Re: coffee: sam & neil
Yeah, the bar was pretty low. She'd nudged it higher in the last year, but not too high, because 365 days wasn't much of anything. It was just enough to make everything bad seem dangerously harmless, to give a false sense of fucking power, but not much more; she tried to remember that every fucking day, and she tried to remember as she lifted her coffee and watched him take the sketchpad and hesitate. She waited to see if he shoved it back across the table, but of course he didn't. She grinned, lips on the brim of her cup, and she chuckled once he started doodling.
"You're so fucking predictable," she said of his coffee order. He'd never been the type to try exciting things, and that coffee order was aligned with that need for stability? Safety? She never knew which of the two it was, and maybe it was some combination. She considered it for a second as she put her cup down, but then he was saying she sounded like Lin, which made her laugh. "Yeah? Awkward. Better, baby?" She and Lin didn't talk too much anymore, but for a while they were constantly chattering, and shit stuck. "I say hella too. Want me to just get it out of the way now?" Her smile was warm, crooked.
She watched his hand, the pencil between his fingers, the way his knuckles curved; intense, like when she wanted to transfer something she was seeing to paper. On her wrist, the sleek metal medical bracelet jingled, and she sat back when he said it been a while. "Yeah. It's been a while," she agreed, and she immediately knocked on the tabletop when he said there wasn't a crisis over their heads. Knock. "You just fucking jinxed us, yeah? Some crisis is going to fall from the sky tomorrow, and it's going to be your fault." She was joking, but it was entirely possible, and her laughter faded slow. "It's good to see you too, Neil." She tipped her head. "Want to tell me what's fucking with you? It's not me, not this time, anyway." She forgot sometimes that it had only been a few weeks for everyone but her. She felt distance between all the bad shit that went down, and it was easy to forget, to assume everyone else did too.