"What are the rules about the coffee?"
"The rules are that the coffee comes off the grounds in four minutes."
"What time is it now?"
"Three minutes thirty."
"That is a lot of time."
"It is enough."
I lift her up onto the counter.
The granite is cool against the backs of her thighs. She makes a small sound when she goes onto the counter.
It is a sound I am going to learn the names of over the next however many years.
I get my hand inside the t-shirt on her body, which is hers.
She is laughing.
She is laughing because the coffee timer on her phone is going to go off in two minutes and thirty, and she is going to have to choose between the coffee and what I am about to do, and she has, in some part of herself, already chosen.
She is choosing me.
The four-minute rule has been hers for ten years, and it is going to lose this morning.
I kiss her.
She kisses me back.
She is laughing into my mouth.
The phone timer chimes. Neither of us reaches for it. The coffee gets bitter on the counter behind her, and we drink it that way half an hour later.
The coffee isbitter by the time we get to it.
She drinks hers. I drink mine. The Chemex sits empty on the counter. She is in the t-shirt that is mine. I am in the pants and nothing else. The kitchen is full of the light of a Thursday morning in DUMBO that the rest of New York is also waking into and that nobody else has, this morning, the way we have it.
She is at the toaster.
I am at the counter.
My phone vibrates against the granite.
I look at it without reaching.
Matteo.
He's awake.
I turn the phone face down on the counter.
I do not say anything.
She is at the toaster. Her back is to me. She has not seen the screen.
The architecture is not closed.
