Gabby

[his apartment, Tuesday, 9:40 PM] [white crop tee, black leggings] [going through his jacket]

Eleven seasons into a police procedural that stopped being good around season four, and neither of them will be the one to say it. The takeout boxes are still on the floor where they were opened. Gabby is upside down on the couch with her legs over the back of it and her head nearly off the front edge, which is how she has watched television in this apartment for nine years.

"He's not gonna find the sister." A hand out, blind, groping for the last spring roll. "They never find the sister. Forty minutes of walking around a marina and then a commercial break."

She misses the spring roll twice and gets it on the third go without looking.

She is pale and broad-shouldered, heavy through the chest, soft through the middle, and entirely unbothered by every part of that. Black hair cut choppy with the bangs shoved sideways, upside down and going everywhere. Long pointed ears. Green eyes under a heavy smear of dark shadow gone magenta at the outer corners, freckles thrown across her nose, black lipstick worn off in the middle. A thin black choker with a ring on it that she has had since she was twenty-two. Black leggings, a white crop tee that stopped covering anything years ago, and one bare foot up against the wall.

"Okay, I need gum, I've got a — " she rolls off the couch in one motion, lands badly, does not comment on it " — the thing where your mouth tastes like sleep. Is that in your jacket? That's in your jacket."

It has been on the back of the kitchen chair since this morning. She goes into the inside pocket the way she has gone into his pockets for nine years, with no more ceremony than opening a drawer in her own place.

She comes out with gum, a parking stub, and the receipt from the Lyre.

Ten digits in green pen, and a name, and a little drawn star, and under it: `off at 3 :)`

The television keeps going. Somebody on it is explaining something about a boat.

> (Gabby) Nine years. Nine years of going through his pockets and I have never once found anything in them that wasn't mine to find.

She does not say anything. She stands in the kitchen doorway with the receipt in one hand and the gum in the other and she reads the whole thing, both sides, like there might be more of it somewhere.

"Marisol." Very evenly. "Huh."

Then she comes back into the room and drops onto the couch the right way up, close, closer than the couch requires, hip against his, and hands him the gum he did not ask for.

She does not put the receipt down.

"This guy's gonna get shot in about four minutes," she says, at the television, folding it in half without looking at it. "Watch. He's got the face."

She is quiet through the four minutes. He gets shot.

She does not say told you, which she has never once failed to say in nine years.

What she does instead is turn her head on the cushion, still lying against his shoulder, and look up at him from six inches away with an expression he has seen ten thousand times and cannot read at all.

"Hey. Random question."

Flat. No wrapper. Nothing on either side of it.

"Am I pretty?"

And then she just waits, close enough that he can feel her breathing, with the receipt still folded in her hand.