2. Late Nights and Bad Coffee

The thing about Eli Vasquez was that he kept unusual hours. Nora was a morning person by necessity rather than inclination — her first class was at eight, and the bus took forty minutes, and she had learned to work with the schedule the world handed her rather than against it. She was usually in bed by eleven-thirty. She was up at six-fifteen. She had, over two years of community college, refined this into a routine so calibrated that deviating from it felt physically wrong. Eli, apparently, did not sleep until two and was not awake before ten, which she would have found entirely theoretical and irrelevant if they did not share a kitchen. The kitchen was small. This had been established in Sofia's listing and confirmed in person. There was room for two people to be in it at the same time only if they had a tacit agreement about personal space, which Nora and Eli had achieved not through conversation but through a kind of instinctive choreography that she was slightly irritated to find herself capable of with someone she barely knew. She first noticed him properly — not just as an obstacle in the hallway with worn elbows — on the fourth night after she'd moved in. She couldn't sleep. This happened sometimes when her anxiety decided to run an 11 p.m. audit of every decision she'd made in the past three years. She had come to the kitchen for tea, which was her version of a white flag to her nervous system, and found Eli sitting at the kitchen table with a notebook and a mug of something that, judging by its color, was either very strong coffee or motor oil. He looked up when she came in. He did not look startled or annoyed, which she found she'd been bracing for. He just looked at her with the calm assessment of someone who'd been awake so long that ordinary social friction had worn off. "Hey," he said. "Hey." She moved to the kettle, filled it, set it on. "I didn't know you were here." "Sofia's asleep. I was at the studio, got back about an hour ago." He looked back at his notebook. "I'll stay out of your way." "You're not in my way," she said, which was technically true and also felt, as she said it, marginally more generous than she'd intended. She made her tea and sat at the other end of the small table because the kitchen had no counter stools and she was genuinely too tired to take her tea to her room with any dignity. She sat and turned her phone face-down and held the mug and tried to let the hot chamomile do its job. Eli was writing something. His pen moved across the notebook in a way that was neither careful nor careless — the particular movement of someone who had written enough to stop thinking about the act of writing. She noticed the notebook's cover was battered in the way of something carried everywhere. She did not look at what he was writing. "What studio?" she asked, after a while, because the silence had become comfortable enough that speaking into it felt possible. He looked up. A slight pause, as though he was deciding how much detail to give. "Recording studio. On Ninth. I do session work sometimes, when they need someone." He took a sip of his coffee-or-motor-oil. "Guitar." "Is that what you do? Music?" An expression crossed his face that she couldn't quite categorize — not quite a wince, not quite resignation. More like the specific face you made when a question had an answer that was longer and more complicated than the question deserved. "It's what I did," he said. "Now it's what I do sometimes when someone needs a warm body who knows where the frets are." She absorbed this. She didn't ask the obvious follow-up, because she had been asked enough difficult follow-up questions about her own life to have developed a policy: if someone didn't offer the next piece, it wasn't yours to take. "What do you study?" he asked, after a moment, which surprised her slightly. She had not expected the reciprocal question. "Business. Or I will be, when I transfer. Right now I'm finishing my associate's at Hartwell." "What kind of business?" "Finance, probably. Accounting." She wrapped both hands around the mug. "Stable. Employable. Reasonable starting salary." He looked at her with a faint expression that she couldn't immediately read and then she could: it was recognition. Not of her specifically, but of something she'd said — the specific vocabulary of someone who had made a decision based on what would reliably work rather than what they wanted. "Practical," he said. "Yes." "There's nothing wrong with practical." She looked at him. "I didn't say there was." "I know. I was saying it." He looked back at his notebook, and she had the sense that this was a thing he said sometimes without intending to say it aloud, a piece of a longer internal argument she wasn't party to. The kettle had gone cold by the time she finished her tea. The kitchen clock read 12:47. She had an eight a.m. class. "I'm going to bed," she said. "Good idea," he said, without looking up. She rinsed her mug, set it on the rack, and went back to her room. She lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and thought, for a few minutes and only a few, about the face he'd made when she'd said stable, employable, reasonable starting salary, and about the way he'd said it's what I did, and about the notebook with the battered cover. Then she set her alarm and went to sleep. She had a five-year plan. People with five-year plans did not lie awake thinking about the late-night habits of their roommate's brothers. She closed her eyes. The ceiling was very quiet.