Chapter 5: Hot Water

Saturday morning, a man in a three-thousand-dollar coat was standing on the stairs of The Anchor Pour with two coffees and a paper bag.

I know because Fiona called me from the bar below.

"There's a tall idiot on my stoop," she said. "He says he's your husband."

"He's not."

"He says it again."

"Tell him I'm in the shower."

"I told him you're on a date."

I laughed, and she heard me laugh, and her voice went soft.

"Lils. Are you okay?"

"No," I said. "But I'm better than he is."

Fiona let him up anyway.

She is five foot four and built like a bar fridge.

She walked him all the way to my third-floor landing with a bar towel on her shoulder.

"If she tells you to leave, you leave," she told him.

"Understood."

"If she cries, I will break your knees with a keg."

"Also understood."

She winked at me over his shoulder and went down the stairs whistling.

Weston stood in my doorway holding the coffees.

He looked terrible.

His shirt had been slept in, or not slept in, and the circles under his eyes were gray now.

"Oat milk, one sugar," he said, and held out the cup. "And a pecan bagel from the place on Charles."

I took it.

It was exactly right.

He'd never once bought me coffee in three years, because I had always bought his.

"Who told you my order?"

"You did." He swallowed. "You wrote it on the back of a receipt in the second year and left it in my desk. I found it last night."

I looked at him over the lid.

"You went through your desk at three in the morning."

"I went through everything."

The shower was running in the corner of the studio behind a plastic curtain, because I had left it on to heat the water.

Steam crept across the ceiling.

I set down the coffee.

"Take your shirt off," I said.

He didn't ask why.

He undid the buttons with fingers that shook.

The shirt dropped to the floor.

His chest was bare and marked with the shadows of my fingernails from the night before.