Page 12 of Roulette

I didn’t move far. The porch was narrow, and standing behind her had put me close enough that I could smell the coffee on her breath and the faint soap scent of whatever she’d washed with that morning. She looked at the open window, then at me, and something in her expression softened just enough to let me know the defensiveness was habit, not conviction.

She picked up the two mugs from the railing where she’d left them hours ago. The coffee was long cold by now, the surface still and dark in the ceramic. She handed one to me without asking if I wanted it, and I took it because that was easier than explaining why I didn’t need another cup of coffee today.

We sat on the porch steps. The wood was warm through my jeans, and the sun had moved far enough west that the steps were in shadow, the light catching the tops of the trees beyond the fence line. Lark tucked her feet up on the second step and balanced her mug on her knee. I stretched my legs out, boots on the gravel, and let the silence sit between us without trying to fill it.

“How long have you lived here?” she asked after a while.

“Eight years.”

“That’s a long time.”

“Feels shorter than it sounds.” I said it plain, not looking for a follow-up. “Been the only life I remember wanting, most days.”

She accepted that like it explained something, and maybe it did. She took a sip of her cold coffee and didn’t wince, which told me she’d drunk worse. I’d seen her at Patsy’s enough mornings to know she took her coffee black and didn’t complain when Dave burned it.

“Becca mentioned you helped patch her bathroom wall,” she said. “After the shelf incident.”

“Fox made me. Wasn’t optional.”

“She made it sound like a whole ordeal.”

“It was a shelf. I put a screw in wrong.” Something in my chest eased at the way she was fighting a smile over her mug. “Everybody’s still talking about it like I burned the place down.”

“Marcy called you ‘surprisingly bad at one specific thing’ this morning. Wouldn’t elaborate.”

“Marcy exaggerates.”

“Does she, though?”

I didn’t answer that, mostly because she wasn’t wrong, and she seemed to take my silence as confirmation, because she huffed a laugh into her mug and didn’t push it further.

She took that in. The conversation moved in short, easy bursts -- a question, an answer, a pause long enough to let the answer land before the next question came. I found myself angled toward her on the step without remembering when I’d shifted. My right hand was resting on the wood between us, close enough to hers that if either of us moved an inch, our knuckles would touch. I didn’t move. Neither did she.

She asked about the garden behind the clubhouse, the one Becca kept saying somebody should get out and weed. I told her it had been Raven’s project a few years back, before life got busy enough that nobody had the time to keep up with it properly. It existed in that in-between state -- not thriving, not dead, just holding on -- and everyone was okay with that.

Lark laughed at that. A dry, quiet sound that caught me off guard because I hadn’t said anything funny. It was just a laugh -- recognition, maybe, of something true even when the truth wasn’t kind. The sound of it moved through me like a current, and I went still for a beat, my mug halfway to my mouth, before I made myself look away toward the trees.

When I looked back, my attention caught on her forearm. A bruise, faded to yellow at the edges but still visible -- a thumbprint shape, maybe two inches long, just below her elbow. You got marks like that from catching yourself on the edge of a counter or a doorframe while moving too fast through a narrow space. A diner bruise. I’d seen them on waitresses before. You carried heavy plates, you turned corners tight, you learned to move through a crowded room without bumping into anyone, and sometimes you failed.

I lingered on it a second too long. She noticed -- of course she noticed -- and her free hand moved to cover it, not consciously, just a reflexive adjustment, like covering a stain on your shirt after someone sees it. I looked back at my coffee. Drank what was left of it. The cold bitterness sat on my tongue, and I didn’t say anything about the bruise because there was nothing to say that wouldn’t make her feel watched, and she’d had enough of that.

The light shifted. The shadow from the porch roof crept farther down the steps, and the first real edge of evening cool moved in under the day’s leftover heat. Lark finished her coffee and stood, brushing her palms against her shorts.

“I should start dinner,” she said, stating it plainly, with no assumption that I expected her to cook.

I answered with a small sound in my throat. She went inside, and the screen door sighed shut behind her. I stayed on the steps with the empty mug in my hands.

After a minute, I set it down on the wood beside hers. Both mugs, side by side, cold coffee staining the bottom of each. The ceramic made a soft click against the porch boards, and I left them there because moving them felt like admitting the moment was over, and I wasn’t ready for that yet.

Elbows on my knees, hands loose between them, facing the compound gate where it stood open at the end of the gravel drive. The daylight thinned across the lot, turning the parked bikes into dark shapes against the fence while the clubhouse carried on behind me, distant and ordinary.

Chapter Seven

Lark

The birdseed smelled like dry earth and something sweet I couldn’t name. I poured it through the hole in the tiny wooden roof, listening to the rush and rattle of it filling the hollow space beneath, and watched a fine dust of husks settle on the backs of my hands. The feeder was shaped like an outhouse -- someone’s idea of a joke, probably, the sort of thing you’d find in a garage that had accumulated twenty years of other people’s cast-offs. Weather-beaten wood, the paint flaking around the door that didn’t actually open. I’d found it on a shelf behind a stack of oil cans, covered in a fine layer of grit, and its useless, stubborn charm had made me want to clean it off and hang it up.

The porch planks were warm under my bare feet. Mid-afternoon heat had soaked into the wood, and it radiated up through my soles almost deliberately, as if the house itself was trying to convince me to stay still for a minute. Cicadas screamed from the tree line beyond the fence, that high, electric whine that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. I brushed seed dust from my palms and reached for the bag on the railing.