It doesn't taste like anything.

What?

It looks like a cantaloupe and faintly smells like one, but I can't taste anything. Maybe it's my tongue, maybe my tongue can't taste anymore and my nose is stuffed.

Your taste buds are fine.

And my nose?

He pulled the cantaloupe out of my hand. My mouth looked strangely small from the bite mark on the quarter moon slice. I touched my chin, wondering if my mouth was really that delicate, it didn't feel that way.

You're right.

I looked up at him, I mean, in his eyes, because I was already looking in his direction but vaguely. At first I thought he meant I was right about my chin, but he was talking about the cantaloupe, throwing it back onto his plate.

Good.

I said good, but it sounded more like another word because I had some croissant in my mouth. I was testing my tongue to ensure I could taste other things. I took a sip of coffee, which mostly just smelt like coffee but tasted more like cream. Cream, right, I was fine. I'm fine.

I wanted the air around me to be swarming with people. I thought Miami would be, people wearing loud Christian Audigier t-shirts, spandex miniskirts, naked greasy chests, white linen. Thought I'd hear the sound of Jennifer Lopez and that really fat hispanic rapper, blaring from some vulgar store but it was just him and I, an older man in a white linen suit; also having breakfast, and maybe a half dozen people walking down the street. There was music playing, but softly, soft music, from the speaker in the corner of the hotel's restaurant patio, where we were sitting.

I needed him to say something, I needed us to talk about something. Not because, like most people, silence is indicative of some complacency; an era of our love where awkward silence is no longer awkward because 'we just know each other so well'. Well, yes, that too, but after last night, I knew it was over but had no reason to. You can't break up with someone after twelve years because of nothing.

I don't want to go in.

We were standing outside Mansion, some club he said was good. He looked at me, used to my incongruous difficulty with everything, but not annoyed. It was as though he had convinced himself this was part of some charming quality he enjoyed in me.

Let's just have a drink and then we can leave. Is there somewhere else you'd like to go?

No.

No?

I'd like to just leave, maybe we can walk and find some place. It doesn't have to be this.

I pointed to a girl with ankle-high, pointy-toed, pleather boots and some mimicking of an over-sized silk dress. He looked at her and not at her ass, which annoyed me. I wanted to get mad at him, I wanted to scream in his face and make him rethink following me back to the hotel room, but he didn't, not once.

Yeah, you're right. It's too gino, let's go.

We ended up at a salsa bar on the strip; the strip where we've had dinner at the most tortuously tourist restaurants the last five nights. He couldn't think of anything better, was satisfied, and I couldn't be bothered to go for hour-long walks, until we found some unknown, hole-in-the-wall restaurant like we used to. Just couldn't be bothered.

I'll have a double Jameson on the rocks and she'll have a vodka water, three limes.

I stood behind him, putting my hands around his shoulders and placing the flats of my palms on his cheeks. I liked feeling the way my hands contorted, and the empty space left where his jaw sunk in a bit. He placed the frigid rock glass on my hand, I snuggled my nose against his neck and grabbed the glass.

Let's dance.

I don't dance.

But no one knows us here.

You know me here.

I walked away, maybe six steps and began dancing to myself because he didn't know me and neither did anyone else here. After ten lengthy minutes, in his mind, I looked back so he could see how I was reveling in men without him and he wasn't there.We had sex in the glass bathroom that night, after I stumbled back to our room. It was a fancy hotel.

Let's go to the beach.

Yeah, let me just get changed.

I had taken a bite and not more of everything on my plate; cantaloupe, croissant, poached egg, sausage, orange.

Nothing tasted like anything.