“Probably.”
“My mom’s going to ask where I was.”
“What are you going to tell her?”
“That I stayed at Keely’s.” She sets the mug down. “Teague?”
“Yeah?”
She hesitates, not looking at me. “Last night. What you said. About not being the dating kind.”
“I remember what I said.”
“Did you mean it?”
I look at her. She’s sitting on my couch with her hair messy and no makeup and my shirt hanging off her frame and coffee on her lips and she’s asking me a direct question because that’s what Zoe does. She walks into rooms and asks direct questions and waits for the answer and doesn’t flinch when it hurts.
“I meant it when I said it,” I say.
“And now?”
“Now I’m drinking coffee with someone who slept on my couch and I’m trying to figure out why I didn’t want her to leave.”
She looks at me. I look at her. The morning light is coming through the window and it’s different from the streetlight, warmer, less forgiving.
“I’m not going to be easy,” I say. “I don’t know how to do this. Whatever this is. If you even want this.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to be difficult and weird and I’m probably going to try to push you away at least twice.”
“I know.”
“Stop saying I know.”
“But I do know.” She picks up the coffee again. “You’re difficult and weird and you gave me a Shirley Temple and taught me about punk and you stopped last night because you cared too much to keep going, and I know exactly who you are.”
I don’t have a response to that. I don’t have a joke or a deflection or a line. She just described me with more accuracy than anyone has managed in twenty-five years of trying, and she did it in my own living room at nine in the morning while wearing my shirt.
“Your coffee is terrible,” she says.
“You keep drinking it.”
“I keep doing a lot of things that aren’t good for me.” She grins. The full one. The ridiculous, face-splitting, room-warming grin that I first saw in my bar three weeks ago and have been thinking about every night since. “Can I come back tonight?”
“The bar’s open every night.”
“I’m not asking about the bar.”
I look at her. She looks at me. The grin softens into something quieter, something that’s asking without pushing, and I think about the contract in the drawer at Anthem and the life I built piece by piece and the routine I’ve been following for three years and how none of it, not one part of it, accounted for a twenty-two-year-old firefighter who drinks Shirley Temples and lines up her sneakers by the door.
“Come back tonight,” I say.
She lights up. The whole face. She sets the mug down and stands and the sweats are pooling at her ankles and the shirt is halfway off her shoulder and she looks absurd and radiant.
“I’ll bring food.”
“You don’t have to bring food.”
