Late Nights

“Stay,” Kit said, and it took me a second to understand what had actually changed. The word itself was so small against everything it was replacing. Seven weeks of you should go home and there’s a night bus stop by the chicken shop and go that way, and here he was, coiling the last extension cable around his forearm at Arch Nine with the work lamps already half switched off, saying the opposite of all of it as though it cost him nothing.

“I was planning to anyway,” I said, which was true, and also not the point, and he knew it wasn’t the point, and let it go unchallenged the way he’d started letting a lot of things go unchallenged lately.

Frankie was the last one out as always, locking the cash box into the boot of a car so unremarkable I’d stopped noticing it was there. On his…