Thursday I went to work.
Fourteen tickets in the queue. The LDAP routing request hit sixteen business days. I added a note that said nothing I hadn't already said. The printer was quiet. The quiet sat wrong, and I did not trust it.
At noon I went to the Korean place on 6th. The lunch crowd was thin for a Thursday. Two of the four-tops empty, a guy at the back eating with one hand and reading something on his phone with the other, a regular at the counter Mia called Mr. Park who was always at the counter and always reading the same Korean newspaper. Mia set the bulgogi down before I ordered, which meant she'd caught me coming in and started the order, which meant my timing was mapped to inside two minutes on her side of the counter. I ate. She refilled the water once. The lean she did when she set the carafe down was a little slower than the lean she did for Mr. Park, the work shirt going taut across her chest in the same way it did every time, and the smile that came with the refill carried more than the refill required. I did nothing with it.
Back at my desk by twelve-forty. At three-fifteen the printer expressed itself, on schedule, the way it did. I cleared it without looking up from the thought I was having. Recurrence interval: 30.2 hours. The interval was holding.
Saturday I went to the gym.
Amber was not on the PT schedule. Travis was. Late twenties, excellent beard, a tendency to take the squat rack between sessions and do something I could never quite identify with kettlebells and a foam roller. I did my sets. The Saturday-morning crowd was the usual: the older lifters at the platforms in back, two women doing partner work at the cable machines, a couple I'd been seeing on Saturdays for months whose entire workout seemed to be hand-holding between sets. The squat form held. Her corrections were still in my body a week later, the way movement holds when it has been re-laid by somebody who knew what they were doing. I added a second working set because the rack was open. There was no reason not to.
I went home.
Saturday night I ate leftover rice on the couch. The cushion next to me was the cushion she'd sat on Wednesday. No visible mark. The foam had recovered. I knew where it was anyway.
Sunday I did laundry. The laundromat on the corner was the laundromat on the corner: fluorescent, four out of eight dryers working at any given time, an old woman folding sheets at the back table with the patient slowness of somebody who had nowhere to be next. I read a paperback through the wash cycle, moved my clothes, read through the dry. The mug Amber had used was in the cabinet at home where I'd put it Thursday morning. Same brand as the others. I could not have picked it out of the lineup.
I checked the PeakForm app. Sunday schedule: Travis morning, nobody afternoon. Same as last week.
I had looked her up. Saturday night, on my laptop, because I am an IT professional and that is what we do when we can't sleep. Amber, personal trainer, PeakForm West Hollywood. Nothing. No social presence. No linked profile. She existed on the gym's PT schedule when she chose to be there and nowhere else.
I put the phone down and finished the laundry.
Monday. Marcus was at the coffee station at eleven.
He was in the blue shirt today, sleeves rolled to the elbow because he ran hot at this hour and the AC on the sixth floor had not adjusted to the warming week. He had the same bad coffee.
"You look like a guy who's waiting for something."
"I'm getting coffee."
"You're getting coffee the way people get coffee when they're not thinking about coffee."
He was not wrong. I had been thinking about a woman who had been in my apartment twice and left both times and given me no way to find her.
"I'm fine."
He looked at me the way somebody looks at you when they have known you long enough to know you're full of shit and have decided not to make it a thing.
"Thursday. Drinks."
"Yeah."
He went back to finance. I went back to the LDAP ticket. Twenty-one business days.
Tuesday I went to the Korean place. Mia had the bulgogi going.
"Same thing?"
"You already started it."
"You're predictable."
I was predictable. Same place every Tuesday, same seat by the window where the light came through the dirty glass at a flat angle and lit the table without making it pleasant, same order. The pattern had been comfortable, and until ten days ago it had been the entire picture.
I ate. I tipped well. I walked back to Hartwell along the block of 6th between her storefront and my office, the same block I'd walked four hundred times, the dried-squid place's window display getting its weekly restocking from a guy with a hand truck, the tax office across the street advertising a March deadline that had been advertised since January.
Wednesday I bought better coffee.
Not a specific brand. Not the brand she would want. I had no data on the brand she would want. The mediocre stuff had been the mediocre stuff for eight months and I had known it was mediocre the entire time and had not done anything about it. I was not going to run the question of why now was different from every other now.
The good coffee was in a brown paper bag with a printed label and a roast date stamped on it in fresh ink, from the small place on Beverly that had four kinds of single-origin and a barista who would tell you about all four of them if you let her. I'd let her. I'd walked out with the Ethiopian. I put it on the shelf at home. Same spot the bad coffee had been in.
Wednesday evening the apartment was quiet. I made dinner. I ate it. No knock at the door.
The ceiling crack was still there.
Thursday I cleared eleven tickets. The printer jammed twice in the same hour and I cleared it both times without checking the screen because I already knew what it was going to say. At five-twelve I got on the Metro. The car at this hour had the Thursday version of the after-work crowd, slightly looser than Monday and Tuesday, the week starting to round itself off toward Friday. At five-forty I got home.
I went to the Korean place for a late dinner because there was nothing in my kitchen that read as dinner. Mia was on the evening shift this week, hair down for once, the work shirt traded for a simpler black tee that fit her in a way the work shirt didn't quite manage. She set the galbi combo down with the same lean as always, and I did nothing.
Home at seven-twenty. I put my bag down. I stood in the kitchen.
The good coffee was on the shelf. The brown paper bag with the printed label was visible from the doorway. The apartment was clean. The couch, the window, the crack. Eight days since she had stood in this kitchen and told me I should be exhausted and was not. I was keeping count, which I had not decided to do. It was just running, the same way you notice when something that was in a room is no longer in the room.
She had no reason to come back. She had come twice. Once to feed, once to tell me what feeding meant and that something on my end had broken the math. Both times she had left before she had finished. She had said there was more. She could come back and deliver it whenever she wanted. She could also never come back. Both outcomes fit the data.
I stood in the kitchen for a while. Outside the window the Vermont evening was doing what it did. The BBQ places' red neon coming on, the karaoke place's purple, a siren going somewhere east toward Western and fading into the general noise of the avenue.
Then there was a knock at the door.