The first thing Dana establishes is that she is not in her apartment, because her ceiling does not have a water stain shaped like Portugal.
The second thing is the arm. Warm, heavy across her waist, attached to — Marcus. Right. Marcus of the bookstore reading, Marcus of the bar after, Marcus of the extremely good forearms, and — oh. Oh, the rest of it arrives all at once, the whole night unpacking itself in no particular order, and she lies very still under Portugal and does inventory.
Her mouth tastes like a campfire made of wine. Her contacts have fused to her eyes into little regret lenses. Phone: on the floor, 6%, one text from Priya that just says WELL?? Her dress is across the room on a chair, and even from here she can see it's inside out, which means it went off in one motion, which means — a flash of it, unbidden: his hands at the hem, the fabric peeling upward, cool air and then his mouth at her hip like a signature. She presses her lips together. Focus.
The gray morning is coming through unfamiliar blinds, striping the bed. He sleeps like something recently felled. There's a freckle on his shoulder blade she has apparently already kissed, because she remembers doing it — remembers the specific salt-warm taste of his skin, remembers his hand splayed at the small of her back pulling her in like a tide getting impatient, remembers a sound she made that she would like stricken from the record, frankly, a sound she didn't know was in the building. Her whole body flushes hot and files it under both embarrassing and again?
Here is the calculus, the morning-after math nobody teaches you: stay and it means something, and it might not mean something; leave and it means nothing, and it might not mean nothing. She has a dentist appointment at 11:15. She hates that she knows that. She hates that some administrative lobe of her is awake in this bed going you have a cleaning, Dana.
She is halfway through a silent extraction — one leg out, weight on the elbow, a heist — when he says, into the pillow, not asleep at all: "There's coffee. If you stay, there's coffee. That's the whole pitch."
"How long have you been awake?"
"Since you gasped at my ceiling."
"Portugal," she says, before she can stop herself, and he lifts his head, hair catastrophic, and looks at the stain, and then at her, delighted.
"It's Portugal," he says. "Two years I've been calling it a boot. It's Portugal." And that's the problem, right there — that's the whole hazard of him. Not the forearms. The delight.
The kitchen is where the movie falls apart. His roommate is there. His roommate is wearing a shirt that says CLEVELAND: MAYBE and making a smoothie, and the blender screams like the void, and the roommate says, "Morning," with the studied neutrality of a man who has heard things, and Dana, in Marcus's T-shirt with her inside-out dress in a tote bag, achieves a state of mortification that borders on religious.
Marcus makes eggs. He makes them with confidence and no ability whatsoever. She watches him salt the pan, get distracted telling her about the bookstore's ongoing war with a squirrel, and salt it again. The eggs arrive rubbery at the edges, wet in the middle, twice-salted, on a plate that says WORLD'S OKAYEST GOLFER, and he presents them like a man who has never once eaten food.
She eats them. All of them. The coffee, in fairness, is genuinely good.
"They're terrible," he says, watching her, wonder in it. "You're eating them and they're terrible."
"They're so bad," she agrees, mouth full. "Why did you make them?"
He turns his mug a slow half-circle on the counter. The blender has gone; the roommate has evaporated with Cleveland-maybe discretion; the kitchen is just radiator tick and gray window light.
"The eggs were a bid," he says, simply. "I can't cook. But people don't leave mid-eggs. I wanted the extra twenty minutes."
The honesty of it lands in her sternum, sideways, and stays there. Last night was wine and velocity. This — rubbery eggs and a man admitting to strategy — is somehow the more dangerous material. Longing, it turns out, doesn't feel like the movies either. It feels like a dentist appointment you're about to cancel.
She doesn't cancel it. This is the thing she'll keep coming back to, on the walk to the train, the city all puddles and Sunday, her dress inside out in a tote bag and her chest doing something unlicensed: she leaves anyway. Because it's fast, and it's a lot, and the sound she made is still in that room, and she needs one hour of her own air to find out what's hers and what was the wine.
At the door he hands her — her hair tie. Off his own wrist, where it apparently spent the night. He does not make a speech about it. He puts it in her palm and folds her fingers over it, and the folding is worse than a kiss, cleaner, more targeted.
"No pressure," he says. "But the squirrel updates are twice weekly, and you're behind."
She makes it down one flight. She stands on the landing, holding a hair tie, doing no math at all for the first time all morning. Then she climbs back up, and she's standing in front of his door with her fist raised and nothing planned — no line, no plan, dentist in ninety minutes —
Her phone buzzes. 4% battery.
I can hear you standing there, it says. The floor creaks. Third board.
She's still laughing when the door opens.
