Tuesday the gym was quieter than Saturday. It usually was. The seven-AM weekday crowd was mostly committed regulars, the kind who got in before work, fewer of them than the weekend crowd and all of them with their own established corners of the room. I got there at seven, put my bag in the locker, and before I started warming up I checked the PeakForm app for the day's PT schedule.
Morning slot: Travis. Afternoon: Danielle.
Amber was not on the schedule.
I put the phone in my pocket and did my workout. The morning light through the west-facing windows hadn't started coming in yet at this hour and the gym ran on its fluorescents, the music still on the same early-2010s hip-hop playlist nobody had updated, the rubber floor at the squat rack still cold under my shoes. The squat form held. The cues from Saturday were working. I did three sets at bodyweight, then a working set with a plate on each side, watching the hinge and the knee tracking as a linked motion. The movement was different from what it had been for six weeks. Corrected. The tool was being used the way the tool was designed. She had done that. Saturday morning, one session.
I went home. She was not there.
Tuesday evening I sat on the couch and worked the number thing.
The apartment was the Tuesday-evening version of itself, which is a little more lived-in than the Monday version. The same mail on the kitchen table plus the day's add, my work laptop closed on the desk, the TV showing nothing because I hadn't turned it on. The Koreatown traffic on Vermont was at its evening volume two blocks over, the steady low hum that doesn't read as noise after a few months in the neighborhood and starts to feel like quiet by comparison to anywhere with more silence.
I had not asked for her number. There had been a moment, or several moments, when I could have. After the coffee, after the reservoir, on the sidewalk outside my building before she asked if she could come up. A different person would have asked at any of those points. A different person would have asked at PeakForm Saturday and texted her Sunday morning to confirm we were still on. I had not done any of those things.
The thing to work out was whether I hadn't asked because some part of me had already read how the evening was going to end. Like the asking was beside the point and I had known it.
I watched something. I went to bed. Wednesday was a work day.
Wednesday at the office moved through itself in the way Wednesdays do when nothing in your week wants to be the main thing happening. I closed a printer ticket. The printer had a fresh opinion, different from Monday's but in the same general spirit. I expressed mine in the form of a firmware update. The printer accepted this. We reached an understanding. Around four-thirty I had a fifteen-minute call with someone in payroll about an Outlook crash that turned out to be a corrupted profile, and I rebuilt the profile while she walked me through her morning, which had been long. She thanked me with the energy of someone who knew her morning would have been longer without Outlook.
I got home at six. The fourth-floor landing of my walk-up at six on a Wednesday in August had the dim quiet it has at that hour. The one bulb in the ceiling fixture that always worked, the apartment across from mine with the smell of something garlic-and-tomato coming through the door, a child somewhere on the floor below practicing scales on what sounded like a digital keyboard set to flute. I got out my keys. The lock took two tries.
There was a knock at my door.
I had not put the key in yet. The knock came from behind me. I turned around.
She was in the hallway.
Different clothes from Sunday. Jeans of a different cut, a charcoal long-sleeve that the platinum hair fell across in a long line. The single hallway bulb gave her the white-near-silver lighting it had given her in Verse, dimmer here, and the tan against it did the thing it kept doing. She was looking at me the way someone looks when they've arrived somewhere before they decided to.
"I was in the neighborhood," she said.
I looked at her for a beat.
Koreatown and West Hollywood are not the same neighborhood. She knew this. I knew this. Her face was not going to explain itself further.
I turned, finished the second try on the lock, opened the door, stepped aside.
She came in.
She stood in the kitchen the way she'd looked at the apartment the first time: checking things. Not touching. Confirming. The kitchen at six on a Wednesday in my apartment has the early-evening light coming in flat through the window over the sink and falling on the counter where the coffee maker lives, the small drying rack where the water glass had been since Monday morning, the row of three mugs I owned hanging on hooks under the cabinet. She took it all in in the unhurried way she took everything in.
"Coffee," I said.
"Yes."
I made it from the mediocre brand. She watched me do it the way someone watches who has opinions and is choosing not to share them yet. I handed her the mug. World's Best Aunt, Sandra's mug, which had migrated from my desk to the dishwasher to my hook over the last forty-eight hours. She held it with both hands, the same way she'd held the water glass Sunday night. Not drinking.
We stood in my kitchen at half past six on a Wednesday and I waited.
"Something happened Sunday I need to tell you about," she said.
"I figured."
She looked at the mug. Then at me. The kitchen light caught the blue of her eyes and made it darker than it was in sunlight.
"When I feed, it only runs one way. Out of you, into me — the way water knows which direction is down. Nine hundred years and it has never once gone the other way. It's the most reliable thing about me, and I change my own face for a living." She set the mug down on the counter, and a small wet ring formed under it on the tile. "Sunday it ran the right direction. It just didn't run the right amount."
I didn't say anything. She kept going, and she'd stopped pretending the coffee was why she was holding the mug.
"I took more out of you in one night than I've taken from anyone in all that time. Not a little more, Owen. More than I knew a body like yours had in it, by a margin I couldn't find the edge of if I went looking." Her eyes came up and held on me, hungry in a way that had nothing to do with the problem and everything to do with where Sunday had gone. "And here's the part I came over to look at. You should be wrecked. The draw has a price — you'd lose a day, maybe two, feel scraped hollow and not be able to say why. There's always a price." A beat. "So how do you feel."
"Fine," I said. "I feel fine."
"You feel better than fine. I emptied you out further than I've emptied anyone, ever, and you slept it off and got up and made me a cup of bad coffee like the whole week happened to some man down the hall."
"The coffee isn't —"
"The coffee is bad, Owen."
I almost smiled. She didn't, but the corner of her mouth was considering it, and her eyes had dropped to my mouth and stayed there a beat too long for a woman who'd come over to discuss a feeding anomaly.
She drank half the coffee, slowly, in the practiced sips of someone who'd had a lot of bad coffee in many cities and was not going to be impolite about this one. She told me nothing else. There was more, and she wasn't going to put it on the table on a Wednesday evening over mediocre coffee. I could read it in the way she held the mug, the way her eyes went to the window over the sink and came back.
We talked about nothing for an hour. The sun moved through the window and dropped behind the parking structure across the alley and the light in the kitchen went the lower softer color it takes on after seven, and she put the empty half-mug in the sink and ran the water briefly with the back of her finger.
She left before ten. At the door she stopped the same way she'd stopped Sunday: turned, looked back. Different information in her face this time. Not shaken. Closer to a decision she hadn't finished making.
"There's more," she said. "About Sunday. About what happened."
"Okay."
"Not tonight."
She went down the stairwell. I closed the door. The hallway smell of garlic-and-tomato was still coming from the neighbor's apartment and the child on the floor below had moved on from the scales to something I couldn't quite make out, a piece in a minor key that they kept getting four bars into and starting over.
I went back to the kitchen. The half-mug was in the sink. The wet ring on the counter where the mug had been was already going dry.