Tuesday the gym was quieter than Saturday. It usually was. 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 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.

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 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.

I got home at six. The fourth-floor landing was quiet. I got out my keys. The lock took two tries.

There was a knock at my door.

---

I opened it.

She was in the hallway. Different clothes from Sunday. Hair down past her shoulders, the platina blonde reading almost silver under the hallway's single bulb. 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 opened the door wider.

She came in.

---

She stood in the kitchen the way she'd looked at the apartment the first time: checking things. Not touching. Confirming.

"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. 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.

"When I feed, the energy moves from you to me. That's the mechanism. It's always been the mechanism. Sunday, it moved. The amount didn't."

She set the mug down.

"I've been doing this nine hundred years. What I took from you Sunday was more than I've taken from anyone in that nine hundred. By a margin I can't account for."

I didn't say anything. She kept going.

"And you should be tired. Not permanently, not dangerously — the draw costs you something. You recover over a day or two. There's a tax." She looked at me. "How do you feel."

"Fine," I said. "I feel fine."

"You feel better than fine. I took more from you than I've taken from anyone in nine centuries and you're standing in your kitchen making me bad coffee like the week happened to someone else."

"The coffee isn't —"

"The coffee is bad, Owen."

I almost smiled. She did not.

She drank half the coffee. She told me nothing else. There was more — I could read it in the way she held the mug, the way her eyes went to the window and came back — but she wasn't going to put it on the table on a Wednesday evening over mediocre coffee.

---

She left before ten. At the door she stopped the same way she'd stopped Sunday: turned, looked back. Different information in her face. 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 left.