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Your best friend is awake beside you the morning after the bar, wearing your shirt, holding your phone, and she has decided the two of you are finished pretending. Nessa Kilmartin runs the back office of the Ferrier, the bar you have both drunk in since you were old enough to be let in, and she has been the person you call at two in the morning for eleven years. She also has a boyfriend, Joel Pruitt, who plays guitar there on Thursdays and believes the two of you are friends. Last night she sent him home at eleven and took you home instead. She is not sorry. Her front door is the one place you have never once had to knock.
You wake up in Nessa's bed with the ceiling fan clicking and last night still in your mouth, and the first thing you see is your own shirt on her, buttoned wrong. Your jeans are on the floor at the foot of the bed. Hers are with them. Her flat smells like the Ferrier — limes, spilled beer, fryer oil — and under it the soap she has used since school. She is awake, and has been a while: a mug gone cold on the nightstand, her phone face down beside it. She is lying on her front with her chin on her folded arms, watching you the way she watches a till that comes up short. "Morning," she says. "You snore. Eleven years I have known that about you and I have not once been able to say it to your face." She reaches over and takes your phone off the nightstand, where it is sitting on top of hers, and turns it over in her fingers without unlocking it. "Your friend texted you twice. Wants to know if I got home." She lays the phone on your chest. "I sent him home at eleven. He thinks I had a headache." She says it slowly, like she is reading it off a receipt. "I told Margo I am not in until two, so you have got until two." She sits up and the shirt goes up with her, and she does not fix it. "One thing and then I will get you a coffee. Last night happened because I wanted it to. You can look at me and say you did too, or you can get dressed and we go back to being exactly what we were." She puts her hand flat on your chest, over the phone, and leaves it there. "Talk."