IN THE HOURS BETWEEN • TC

Day 6, plus an hour of Day 7

Quite a hefty chapter!! Do not read the end of this around people if you know what's good for you. Happy Friday. 

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She watches him patter out of the room, her eyebrows furrowed in mild confusion: that was going to be her next step, but why then? Why so quickly?

Una stews for a while, staring out at the incoming morning. She rubs sleep from her eyes, pulls her fingers through the back of her hair in lieu of a comb. Silently, she burrows under the covers, curls into a ball, and nudges her nose against Timothée's bedding. It smells of warmth, of long mornings punctuated by coffee breaks, leg stretches. She closes her eyes and breathes deeply. What if it was like this for the rest of her life? Patches of sleep with an arm around her waist, the cool air of morning, a kiss on her lips and the smell of butter bubbling in a pan.

"Ça va?"

She blinks her eyes open and pulls down the bedding to look at him, squinting in the light. Timmy is smiling the way he used to, leaning against the doorframe with a mug.

"Yeah, I was just..." Una trails off. Shuffles towards the headboard, sitting up. "Your bed's comfy," she smiles, reaching a hand up to the back of her head to tame the hair there.

Timmy smiles back. "Fais attention," he warns, walking over to her. "It's hot."

Una pulls the sleeves of her jumper over her palms and takes the mug of coffee from him. "Thank you," she says quietly.

"No problem," Timmy says. He walks over to the window and unbuckles his belt, sliding it out of the belt loops. "Not good to sleep in jeans," he shakes his head.

"I could have told you that," Una grins, and he shrugs. Reaches into the top drawer of his dresser and pulls out a pack of straights, a lighter. Stands there with his cigarette and pushes open the window a tad more, blowing a thin stream of smoke out of the gap. Una watches his parted lips and feels like she is eighteen again. She wants to crawl across the bed, stand by the window with him, reach a hand into his pocket, or else his jeans. Feel the beat of his heart against her cheek, the smell of smoke on his breath.

"I don't smoke, by the way," Timmy says, and Una looks up from the rim of her mug. "Romain isn't a...oh, fuck, I forgot how you say that." He taps a bit of ash out of the window, looking at her for help.

"Fan?" Una offers.

He nods. "He isn't...I don't know. But I gave it up for him. And Léo."

"Is Léo the baby?" Una asks, and Timmy nods. Exhales through his nose.

"How do you know about him?"

"I think I saw your dad with him. At Intermarché."

"Intermarché."

"Intermarché," she corrects herself. "And I think I heard crying, yesterday. Through the wall."

He nods again.

"He's cute," Una says. Timmy smiles a little. 

"We don't look similar," he says, and Una wishes this would stop feeling like a conversation between strangers. She takes a sip of her coffee, which is still too hot.

"I'm just going to the loo," she says, and he looks over his shoulder as she leaves, not meeting her gaze but staring thoughtfully at a spot on the wall.

—

In the toilet, Una resolves to do what she came here for. She wants to ask him everything, wants to make sense of it. Because what if it leads to something real, something perfect, something akin to the way it was before?