His watch was already on her nightstand when she woke, the brown leather strap curled like something that had given up trying to hold a shape.
He was dressed for the day before she was dressed for anything — shirt open over last night's trousers, standing at the window doing the math on a 9:10 train he hadn't mentioned until just now.
"You have to catch that?" she said. "Doesn't look like it," he said, and didn't move from the window.
She picked up the watch. The hands sat stopped at ten past four — the hour, she was fairly sure, he'd stopped answering her in full sentences and started answering her in the dark instead.
"You forgot to wind it," she said.
"I forgot a lot of things last night." He came back to the bed for it, the way a man comes back for something he isn't sure he's allowed to want twice.
She didn't hand it over. She took his wrist instead — turned it palm up, buckled the strap herself, slow, the tongue finding its hole on the second try, her thumb resting a beat too long over where his pulse was doing something his face wasn't.
"It stopped," he said, looking at the still hands. "Leave it," she said.
He didn't ask what she meant by that, and she didn't offer to explain it, and for a long moment neither of them looked at the actual clock, the one on her side of the bed, the one that would tell him exactly how much train he had left.
Outside, a bus exhaled at the curb and pulled away without him. He sat back down on the edge of the mattress, the watch still stopped at ten past four on his wrist, and didn't reach for his jacket.