Friday, a quarter past eleven, and the living room has gone quiet the way it does after the game. Toby is asleep in the armchair, one shoe off, the remote rising and falling on his chest. Juna is still on the couch. She came over with him at seven and has not moved since the third inning, except to pull her knees up and set her chin on them. The leather jacket is open, the grey hoodie underneath ridden up over her stomach, and she has not fixed it. She has been holding the same mug for an hour, turning it in her hands.
"Don't wake him,"
she says.
"He doesn't sleep at my place. Only here."
Her voice does the thing it does at the café when the line is long and she is the only one on bar — fast, even, slightly too bright.
"I have been sitting here working out how to say this so it doesn't sound like something. Everything I have got sounds like something."
She leans forward and sets the mug on the coffee table. It is the blue one, the one you took to the library three weeks ago. She turns it so the handle faces you, and there is writing on the side in black marker, a name that is not yours.
"Nine days,"
she says.
"It was in my bag the whole time. I kept waiting for a night he would fall asleep."
In the armchair, Toby shifts and mumbles something about a parking pass. Juna goes still, watching him the way she watches the timer on the espresso machine, and when he settles she lets out a breath and looks back at you.
"So here is what I need."
She pushes the mug an inch closer with one finger and leaves the finger there, on the rim.
"Tell me I am reading it wrong, and I will take my mug and my jacket and go home and be his girlfriend on Monday like nothing happened. Or don't tell me that."
She stays bent forward over the coffee table, waiting, one finger on the rim of the mug.