She turns her head. Her mouth is close to my hair. She doesn’t kiss me. She just breathes there for a second, close and warm.
“You’re going to be trouble,” she says.
“I’m going to be a firefighter.”
“Same thing.” Her arm drops from the couch to my shoulders. Not around me, just resting there, the weight of it warm through the Black Flag shirt. “Watch the game, Zoe.”
I watch the game. I fall asleep in the second half, my head on her shoulder, wearing her clothes, in her apartment. The last thing I hear is the commentator’s voice and the crowd and Teague breathing next to me, steady and slow.
I sleep better than I have in three weeks.
Chapter Sixteen
Teague
She’s on my couch.
I wake up at nine, which is late for me, and I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and listen. The laundromat is running downstairs, the low thump of dryers. The street outside is doing its morning thing, traffic and someone’s music and a kid yelling about something. And from my living room, the sound of breathing. Slow and even.
Zoe Kimball is asleep on my couch in my Black Flag t-shirt with a blanket pulled up to her chin.
I could have let her sleep in my bed. She fell asleep during the second half of the Thorns game, head on my shoulder, and I sat there for twenty minutes not moving because her breathing was warm against my neck and I didn’t want to wake her and I didn’t want to think about why I didn’t want to wake her. Then I eased out from under her, laid her down, put the blanket over her, and went to my room and closed the door and lay in the dark for an hour and a half before I slept.
I get up. Bathroom. Brush teeth. Splash water on my face. The mirror shows me what I already know, which is that I look like someone who had a bad night’s sleep and a worse conscience. My hair is flat on one side. The ink on my forearm is itching under the aftercare lotion. My rings are on the bathroom shelf where I left them last night.
I put the rings back on. Go to the kitchen.
She’s still asleep. I can see her from the kitchen doorway, one arm hanging off the couch, dark hair loose on the cushion. She looks younger in sleep. Less like a woman who talked her way into a fire station and more like someone’s kid who fell asleep watching TV, which is essentially what happened except for the part where I had my face between her thighs an hour before that.
I make coffee. The grinder is loud and I wince and glance toward the couch, but Zoe doesn’t move. She sleeps like someone who’s been tired for weeks and finally stopped running. I grind the beans and fill the pot and stand in my kitchen and wait for the coffee to brew and try to figure out what I’m supposed to do with the person on my couch.
I’ve had people spend the night. That’s not new. What’s new is the part where I care about what happens in the morning. Usually I make coffee, offer a cup, have a normal conversation about nothing, and they leave and I clean up and the apartment goes back to being mine. Transaction complete. No residue.
This has residue.
The coffee finishes. I pour two cups. Black for me. I don’t know how Zoe takes hers, which is a fact I shouldn’t care about and do. I bring both cups to the living room and set hers on thecoffee table and sit in the chair across from the couch and drink mine and wait.
She stirs after ten minutes. The smell of coffee, probably. She scrunches her face first, then stretches, then opens her eyes and blinks at the ceiling and there’s a moment where I can see her remembering where she is. It crosses her face in layers. The apartment. The couch. The clothes she’s wearing. Last night.
Me.
She turns her head and sees me in the chair with my coffee and her face does the Zoe thing, the full-broadcast thing, where everything she’s feeling is right there on the surface and she doesn’t even try to hide it. Relief. Nervousness. A small, uncertain smile.
“Hi,” she says.“I fell asleep.”
“You fell asleep during the Thorns game. They won, if you care.”
“I care.” She sits up. The Black Flag shirt slips off her shoulder and she pulls it back up and reaches for the coffee. She takes a sip. Makes a face. “This is very strong.”
“That’s how coffee works.”
“This is how punishment works.” But she drinks it again, both hands wrapped around the mug, and she looks at me over the rim with those dark eyes and I can see her deciding whether to address what happened or wait for me to address it.
She waits. Zoe Kimball, who rushes into everything, who brought cookies to a fire captain and washed a rig uninvited and sang karaoke in my bar, waits. She sits on my couch in my clothes and drinks my terrible coffee and waits for me to go first.
I don’t go first. I drink my coffee. She drinks hers. The silence sits between us, not uncomfortable, just present. The laundromat thumps downstairs. A car horn honks on the street.
“I should go home,” she says.
