Chapter 2: Ash and Coffee
The couch had swallowed him sometime after three, and the first thing he knew was the taste. Copper and burnt sugar, coating his tongue, sour at the back of his throat. Gray light came through the blinds in thin slices and laid stripes across the carpet.
On the table, a square of blackened foil. The pipe beside it, bowl charred, sweet rot rising off the glass into the cold air. Ash had scattered across the wood grain, and one of Sabrina's hair ties lay in it, orange, dusted gray.
He sat up slow. His head swam, then settled. The apartment was quiet the way it got when she was gone, and the clock on the cable box said 6:12. Her shift ended at six. She walked home. Two minutes, across the street.
He stood and pulled the blanket off his legs. His knees ached. He gathered the foil in his fist and dropped it in the trash under the sink, didn't watch it go down. The pipe he put in the drawer with the takeout menus, back behind the phone books, and shut it soft.
Then he ran the water hot and took the sponge to the counter. Bleach. The whole length of it, the seam at the backsplash, the corner where the sugar jar sat. His hands were shaking when he wrung the sponge out. He pressed them flat on the counter and counted to twenty.
By the time the lock turned, he had coffee going and two mugs down. The smell of bleach hung over everything.
Sabrina came in with her hood up and the sleeve of her uniform tied at her waist. Fryer oil and cold air came off her. She kicked her sneakers off without looking, and they landed in the pile by the door.
"Morning," she said.
"Morning."
She stopped at the table. Just for a second. Her eyes went across the wood grain, the place he'd wiped twice. Then she went past it to the kitchen and took the mug he held out.
"Thanks."
He nodded. His hand was steady enough on the mug. He set it down and picked up his own and drank, and the coffee was bitter and sat right.
She pulled her hood down and her hair fell loose. She looked tired, the dark under her eyes gone gray behind the glasses, but not like she'd been up all night with anybody. She looked like she'd been on her feet.
"Roy burn the bacon again?"
"Roy burns everything," she said. "The wheel never stops."
He laughed, and it came out easy. They drank their coffee at the counter, her leaning against the fridge, him with his hip to the stove. It was the same as every other morning. She told him about a guy who came in at three and ordered a burger and cried into it. He told her the neighbors' dog had been at it since five. She rolled her eyes and drank.
An hour went by like that. He washed the mugs. She went to the bathroom, came out, sat on the arm of the couch with her phone facedown on her leg. He kept his voice level and his hands busy. He put the sponge in the sink, wiped the drawer handles, wiped the stove.
Then she said it.
"You smoked."
Not a question. Flat, the way she read a ticket.
He turned the water off.
She looked at him over the top of her glasses. "Don't," she said. "Don't make the face. I could smell it in the hall."
"Smelled the bleach."
"Under the bleach."
His mouth opened and closed. He dried his hands and laid the towel down and didn't say anything for a while, which was its own answer.
"Sabrina."
"How long."
"I don't know."
"You don't know how long you've been smoking again."
"Since Thursday."
She nodded slow, like she'd already worked it out. Her jaw moved. She set the mug on the floor beside the couch, and the little clink of it was the loudest thing in the room.
"Okay," she said.
"That's it?"
"What do you want me to say. You want me to yell at you?"
"I want you to say something."
"I said okay."
He crossed the room and stood over her. She didn't look up. She watched her own hands in her lap, thumbs pressed together.
"You knew," he said. "Before you came in."
"I knew."
"And you sat there for an hour."
"You wanted the hour," she said. "I figured I'd let you have it."
That went under his ribs worse than yelling would have. He sat down on the other end of the couch, and the cushion gave, and there was all that space between them either way.
"You think I'm stupid," she said.
"I don't think that."
"You put the pipe in with the menus." She pulled one knee up onto the couch. "It's still warm in there. I can see it from here, the drawer's not closed all the way."
He looked. It wasn't.
He got up and pushed the drawer shut, and it clicked, and that was that.
She watched him come back. When he sat down again she was looking at him different, quieter, like she'd decided something and hadn't said it yet.
"How's the counter," she said.
"Clean."
"Bleach and all."
"Bleach and all."
She let out a breath that was almost a laugh. She pulled her hoodie tighter around herself, tucked her chin down into the collar, and for a minute she looked twenty and small and like somebody he'd known a long time ago, before any of the rest of it.
"It's fine," she said. "I'm not going to hang it over you. I'm not your keeper."
"Nobody asked you to be."
"Good."
The fridge hummed. Down the hall somebody's TV came on, muffled, a game show. He could hear the audience laughing through the wall.
"You look like you slept on the couch," she said.
"I did."
"All night."
"Most of it."
She nodded again, and there was something going on behind her face he couldn't get at. He'd known her long enough to know the signs. The way she wouldn't look at him straight. The way she kept her hands busy doing nothing.
"Sabrina."
"Don't."
"What."
"Don't ask me where I was."
"I wasn't going to."
"You were."
He hadn't, but he probably would have, so he let it go. He leaned his head back on the couch and shut his eyes, and behind the lids the room kept turning slow, leftover from the night before.
"When's the hearing," she said.
"Eleven days."
"Eleven."
"That's what the letter said."
She was quiet. He opened his eyes and she had her phone out now, screen lit, thumb moving over it slow. Not texting. Just scrolling nothing, the way she did when she wanted somewhere else to put her eyes.
"There's something you're not telling me," he said.
"There's a lot I'm not telling you."
"I know that."
"So why'd you say it."
He didn't have an answer that wasn't stupid, so he sat with it. She put the phone down screen-first again and looked at him then, straight on, and her eyes were tired and flat and a little hard around the edges.
"You think you're the only one who's been sleeping on that couch," she said.
He didn't say anything.
She stood up and went to the bathroom and shut the door, and he heard the lock turn over, and the faucet run, and then nothing, a long nothing, while he sat there on his end of the couch with bleach in his nose and the taste still in his mouth and no idea at all what she'd meant.
He sat on the couch and listened to the water run. When it stopped, a long stretch of nothing went by, the kind of silence that had a shape to it. Then the lock clicked back and she came out with her hair wet at the temples and her glasses off, and she went past him to the bedroom without a word and shut that door too.
He stayed put.
The apartment did its morning sounds. Traffic started up out on the street. The neighbors' game show ended and something with a laugh track took its place. His mouth still tasted like the night before, and his hands had gone back to shaking now that there was nothing in them.
Around eight he got up. He had one thing he actually needed out of the entryway, the charger for his phone, and the pile by the door had eaten it sometime in the last week. He crouched and started digging.
Coats. Her work hoodie, still faintly fried. A jacket of his he hadn't worn since fall. Somebody's scarf that belonged to neither of them. He pulled it all out onto the floor and shook each one, and the charger wasn't in any of it.
Then he went for the shoes.
Hers were in a heap, the work sneakers and a pair of flats and one boot. Just one boot, black, scuffed at the toe, the other one gone wherever the other one went two months ago. He lifted it by the heel and something knocked loose inside it, a dry little knock like a pebble.
He turned it over and shook it. Nothing came out. He put his hand in and felt along the inside sole, and there it was, a lump of tape against the wall of the boot under the insole. Gray tape, wound twice around, stuck to the leather, and when he worked his thumbnail under it, it came up and took a patch of the boot's lining with it.
A key.
Small. Brass head, round, worn smooth at the edges. No ring. No fob. Just the one key, taped into a boot she didn't wear, in a pile of shoes she never went through.
He stood there holding it, and his thumb went over the brass until it warmed.
He tried it on the front door, because that was the first stupid thought he had. It didn't go. The lock took it an eighth of an inch and stopped. He tried it again, slower, like that would change the shape of the pin. It didn't fit.
The bedroom door opened behind him.
Sabrina stood in the frame with her hoodie on over a T-shirt and no glasses, her hair down flat and wet. She looked at the door, at his hand on the knob, at the key in his other hand, and she went very still. It was a different kind of still than the morning. This one had her shoulders up near her ears.
"What's this key to?" he said.
She didn't answer.
"It was in your boot," he said. "Taped in."
"I know where it was."
"So what is it."
She came into the room. She crossed to the kitchen and took a glass out of the cabinet and filled it at the sink, all of it slow, deliberate, like the water needed watching. She drank half of it standing there with her back to him.
"Sabrina."
"I heard you."
"What's it open."
She set the glass down. "A room."
"A room."
"On Bellview. Above the laundromat." She turned around. "There's four of them up there. Guy rents them out by the week. I paid for one."
He looked down at the key, then back up at her. The bleach smell was gone from his nose, replaced by something colder.
"How long."
"Three weeks."
He sat down on the arm of the couch because his legs decided it for him.
"So you've got a place," he said.
"I've got a room. It's got a bed and a hot plate and a window that looks at the alley."
"You're leaving."
"I didn't say that."
"You paid rent on a room you're not sleeping in."
"I paid rent on a room so I'd have somewhere." Her jaw worked. "You don't get it."
"Explain it to me."
She laughed, short and dry, nothing behind it. She picked the glass back up and didn't drink from it. "Eleven days," she said. "That's what the letter said. You think I'm going to walk into a courtroom and come back here after?"
"You don't know what's going to happen at that hearing."
"I pled guilty, Diego. There's not a lot of mystery in it."
"So you got a room for after."
"I got a room for before." She looked at him straight for the first time since she'd come out. "So if it gets to be too much here, if it's three in the morning and I can't be in this apartment one more minute, I've got somewhere to go that isn't Duncan's couch and isn't the parking lot behind the diner."
The name landed between them and neither one of them picked it up.
He turned the key over once more. Brass, small, unremarkable. It had been in that boot the whole time. Every morning he'd made her coffee, every night he'd watched her go out the door, and the key had been sitting in a pile of shoes by his feet.
"Why's it taped in the boot?" he said.
"Because I didn't want you finding it."
"You just told me where it is."
"I told you because you already had it in your hand." She came across the room and stopped a few feet off. "Give it here."
He didn't.
"Diego."
"It's a key to a room you're renting," he said. "It's yours. I'm not going to keep it."
"Then give it."
He held it out and she took it. Her fingers were cold, and she didn't look at his face while she did it. She dropped the key in the pocket of her hoodie and stood there with her hand in there a second too long, like she was checking it had landed.
"You could have told me," he said.
"Sure."
"I wouldn't have thrown you out over wanting an exit."
She looked at him then, and there was something in it he couldn't name, not quite anger and not quite anything else. "You think that's what I was worried about."
"I don't know what you were worried about."
"No," she said. "You don't."
Diego let her walk out the door with the key in her pocket and didn't bring it up again until her shift ended that night. He was waiting on the stoop across from the diner when she came around the side with her apron still on, and he asked her flat out if she planned to ever come back to the apartment after the hearing. She came around the side of the diner with her apron balled in one hand, and the fryer smell came off her and carried a good two feet. She stopped when she saw him on the stoop. Bellview traffic went by behind her, headlights already on though it wasn't dark yet.
"You waiting on me?" she said.
"Do you plan on ever coming back here after the hearing?"
She took her time with it. A bus pulled up at the corner and let somebody off.
"That's what you came across the street for."
"Answer it."
"I've got eleven days and a room that costs me eighty a week," she said. "You tell me what I'm supposed to do with that."
He came down one step. Wind went through his hoodie and he let it. Her hand was in the pocket with the key in it, and the other one kept working the apron, twisting it up into itself.
"Two weeks," she said. "I sleep there on nights I work. My stuff stays here."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the one you're getting."
"You want to know something," he said. "Ask me something real."
She was at the table with a cold mug and her phone face down. She took her time, like the question had to be worth the asking.
"When you left," she said. "The year you were gone. Were you ever going to come back for me. Or did you only come because the court said you couldn't have the kids."
That sat between them. He picked the mug up and put it down without drinking.
"It's not—" He stopped. He looked at the counter, at the bleached seam he'd scrubbed that morning, like the answer was written in it. "There's a thing I do," he said. "When it gets close. I go flat. You've seen it. Everybody's seen it. I don't—" He stopped again, and this time she watched him do it, watched the sentence die in his mouth.
"You don't what."
"I don't," he said, and left it there.
She nodded slow, like that was the answer she'd counted on getting. She got up and carried her mug to the sink and ran it under the tap even though it was empty, and watched the water, and neither of them said anything for long enough that the fridge hummed twice.
She turned the tap off and the silence after it was worse than the water. Diego stood up, took his keys off the hook, and said he was going to a meeting at the church on Seventh, the nine o'clock one, and he didn't ask if she wanted to come. She was still standing at the sink when the door clicked shut behind him. The street was cold and running with bus exhaust, and the fryer vents along the block pushed out a grease smell that stuck to the inside of his nose. He went up Bellview because the church was that way. Halfway along he came level with the laundromat, and he stopped.
Fluorescents threw green light onto the sidewalk through the window. Dryers still going at that hour, somebody's clothes turning. Above it, four windows set into the brick. Three dark. One lit, shade pulled halfway down, and a bare bulb showing at the gap.
He stood there long enough that a woman came out with a basket on her hip and looked him over twice. He moved on.
He didn't make the meeting. He got as far as the stone steps and sat down on them with his elbows on his knees and listened to the singing come through the doors, and when the clapping started up at the end he was still out there. Then he walked home.
She was asleep on the couch when he came in, curled under the throw with her glasses on the floor and her phone plugged in on the cushion. He stood over her a minute. Then he took the blanket off the back of the chair and laid it over her legs, and she didn't stir, and he sat down at the other end and didn't sleep.
She came in at four, hours after her shift should have ended, and she didn't put her bag down. She stood in the doorway with her keys still in her fist and looked at the room like she was checking it was the same room.
"You're home," he said.
"Here I am."
He was at the counter with a mug and the paper he never read past the first page. He didn't get up. That had been the rule he'd set himself weeks ago and kept, and it was the right rule, and he watched her take it as one more thing.
"Long shift," he said.
"Something like that."
She finally put the bag down. Her shoes were wrong — the flats from the pile by the door, not the work sneakers — and there was street grit on the sides of them, like she'd walked a while somewhere that wasn't the diner. He kept his eyes on the paper.
"You want coffee," he said.
"No."
"Something to eat."
"I'm not hungry, Diego."
Every no came out of her fast and flat, and none of them were about what he'd offered. He turned a page he hadn't read.
She stood there in the middle of the floor like she was waiting on him to ask, and he could feel it, the pull of it, the thing in his chest that wanted to go over there and put his hands on her shoulders and make her say it. He didn't. He'd promised himself he wouldn't, and the promise had become the whole of them: he doesn't ask, she doesn't tell, and the apartment gets quieter by the week.
"I'm going to shower," she said.
"Okay."
She went past him to the bathroom and he didn't turn his head. He heard the door, not locked this time, and the water on, and through it the sound she made once when she thought nobody could hear her, short and cut off, like a cough she'd swallowed.
She came out of the bathroom with her hair wet and no glasses and the towel pulled up under her arms, and she walked past him at the counter without stopping and stood in the doorway to the bedroom with her back to him.
"Come here," she said.
Not a question. He set the mug down and went.
The room was dim and warm. She didn't turn around when he got to her. She reached back and took his hand off his side and put it on her waist, under the towel, on bare skin, and held it there until he understood he was supposed to keep it there. Then she let go of his wrist and tipped her head to one side and he put his mouth on the side of her neck because that was what the angle asked for, and she breathed out through her nose and didn't say anything.
He knew her body the way you know a song you've played too many times, and he let her run it. She stepped out of the towel and turned around and pushed him back toward the bed with a flat hand on his chest, not hard, just a direction, and he sat down on the edge of the mattress because she wanted him to and because standing there with the decision sitting entirely on her side of the room was unbearable in a way he couldn't name. She straddled him still damp, knees on either side of his hips, and kissed him slow and open like she had all night, and he kept his hands on her back where she'd put them and let her use him.
She reached down and got him out of his jeans with two hands and worked him upright and it was her who did it, her who shifted her hips over him, her who sank down an inch at a time with her mouth against his shoulder and her breath going hot and uneven against his collarbone. He held still for her. He did what she wanted with his hips and nothing more, and every time she moved faster he moved with her, and every time she slowed down he slowed down, and somewhere in the middle of it she made a sound he hadn't heard from her in a long time, low and real, and it went through him worse than anything she'd said all week.
She finished first, or he thought she did — the rhythm went ragged and her nails dug and her forehead dropped hard onto the top of his shoulder — and then he did, with his hands spread wide on her back because that was the only place she'd let them go, and for a second afterward neither of them moved.
She got up first. Pulled the towel back around herself like the room had gone cold. He stayed on the edge of the bed doing up his jeans with his hands not quite working yet.
At the doorway she stopped, and didn't look at him, and said, "Don't make it a thing."
Then the bathroom door, and the lock, and the water.
He sat on the bed with the smell of her on his hands and the smell of bleach still somewhere under it, and he couldn't say — not then, not the next morning, not for a long time after — whether she'd wanted it or not. He couldn't say if the sound she'd made had been the real one or the one he remembered making up. He only knew he'd gone when she said come here, and that somewhere under his own relief at being wanted, a door had closed that he hadn't seen close.
He sat with his paper and his coffee going cold and did nothing about it. That was the part he'd get to later, walking it back: she'd stood there in the middle of the floor with her shoes two sizes of wrong and something terrible on her, and the man who was supposed to know her had said you want coffee, and gone back to the paper.
When she came out she went to the bedroom and shut the door. He drank the cold coffee and washed the mug and stood a long time at the sink with the water running, and he still didn't know what had happened to her that day. He only knew he'd been in the room for it and missed it.
He finished his coffee and set the mug in the sink without rinsing it, and the question he'd been chewing on since the drawer clicked shut finally came up. "You want to tell me why you let me make you coffee for an hour first?" Sabrina pulled her hood down and looked at him like the answer should have been obvious. "You wanted the hour," she said. "I let you have it."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the one you're getting." She pulled her cuffs down over her knuckles and held them there. "Why'd you need me to say it?"
He looked at her across the counter. "Because you already knew."
"That's not why." She said it without any heat behind it. "You wanted to watch how long I'd sit there and play dumb about it."
"Sabrina."
"Don't." She pushed off the fridge. "You smoked. I smelled it before I got up the stairs, before any of the bleach. So we're both standing here with something on us. Nobody's got clean hands."
He turned the drawer face flush with the others using his thumb, and the click of it filled the room better than either of them had.
"And what were you deciding?" he said.
"Which way I wanted the morning to go."
"That's not an—"
"I know." She walked past him to the pile by the door and dug the boot out by the heel. Then she took the key out of her hoodie pocket and set it on the counter between them. She set it down dead center, not close to him, not close to her. "There. Now you can stop digging through my shoes."
He didn't pick the key up. He left it lying there between the sugar jar and the salt, brass on the counter like a piece of evidence neither of them could move, and asked her whether the room was a way out or a way of telling him something he should already have heard. He kept his hand off it. The key sat between the sugar jar and the salt, brass gone dull under the kitchen light.
"Both," she said. "It's a way out, and it's a thing I didn't tell you. With us those are the same thing."
"That's not what I asked."
"I know what you asked."
She came back to the counter but not close, one hip against the drawer he'd pushed shut an hour ago. The fridge hummed. Somewhere down the hall a television went to commercials and a man's voice sold mattresses.
"There's a bed in it," she said. "One sheet. A pillow I got at the dollar store."
"Then sleep there tonight."
She looked at him hard, and he hadn't meant it as anything, and she took it as something anyway.
"Maybe I will."
"Sabrina."
"You told me I could say no." She picked the key up. "So that's my no. Not to you. To this. Tonight."
He waited for the pocket. For the hoodie, for the small weight gone out of sight again where he'd never find it. She didn't. She reached across the counter and put it in his open palm and folded his fingers over it with her own.
"Hold it," she said. "If I go, I'll walk out that door and you'll watch me do it. No boots. No hiding."
He looked down at his fist, at the brass showing between his knuckles.
"You mean that?"
"I don't know what I mean." She took her hand back and stepped off the counter. "But I'm tired of the shoes."
She turned and walked to the bedroom, and after a second he heard the shower go on again. He stood at the counter with the key in his hand and the bleach smell still in the seams, listening, and then he followed her down the hall and opened the door. The door swung in on a wall of steam. The mirror had gone blind, and the shower was running full into the tub, drumming on the porcelain with the curtain shoved to one side. She wasn't under it.
She sat on the tile with her back against the tub skirt and her knees up. Her hoodie was still on, sleeves dark to the elbow where she'd reached in to test the water. Her glasses lay by the drain.
"You going to stand there?" she said.
He shut the door behind him, because the hall was cold and the steam was the warmest thing in the apartment. It beaded on his forearms and fogged the lenses he wasn't wearing.
"You're not in the shower."
"I know that."
He crouched. Water came through his jeans at the knee. She wasn't looking at him. She watched the stream come out of the spout and go down the drain, and the sound of it filled the room the way an argument fills a room when nobody's winning it.
He reached past her and shut the tap off. The quiet came down fast and total.
"Better," she said.
He stayed where he was, low to the wet floor, close enough that she could have put a hand on his shoulder if she wanted. She didn't. Then she moved her foot over and let her knee knock against his.
"Sit," she said.
Ten minutes later the bathroom door opened again.
He'd barely moved off the edge of the bed — jeans still open, hands still buzzing — and he didn't look up until he heard her foot on the carpet. She stopped in the doorway with the towel bunched at her hip and none of the water off her, and she didn't say come here this time.
"On your back," she said.
He went. Lay back on the bed with his arms out and did nothing with them, because she hadn't told him what to do with them, and she crossed the room and stood over the mattress looking down at him like she was deciding how much of him she wanted to use.
"Take your shirt off."
He got it up over his head and dropped it on the floor, and she watched him do it with her hand on the knot of the towel and her lips just barely parted, like the sight of him obedient was its own thing she was taking in. Then she unwound the towel and let it fall and came in over him again, knees on either side of his ribs this time instead of his hips, so her wet hair hung down into his face and she was looking down the length of both of them at what she'd left like that.
"Hands on my thighs," she said. "Don't move them."
He put them there.