I woke up at three in the morning because I smelled coffee.
Not my coffee. Not the Huila I'd unpacked into his kitchen six hours ago, not the pour-over I'd made as an act of territorial rebellion. This was different — darker roast, heavier body, the kind of coffee a man makes when he doesn't know any better because nobody's ever taught him the difference between good and tolerable.
He was awake. On the other side of my deadbolt. Making terrible coffee in the middle of the night.
I lay in the guest bed — his sheets, his thread count, the kind of bed that costs more than my first three months of rent in Baker — and stared at the ceiling and listened to the sounds of Cole Ashford's kitchen through the wall. Cabinet opening. Water running. The beep of a machine that was not my machine and was producing coffee that would make me physically angry if I tasted it.
