Chapter Eleven - Nora
She woke up cold on one side and warm on the other.
It took her a second to sort out. The jacket. His jacket, over her shoulders and half her arm, smelling like cedar and printer toner and something underneath she didn't have a word for.
"What time is it." Her voice was wrecked. She didn't move.
"Six." He didn't look over. Screen glow on his face, headphones around his neck instead of in his ears, four empty coffee cups crowded against his elbow, none of them recent. "You've been out about four hours."
"You didn't wake me up?"
"You needed it more than the deck did."
She sat up slow. The jacket slid off her shoulder into her lap. Her foot was still hanging off the edge of the cushion, bare, cold from the AC running all night. She pulled it under her without thinking, and then, half a second later, wondered why she'd needed to.
Nothing had happened. She knew that the way you know anything you weren't awake for — which is to say not at all, just a working theory built on nothing.
But the room was different than it had been at midnight.
There was a tightness in him she hadn't seen before. Something held in the way he sat. Headphones off, four coffees deep, staring at a screen he didn't appear to be reading.
"You okay?"
"Fine. Long night."
"You look like you saw a ghost."
"Didn't sleep. Ghosts happen when you don't sleep."
Easy enough. But his eyes didn't land on her when he said it. They went somewhere just past her shoulder. She filed that with everything else she'd been filing lately.
She handed the jacket back. Their hands didn't touch — he took it careful, an inch of clearance kept on purpose. She noticed that too. The distance was doing a job she couldn't see the whole of.
"Thank you. For the jacket. And for letting me sleep."
"Don't mention it."
"I'm going to mention it a little. You've been weird all morning."
"I've had four coffees and zero sleep. Weird is generational at this point."
He looked at her properly then, and whatever had been sitting tight in his face let go. The dry, unbothered version of him came back.
"Go home. Shower. Come back at ten, we'll finish the deck."
She gathered her things slower than she needed to. He watched her do it without looking like he was watching. She was aware of her own bare foot going back into the flat, aware of him being aware of it, and underneath all that, aware of a question she had no language for yet.
It could wait. It had been waiting.
"See you at ten."
On the walk to the train she did not examine why some small stupid part of her wished she'd woken up an hour earlier. Just to see what four a.m. in an empty office looked like on his face.
The train was nearly empty at six-thirty. That in-between hour before the real commute, everyone staring at their own reflection in the dark glass. She stared at hers doing the same thing.
Something had shifted. She had no proof. Nothing she could point at and call evidence, just a pile of small wrongnesses that didn't add up on their own. His stillness. The inch of clearance over the jacket. The way he hadn't quite looked at her.
Exhaustion would explain all of it. Four hours of couch sleep and too much coffee would explain all of it.
She didn't believe it. And she didn't want to look too hard at why some part of her wanted it to be something else.
She showered until the water went lukewarm, thinking about nothing in particular and everything at once. The deck. The handful of days left. A man down the hall from a vending machine that hated them both, who'd apparently spent a whole night not sleeping over something he wasn't telling her.
She didn't chase it any further than that. It felt like the kind of thing that might spook.