She'd fed the meter on his street the night before, two hours bought against her own better judgment, and hadn't thought once since about what time it actually was.
She woke a little before eight to a cold dent in the sheet where he'd been and the specific quiet of a room that has already decided something without asking her. The window had gone grey. His side of the bed was cool enough that it hadn't happened in the last ten minutes.
She lay there running the version of this she'd already rehearsed to herself on the drive over — the easy one, the one that doesn't need an audience for the leaving — and had nearly finished believing it when she heard him on the stairs.
He came up without a shirt, a coat thrown over nothing, his shoes stepped out of at the foot of the stairs and the street's cold still coming off him, a small folded slip of paper held between two fingers like something he'd been handed rather than carried.
"Two hours," he said, stopping short of the bed, short of the door too. "I didn't want to find out the hard way it wasn't enough."
He set the receipt on the pillow by her cheek instead of the nightstand, which she understood, without either of them saying so, to be the entire point of it. His hand found the small of her back under the warm sheet, and it was so cold she flinched — then, against her own better judgment again, laughed.
The word stay had been sitting there available the whole time, and neither of them reached for it, the way you don't reach for a glass already too full — touching it is the only way to spill it.
The meter would want feeding again at ten. Ten was not now. And ten, when it came, could go on wanting.