Chapter Sixteen
Teague
She’s on my couch.
I wake up at nine, which is late for me, and I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and listen.
The laundromat is running downstairs, the low thump of dryers.
The street outside is doing its morning thing, traffic and someone’s music and a kid yelling about something.
And from my living room, the sound of breathing. Slow and even.
Zoe Kimball is asleep on my couch in my Black Flag t-shirt with a blanket pulled up to her chin.
I could have let her sleep in my bed. She fell asleep during the second half of the Thorns game, head on my shoulder, and I sat there for twenty minutes not moving because her breathing was warm against my neck and I didn’t want to wake her and I didn’t want to think about why I didn’t want to wake her.
Then I eased out from under her, laid her down, put the blanket over her, and went to my room and closed the door and lay in the dark for an hour and a half before I slept.
I get up. Bathroom. Brush teeth. Splash water on my face.
The mirror shows me what I already know, which is that I look like someone who had a bad night’s sleep and a worse conscience.
My hair is flat on one side. The ink on my forearm is itching under the aftercare lotion.
My rings are on the bathroom shelf where I left them last night.
I put the rings back on. Go to the kitchen.
She’s still asleep. I can see her from the kitchen doorway, one arm hanging off the couch, dark hair loose on the cushion.
She looks younger in sleep. Less like a woman who talked her way into a fire station and more like someone’s kid who fell asleep watching TV, which is essentially what happened except for the part where I had my face between her thighs an hour before that.
I make coffee. The grinder is loud and I wince and glance toward the couch, but Zoe doesn’t move.
She sleeps like someone who’s been tired for weeks and finally stopped running.
I grind the beans and fill the pot and stand in my kitchen and wait for the coffee to brew and try to figure out what I’m supposed to do with the person on my couch.
I’ve had people spend the night. That’s not new.
What’s new is the part where I care about what happens in the morning.
Usually I make coffee, offer a cup, have a normal conversation about nothing, and they leave and I clean up and the apartment goes back to being mine. Transaction complete. No residue.
This has residue.
The coffee finishes. I pour two cups. Black for me. I don’t know how Zoe takes hers, which is a fact I shouldn’t care about and do. I bring both cups to the living room and set hers on the coffee table and sit in the chair across from the couch and drink mine and wait.
She stirs after ten minutes. The smell of coffee, probably.
She scrunches her face first, then stretches, then opens her eyes and blinks at the ceiling and there’s a moment where I can see her remembering where she is.
It crosses her face in layers. The apartment.
The couch. The clothes she’s wearing. Last night.
Me.
She turns her head and sees me in the chair with my coffee and her face does the Zoe thing, the full-broadcast thing, where everything she’s feeling is right there on the surface and she doesn’t even try to hide it. Relief. Nervousness. A small, uncertain smile.
“Hi,” she says. “I fell asleep.”
“You fell asleep during the Thorns game. They won, if you care.”
“I care.” She sits up. The Black Flag shirt slips off her shoulder and she pulls it back up and reaches for the coffee. She takes a sip. Makes a face. “This is very strong.”
“That’s how coffee works.”
“This is how punishment works.” But she drinks it again, both hands wrapped around the mug, and she looks at me over the rim with those dark eyes and I can see her deciding whether to address what happened or wait for me to address it.
She waits. Zoe Kimball, who rushes into everything, who brought cookies to a fire captain and washed a rig uninvited and sang karaoke in my bar, waits. She sits on my couch in my clothes and drinks my terrible coffee and waits for me to go first.
I don’t go first. I drink my coffee. She drinks hers. The silence sits between us, not uncomfortable, just present. The laundromat thumps downstairs. A car horn honks on the street.
“I should go home,” she says.
“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.”
“I’m bringing food.” She picks up her sneakers. Sits on the couch to put them on. “I’m bringing my mom’s chicken.”
“You’re going to steal your mom’s chicken.”
“I’m going to ask for leftovers. She always makes too much. It’s a cultural obligation.” She ties her laces. Stands up. She’s in my sweats and my shirt and her sneakers and she looks like a person who belongs somewhere that isn’t here and she’s coming back tonight anyway.
“Teague?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m going to meet your parents someday too.”
“I don’t talk to my parents.”
“Then I’ll meet whoever matters. Because you matter to me. So, just...heads up. I'm in your life now.” She walks to the door. Stops with her hand on the knob. “And Teague? I’m going to tell Keely what happened.”
“Which part?”
“The orgasm part.”
I roll my eyes, but I'm smiling anyway. “Of course you are.”
“She’s going to ask for details.”
“I’m sure she is.”
“I’m going to give her details.” She opens the door. The sunlight catches her face and she’s grinning again, unapologetic, fully Zoe. “Bye, Teague.”
“Bye, Zoe.”
She leaves. The door clicks shut. Her footsteps go down the stairs, light and fast, and then the street door opens and closes and she’s gone.
I sit in the chair with my coffee. The couch still has the indent where she slept. The blanket is folded. She folded the blanket before she left.
I pick up her mug. It’s still warm. There’s a lip print on the rim, coffee and her, and I wash it and put it in the rack and stand at my sink and look out the window at the street and think about a girl who just walked out of my apartment wearing my clothes and told me she’s going to describe my mouth to her best friend and I should be horrified and I’m not.
I’m not horrified. I’m not scared. I’m standing in my kitchen and the apartment smells like coffee and Zoe Kimball and I told a girl to come back tonight and I meant it.
That’s new. All of it. Every part.
I finish my coffee. Start cleaning.