In The Devil's Arm

The Morning After

In The Devil's Arms

Chapter 3

The Morning After

Mia woke up thinking about his eyes.

She didn't want to. She had gone to sleep firmly resolved not to had spent the last hour before drifting off constructing a very reasonable internal argument about why a stranger's gaze across a crowded room meant absolutely nothing and deserved exactly zero real estate in her head.

And yet.

There they were. The first thing that surfaced when consciousness found her on Saturday morning. Dark and still and burning with that quiet intensity that had no business being as unsettling as it was. She lay on her back in the grey morning light filtering through their curtains and stared at the ceiling and felt the memory of being watched settle over her like something with weight.

Stop it, she told herself.

She sat up.

Jade was still asleep on the other side of the room, face half buried in her pillow, locs fanned out around her head like a crown. She was snoring very softly a sound she denied completely when awake and which Mia had documented evidence of on her phone for moments exactly like this.

Mia swung her legs over the side of the bed, rolled her neck until it cracked twice, and padded quietly to the kitchen.

The morning was slow and grey and ordinary in all the ways Friday night had not been.

She made two cups of coffee black for herself, oat milk and two sugars for Jade and settled at the kitchen table with her laptop open and her submission waiting exactly where she had abandoned it. Four days until it was due. She read back over what she had written, made two small corrections, and then sat with her fingers over the keyboard and her mind somewhere completely else.

She thought about the club. The way the light moved inside it like something alive. The way the crowd carried themselves that particular ease of people who had never needed to try. The VIP sections rising above the floor like a separate world looking down on the one below.

She thought about him standing at the glass.

Still. Certain. Looking at her like the rest of the room had ceased to exist.

She pressed her fingers to her temples and pulled herself back.

Supply chain logistics, she told herself firmly. Focus.

She focused. Mostly. She wrote four paragraphs she was reasonably proud of and deleted one she wasn't and by the time Jade shuffled into the kitchen at half past ten Mia had made genuine progress and was feeling almost like herself again.

Jade looked at the two cups on the table. Looked at the laptop. Looked at Mia.

"Morning," she said, her voice still thick with sleep.

"Morning," Mia said without looking up. "Your coffee is there."

Jade picked it up, wrapped both hands around it and dropped into the chair across from her. She was quiet for a while scrolling her phone, blinking slowly into the morning, unbothered and warm and entirely herself.

She didn't ask about last night.

Mia waited for her to. Sat with the faint tension of expecting the question why did you want to leave, what happened, are you okay and when it didn't come she felt herself exhale very slowly into the silence.

This was one of the things she loved most about Jade Rivera. The way she could sit beside you in the morning without needing anything from you. Without filling every quiet space with words. She was loud and fearless and larger than life in a hundred ways but she also knew had always somehow known when to simply be present and let a person breathe.

Mia was grateful for it this morning more than usual.

She kept her eyes on her laptop. Kept the image of dark eyes and a dark suit behind glass somewhere in the private back room of her mind where she had locked it the night before.

She had no intention of taking it out.

Not for Jade. Not for anyone.

Whatever that had been that strange, airless, weightless moment across a crowded room it was hers. Privately, quietly, confusingly hers. And she was going to leave it exactly where it was.

She typed another sentence.

Jade hummed softly at something on her phone.

The city moved outside their window.

The morning passed.

By midday she had made real progress on the submission and felt confident enough about it to close the laptop and change into her uniform for the afternoon shift at Brewed.

The coffee shop on a Saturday was a different creature from the weekday rush. Slower. Warmer. People came in with books and laptops and the particular unhurried ease of those with nowhere to be. She had always liked the Saturday shift for exactly this reason the rhythm was gentler, the orders less frantic, the counter conversations more human.

It asked nothing of her except presence.

She could do presence. Presence was easy. Presence required no explanation and no excavation of whatever was sitting quietly in the back of her chest since last night.

"You look different," Brenda said the moment she walked in, studying her face with the focused attention of someone who catalogued people the way others catalogued weather

.

"Went out last night," Mia said simply, tying her apron.

Brenda's eyes widened. "You? Out? On a Friday night?"

"Jade's idea."

"I love Jade." Brenda leaned on the counter. "Anywhere good?"

"A new place. Vega, on 27th."

Something shifted in Brenda's expression. Her eyes sharpened almost imperceptibly a flicker of something that was there and gone before Mia could name it. She opened her mouth.

The door opened.

Three customers came in at once, followed immediately by two more, and the afternoon rush swallowed them whole before a single word came out.

The moment dissolved into orders and movement and the familiar Saturday machinery of the shop names called out, steam wands hissing, the soft thud of portafilters and the clean sharp smell of fresh espresso filling the air.

Mia worked. Steadily, efficiently, the way she always did. She smiled at the man who ordered the same oat flat white every single Saturday. She remembered without asking that the woman in the green coat wanted her vanilla latte with one pump not two. She made a double espresso for a student who looked like he hadn't slept in three days and felt a particular solidarity with him that she kept to herself.

The question Brenda hadn't finished dissolved quietly into the noise of the afternoon.

Mia did not ask her to finish it.

She wasn't sure she wanted the answer.

She got home at six to find Jade cross legged on the couch surrounded by textbooks she was clearly not reading, a reality show playing on the television at a volume that suggested it was more emotional support than entertainment.

"I ordered Thai," Jade said without looking up. "Green curry, your usual."

"You're a saint," Mia said, dropping her bag by the door and toeing off her shoes.

"I know." Jade finally looked up. "Good shift?"

"Fine. Quiet."

"Come sit."

Mia sat. Jade pulled the blanket from the back of the couch and dropped it over both their legs without ceremony and turned the volume down slightly and they sat together in the warm, easy quiet of two people who had long since moved past the need to fill every silence.

The food arrived twenty minutes later. They ate from the containers on the coffee table, talking about small things Jade's upcoming exam, a video Jade had seen that Mia absolutely had to watch, the couple in the apartment above them who had apparently acquired a new piece of furniture that required extensive assembly at eleven o'clock at night.

Normal things. Ordinary things.

The kind of things that made an evening feel like solid ground beneath your feet.

Mia laughed genuinely twice and felt the tight thing in her chest loosen a fraction more with each hour that passed.

Later, in the dark of their bedroom, she lay on her back and listened to the city outside and let herself think about him one last time.

The stillness of him. The certainty. The way his eyes had found her so completely that the rest of the room had fallen away like it was made of paper.

She thought about it for exactly sixty seconds.

Then she folded it up. Tucked it away. Put it somewhere she didn't intend to visit again.

She had eight days until graduation.

She had a submission due in four days.

She had a whole life waiting on the other side of a stage and a degree and every sacrifice she had ever made.

She did not have space for dark eyes and a man behind frosted glass who probably looked at every woman in every room exactly the same way.

Probably.

She closed her eyes.

She told herself that and kept telling herself that until the words lost their shape and sleep pulled her under.

She did not dream.

Or if she did she would not remember it in the morning.

Or if she remembered she would not admit it.

Not even to herself.