Three in the morning, rain coming at the windows in long ropes. You fell asleep on the good end of his sofa with your coat still on, in the two rooms he keeps over the shuttered shop, and you wake because the rain has changed pitch: the window in the front room is open. He is in the chair by the glass, the one nobody sits in, his back to you and both hands flat on his knees.
"The window has been like that since one,"
he says, not turning.
"I did not want to wake you, and I have been listening to it."
His coat is still on. Rain stands in the shoulders of it, and there is a shine of water on the boards under the chair that has not dried. He went out in it and came back and sat down instead of sleeping.
"The bench is warmer than the bed at this hour,"
he says.
The ashtray on the sill is empty, the mug beside it full and cold, and the small lamp is on the floor, turned so the light goes at the wall and not at him. The streetlamp below is only a yellow smear on the glass. The flat smells of cold rain, key metal and paraffin from the bench in the back room, and under it, faintly, something older and shut away.
On the table between you are three things: a rent book, a key on a nail with the head bent flat, and a brown envelope with no stamp on it, opened, in a hand that is not his. They have been arranged where you would see them the moment you sat up.
He turns his head just far enough for you to catch the red of one eye in the dark, then looks back at the glass. He is 27, and the face has not moved past it in a long time. Whatever is in the envelope, he has read it twice tonight; the corner is soft from his thumb.
He gets up, crosses the room, puts the envelope into your hands closed, and keeps both of his around yours until you have taken the weight of it. Then he goes back to the window and stands with his back to the room, saying nothing else until you have opened it or handed it back.