I test it anyway.
I sit up.
"You shouldn't be doing that," she says.
Her voice. From across the kitchen.
She is at the counter. Coffee in her hands. Same blouse and skirt as last night, the jacket gone. The sleeves of her blouse pushed to her elbows.
Her dark hair is loose. Flattened on one side from a few hours of uneven sleep, damp at the ends from a fast shower.
No careful perfection this morning. No version of Nadia built for other people’s eyes.
There is, technically, me. She has decided I do not count.
That should bother me more than it does.
The Chemex sits beside her on the counter. Glass vessel. Wooden collar. The paper filter still folded back over the rim where she set it after the pour. The kind of pour-over coffee maker that takes four minutes per cup and demands you stand there for all four of them. Whatever else this cabin is, she did not stop being herself when she walked into it.
"Coffee."
"You shouldn't have that either."
"I'll risk it."
She looks at me for a second before pouring a second cup and bringing it to the couch, setting it on the side table within reach. Steps back before I can reach for it.
That is deliberate.
She is also doing it from about three feet away, which means I am now aware of exactly what she smells like. Something clean and specific. The kind of thing a woman wears when she is not trying to be noticed, and is impossible not to notice anyway.
I drink the coffee. It is good coffee. Black.
"How do you take it?" she asks.
"Milk. Two sugars."
She looks at me.
"That is how a child takes coffee."
"I'm aware."
She picks up her own cup and looks at it for a moment. Then, with the particular expression of a woman who has decided to conduct a brief scientific experiment, she already knows the results of it, she adds milk. A small amount. Then sugar. Two. She stirs it once.
She takes a sip.
Her face does something.
It is not a large thing. It is the face of a woman who has been drinking espresso since she was twelve and has just been handed a glass of warm birthday cake and told it is coffee.
"How do you drink this?"
"Very happily."
"It tastes like dessert."
"That's the point."
