She’d dressed an hour early, on purpose. That was the whole of tonight’s plan, if it could be called one.
The record was already cued, the needle resting a half-inch from the groove like something holding its breath. The window sat cracked two inches onto the summer street, enough to let in a stranger’s sprinkler and, once, a car radio passing under a bassline she didn’t own.
She hadn’t poured anything yet. That part was deliberate too. A glass sweating on the counter would have meant she was managing the wait instead of having it.
This was the hour nobody warned her she’d come to want — not him yet, just the version of herself that only existed here: unhurried, unwitnessed, entirely certain of something she couldn’t have named out loud.
She caught her own reflection in the black glass of the window and didn’t immediately recognize the woman standing so still on purpose.
Nine forty, she thought. He’d be early, the way he always was when he was pretending not to be looking forward to something.
The buzzer went off at nine thirty-eight, and it went through her like a struck match.
She let it ring itself out. Then she stood another moment with her palm flat on the cold counter, holding onto the last of an evening that still belonged only to her.
It sounded again, patient this time, the way certain people are patient about things they already know they’re going to get.
Not yet, she thought, and meant it as tenderness, not delay.
When she finally crossed the room, her hand found the buzzer before her mind had fully agreed to it, and the hour she’d built on purpose — the good one — ended on a single note held half a second longer than it needed to.