Page 49 of One Room Vacancy
SAGE
I wake up with a headache that has nothing to do with alcohol.
It’s the kind that sits behind your eyes, dull and persistent, like my body knows I’m not ready to deal with anything and is trying to slow me down until I am. I pull the covers over my head and will the world to give me just one more hour of pretending last night didn’t happen.
Not the part where I poured tequila into Hannah’s mouth straight from the bottle—that was actually relatively normal for a Friday night when she’s in Atlanta—but the part where Gabe touched me like a map of my body was seared into his brain, and the part where he asked me if we could go home and finish what we started, and I almost said yes.
Almost.
I stay in bed until I smell maple sausage.
It sneaks under my door like a promise I didn’t ask for, warm and familiar, the kind of smell that tugs at a memory before I can stop it.
Only it’s not a memory, not really.
It’s the shape of something I used to imagine, back when I still let myself believe there might be a version of us that made sense in the daylight. Sunday mornings with messy hair andshared coffee, him cooking breakfast while I sat on the counter and pretended not to watch the way his shirt clung to his back. A life that felt steady, maybe even safe.
But that version never existed, not outside the space between breakups.
We were never soft mornings and domestic rhythms; we were barely anything at all. Just moments, strung together with bad timing and worse decisions. A handful of nights when I convinced myself his hands on my body meant something more than habit.
Still, my stomach growls. Apparently, hunger doesn’t care about emotional nuance.
I swing my legs out from under the blanket and grab the old, oversized T-shirt hanging off the bedpost—his, because of course it is—and pull it over my head before I can talk myself out of it. I peel off my bonnet and toss it onto the pillow, smoothing a hand over my hair like it matters.
The kitchen’s quiet except for the low sizzle of the skillet and the hum of the fridge. He’s barefoot, his back to me, moving like someone who doesn’t realize I’m standing here wondering what the hell we’re doing. Or maybe he does. Maybe he’s just better at pretending this is normal.
He doesn’t look up when I come in, doesn’t make a joke or ask how I slept; he just shifts the pan slightly and forks another sausage onto a paper towel-lined plate.
He’s not pushing, not talking, not even smiling, just making breakfast like it doesn’t mean anything. Like it’s not the closest we’ve ever come to being domestic, and it’s happening after I shut him down at the bar and told him with my mouth what my body couldn’t follow through on.
I sit on a stool and watch him for a second, my heart doing that stupid, stuttering thing it always does around him.
Because this doesn’t mean anything, and that’s always been the problem.
He finally glances over, eyes dropping to the shirt I’m wearing. His mouth tugs up at the corner—not a full smile, but something close.
“Son of a bitch,” he says, turning back to the stove. “That’s where my Falcons shirt went.”
I look down like I haven’t seen it before. “I left in it one morning. Last summer, I think.”
He huffs a quiet laugh. “You’ve had it that long?”
“You weren’t exactly asking me to come back for it.”
He doesn’t respond to that, just flips the last sausage onto a paper towel like I didn’t say anything.
“I kept it,” I add, softer now, “because it was the softest shirt I’d ever felt. It felt like a victimless crime.”
“Yeah.” He reaches for a plate, still not looking at me. “That’s why I was pissed when I lost it.”
That’s it. No teasing, no flirtation, just a thread of something warm passed back and forth between us, the kind we don’t know how to hold for long.
He sets the plate on the counter between us and grabs two forks from the drawer.
And just like that, we’re sharing breakfast. In stolen clothes, talking about a night almost a year gone, like it might still matter.
I didn’t keep the shirt because it was soft.
