Chapter Three
Autumn
Iwake up in a room I've never seen in daylight.
The blind over the alley window is crooked, letting a strip of gray morning across the brick wall and the foot of the bed. There's a stack of records on the floor, a couch against the opposite wall with a blanket folded over one arm, and a deck of cards abandoned on the side table.
Sam's arm is across my waist.
He's still asleep behind me, his chest warm against my back. I turn carefully enough not to wake him and get my first look at his face without the rest of him moving around it. His jaw is loose, curls going in every direction, one cheek pressed into the pillow.
On the bottom shelf of the bookcase, there's a box of crayons.
I know who they belong to without asking.
Sam shifts in his sleep and pulls me closer, his arm tightening around my middle. Whatever thought I was about to have about the crayons disappears when his mouth brushes the back of my shoulder.
A few minutes later, his eyes open.
There's no slow return. One second he's asleep, the next he's looking at me through hair that's standing up in at least six directions.
Then he pulls me back against him and puts his face in my hair.
"Morning."
His mouth touches my shoulder.
"Morning."
"Coffee."
I turn my head enough to look at him. "Is that a question?"
"It's a courtesy."
He gets out of bed before I can answer.
The sheet falls away with him, leaving him in a pair of low-slung boxer briefs and nothing else. Daylight was not the safest way for me to see Sam Reeves without a shirt.
I've had pieces of him for months. Forearms across the bar. Ink disappearing beneath rolled sleeves. Roses reaching above his collar when he bends his head.
This is all of it at once.
The blackwork runs over his arm and shoulder, across his chest and up the side of his neck. His boxers sit low enough on his hips that I have to drag my eyes back up before he catches me staring.
He catches me anyway.
One corner of his mouth moves before he turns toward the kitchen.
A cabinet opens. Then another. A few seconds later, coffee starts to smell through the apartment.
I sit up and look around for my clothes. My jeans are beside the bed, but my shirt is nowhere in sight. Sam's black button-down is closer, crumpled near the foot of the mattress.
Good enough.
I pull it on and button enough of it to be decent before following the coffee.
Sam is standing at the kitchen counter with his back to me when I come in.
"Where's my shirt?"
"Kitchen."
I look around. "This is the kitchen."
He glances toward the counter behind me.
My shirt is on the floor beside it.
I look at the shirt, then at him. "Why is my shirt in the kitchen?"
There's a pause before he turns back to the coffee.
"You know why your shirt is in the kitchen."
Right.
I leave it where it is.
The floor creaks as I cross toward him, and when Sam looks over his shoulder, his eyes land on the shirt I'm wearing.
His hand pauses halfway to the mug. I look down at myself, then back at him. He turns to the coffee with more attention than coffee requires and slides a mug toward me.
The first sip is exactly right. Not just close enough, but exactly right. I look over the rim and find him watching me.
His mouth shifts slightly before he points toward one of the chairs at the small table.
"Sit."
"Excuse me?"
"You're not doing anything today."
"I have a call at eleven."
"You have a call at eleven you can take from that chair."
I pull the chair out. "That sounds suspiciously like doing something."
"Sit down, Autumn."
I sit.
Sam pulls a pan from the cabinet and starts breakfast while I work on my coffee. The first egg attaches itself to the pan almost immediately. He tries the spatula from three different angles before finally accepting that most of it isn't coming back.
I wait until he scrapes it into the trash. "Was that mine?"
"No, that was the practice egg."
The second one goes better.
While he cooks, he tells me about a fire inspector who once shut down the club over an extension cord.
The story should take thirty seconds, but Sam keeps remembering pieces of it as he goes.
Somewhere in the middle Bex enters the situation and starts arguing municipal code with a man holding a clipboard.
"She told him he couldn't cite a code if he couldn't give her the number," Sam says, working the spatula beneath the next egg.
I lower my coffee. "She did not."
He glances at me. "You know Bex."
I do, which is why I start laughing before he gets much farther.
The inspector wasn't prepared for her, Sam wasn't willing to rescue either of them, and nobody involved remembers how the argument actually ended.
By the time he admits he's forgotten the rest of the story, I'm laughing hard enough that I have to put my mug down.
Sam glances over from the stove, and the smile he tries to hide before turning back to the pan tells me he's enjoying this more than he plans to admit.
A few minutes later he puts a plate in front of me and takes the chair across from mine. The eggs are better than the first casualty suggested they would be. We eat without talking for a while, my bare feet tucked beneath the chair and Sam's shirt brushing the tops of my thighs every time I move.
My own shirt is still on the kitchen floor.
I notice it every once in a while and leave it there.
When my coffee gets low, Sam reaches across the table for the mug and refills it without asking. I watch him set it back in front of me, and when his eyes lift to mine, I take another sip instead of commenting on the fact that he got it exactly right again.
His eyes stay on mine for another second before he goes back to his breakfast.
By the time we finish eating, the fire-inspector story has wandered into everything Sam would change about Vibes if he ever built another place. Smaller. No stage, no dressing rooms. Just a bar in Pilsen where he could know the whole room without running a show around it.
"Does this imaginary bar have a name?"
Sam takes my empty plate and stands. "Smoke."
I look at him over my mug. "That's annoyingly good."
One corner of his mouth moves. "Yeah."
My phone buzzes from inside my bag near the couch, and when I check the time, it's close enough to eleven that I have to move.
"Shit. My call."
Sam nods toward the chair I'm already sitting in. "Told you."
I give him a look while I pull my laptop out of my bag, but I stay exactly where I am.
The call runs longer than it should. Sam cleans up around me while I work, moving quietly enough that after a while I stop noticing when he leaves the room.
At some point he disappears downstairs. By the time he comes back, I'm answering questions from three different people and have forgotten I'm sitting in his kitchen wearing his shirt.
When I finally hang up, I could pack everything away.
Instead, I open my email.
Sam doesn't comment on that either.
The morning slips into afternoon without either of us deciding it will.
I work while he moves between the apartment and the club below, sometimes gone for ten minutes, sometimes longer.
When he's upstairs, we talk in pieces around whatever I'm doing.
Nothing important. Nothing that requires either of us to decide what last night made us.
Eventually I close the laptop and realize I've been staring at the same email for several minutes.
"I should go."
Sam is leaning against the counter with his arms folded. He looks at me for a moment before nodding.
"Yeah."
Neither of us moves.
I don't know what I'm waiting for, and I don't think he does either.
Then I stand and go find my clothes.
By the time I'm dressed, Sam has pulled on one of his black shirts.
He walks downstairs with me, through the narrow stairwell and into the empty club.
Vibes looks different again without people in it, the stage dark and the long bar waiting for another night.
Our footsteps follow us all the way to the front.
Sam stops with one hand on the latch.
"You working tonight?"
"Until seven or so."
"Come by after."
I look at him. "I might."
"You will."
"I might."
He opens the door before I can smile, and the crisp Chicago air blows straight into the room.
I step onto the sidewalk and pull my orange coat closed. When I turn back, Sam is still standing in the doorway with one shoulder inside the club.
"Autumn."
"Yeah?"
For a second, he doesn't say anything.
I wait.
His eyes stay on mine long enough that I think this might finally be the conversation we didn't have over breakfast. Then his gaze drops to my coat.
"Wear something warmer next time."
I look down at the orange wool. "You don't like my coat?"
"I like your coat." His eyes come back to mine. "It's not a warm coat."
A laugh slips out of me. "Goodbye, Sam."
"Later."
He stays in the doorway while I start down Milwaukee.
I make it half a block before I hear him again.
Wear something warmer next time.
It felt different standing in front of him.
Out here, I'm not sure why.
Sam takes care of people. I've watched him do it since I got here.
I pull the coat tighter and keep walking.
After a night in his bed, a morning in his kitchen and most of the day in his shirt, I shouldn't care whether something as small as that belongs only to me.
By the time I reach the corner, I've decided it means nothing.
By the next block, I'm still deciding.