows are pressed tight to her sides. Tim smiles to reassure her, “Fine,” but he feels the smile go wrong. He can feel that it's one of those sickly smiles that looks like it's being pulled down at the corners by some unseen weight. He can feel that it looks almost sarcastic, that it looks almost mocking. Kara's eyes and expression go flat, and he sees that he's done nothing to reassure her, that he must only look worse. So Tim lets the smile fall, lets his eyes droop, lets his face pull his head down a little. His breath escapes him in one, thick rush. He looks up at her again. He says, “Kara. I think you're great.”

Nothing about her face changes, and This, he thinks, is unexpected.

“I, I think you're great. And I just wanted you to know that. And, but, well...”

“You're breaking up with me,” she says. Her voice is vacant of emotion.

“What? No, I'm...well, um...”

Her voice the same, her face the same – flat – she says, “You're breaking up with me.”

“Kara, I,” Tim starts. “I just, well...” His gaze leans out the window again. Earlier he'd thought that the rain's intensity was growing, but now he sees that it's slowed to a patient drizzle. “Yes,” he says. “I am.”

“Fine.”

She doesn't leave. She stays. Tim can see the haze of her in his periphery. This is something that she does, he knows, so she can win. She waits so she can have the last word. She waits until she has you by the eyes. Tim focuses on the Draper building, on the tan-brown of the bricks. He doesn't want her to win. He doesn't know why, but there is that feeling, strong and at the base of him – that feeling of, No.

“Fine,” Kara says again.

Tim feels his neck twitch toward her. A gust of wind throws some rain against the window. It obscures the view, and as the water sheets downward, it makes the Draper building look as if it's dancing, as if it's wriggling back and forth like a charmed snake. Tim knows that Kara is waiting, and that she can wait for a long, long time, but I won't look, he thinks. Not until she's gone. I won't look. I won't look till it's over. But it doesn't end. She waits. And she waits. And she waits. Tim's neck twitches, and then it twitches more and more, and although he doesn't want to see, he wants desperately to look. He wants desperately for the twitching to stop, and the moment to stop, and for all of it to stop and be over with: gone.

“Fine,” Kara says with flat, affectless fury.

I'm going to look, Tim thinks. I can't help it, I'm just...I'm going to look. I know it.

“You want to break up with me, that's fine, Timothy.”

And, She never calls me 'Timothy.'

Outside, a shadow appears to fall over the Draper building, darker than the rest of the day's shadow.

Just go away, Tim thinks. Please, just something happen, and make her go away.

“But look at me when I say this.”

And like that – like she had snapped, or yanked a leash around, or like she had smacked him hard in the face – he turns to her. Christ, he thinks. And as he turns: the sound.

The crack, the breach. The thunder that is not thunder, but worse. So loud that inches-thick, body-proof windows can't hold it back. So loud, it shakes the earth. So loud, the ground itself is afraid.

And because he can't see it, the sound – the explosion and crush of fifty stories-worth of concrete, metal, glass, of flesh – of one whole building as it topples in on itself and crashes down outside, because it is sound without source, for Tim, at first, because it is only sound, the sound has no meaning. It is only sound: awful, terrible, horrible sound. But then he sees Kara look outside, and he sees all of the heads around the office look outside. And so he looks outside, out the window, through the rain, and he sees what the sound was, and he sees what has happened.

Someone, speaking for everyone, says, “Oh. Oh my God.”

And still the sound is there.

He felt horrible about it later. He never told anyone about it later. But the first thing that Tim thought when he looked out the window and saw the shattered remains of the Draper building – a cloud of dust and terror swirling up and consuming one black, bony spike of tortured architecture – the first thing he thought was, Thank God. Thank God that building just blew up. And before the first siren-wail could be heard on the street below, he was gone: alone and atremble on the shiny men's room floor.