five-forty

july 24, 2026

The cab was booked for five-forty. Anya’s suitcase sat by the door with her boarding pass paper-clipped to the tag because she was the kind of person who printed things.

They were on the couch. Ellis had his socked feet on the coffee table. The television was off. It had been off since seven. Neither of them had proposed turning it on.

She had thought earlier in the week that tonight she would want to say the thing she had been meaning to say for weeks. Now that they were here on the couch in the light from the one lamp, she found she did not want to say it. She wanted to sit next to him.

He reached for her hand without turning to look. He did this constantly. She had thought two days ago that she would miss it and had been correct: she was already missing it and it was happening right now, this exact motion, his palm across hers, the loose knot of his fingers.

“You booked the driver,” he said.

“I did.”

“Reliable one?”

“Same service my sister uses when she flies out of Newark. I already gave him the address downstairs and my number.”

He nodded. His thumb moved once against the back of her hand and settled.

She turned toward him. She had not planned this either. His face was closer than she had estimated. Ellis kept his gaze on her a beat longer than the moment permitted. This was not a look he had given her often before the decision, but he had been giving it to her for four days now, since the night they had actually said it, and she had learned to receive it without moving away.

“Come here,” he said.

She did.

He took her face in his hand the way he had always taken her face, and she thought: this one. She had thought a lot in the past four days about which of his gestures she would carry and had been wrong about most of them; she had catalogued them wrong because you cannot know before something is over what will keep. But this. This one she was going to carry.

He kissed her. Not the last-time way. The regular way. That was what undid her. She had expected him to make it dramatic and he had refused, and the refusal was the whole thing: this was still the person she had lived with for four years, still his exact mouth, still the way he stopped for a second in the middle of a kiss to breathe against her, still the way his hand moved into her hair without hurrying.

They moved to the bedroom eventually. She could not have said how long they had been on the couch. Neither of them had made a speech about the move. He stood up and offered her his hand and she took it, and they walked the twelve feet to the door of the bedroom in the same way they had walked it a thousand times, and she thought: also this. Also this walk.

In the bedroom he undressed her the way he undressed her, which was slowly and without production. She had thought maybe he would say something and he did not. She was grateful. Anything he said would have been the wrong sentence, and he knew this, which was part of why she had loved him and part of why they were not going to survive each other; he was too accurate a reader of a room to compensate for someone who was not.

She did not close her eyes. She wanted to see him. He noticed and did not comment on it, only shifted his weight so she had a better sight-line to his face.

He was hard against her thigh and she took him in her hand and he made the small sound she had known for four years, the almost-word at the back of his throat, and she thought: this one, also. She was aware of how much she was cataloguing and she did not stop; there was no point in not; she had all night and none of it would be enough.

He entered her carefully. He always did the first time on any given night, and this was not different. She lifted her hips to meet him and he sank into her with the exhale she had listened for a thousand times, and then he stopped, held, looked at her.

“Okay?” he said.

“Yes.”

“You can, if you need to say anything.”

“I don’t. Move.”

He moved. Slow at first, then finding the rate they had always found, then slower than that, because they were both stretching this and neither had needed to name it. She held his shoulders. He was above her, working, and she watched his face and did not close her eyes and did not look away.

She had thought the leaving would be about the parts of him she was going to lose access to. It was not. It was about the parts of her that only existed with him. She was aware of that now, the way she was aware of his weight and his breath and the exact pressure of his hand under her lower back: this specific version of herself, the one who was with him, was the one she was leaving behind in this bed tonight. Tomorrow she would be someone else. She had not understood this until this second and now she did and there was nowhere to put it except here.

She came before he did. She always had. He kept moving through it, slower and slower, and she held onto him and let it happen and let it keep happening until it had finished happening. Then he came, and she watched his face for that too, and it was the same face and different because it was the last time she was going to see it in this room.

Afterward, they lay on their sides facing each other. He put his hand on her waist and left it there. She did not know how long they stayed like that. She did not want to look at the clock.

“You have to sleep,” he said eventually.

“I know.”

“Wake me up before the cab.”

“I will.”

He did not say I love you. She was grateful. He had said it four days ago, in the conversation where they had said the actual thing, and it had been true then and it was true now, and saying it again in this bed would have made it into a farewell instead of a fact.

She set the alarm for five-fifteen. He turned the lamp off. She lay with her back against his chest and his arm across her waist, and she did not sleep for a long time, and then she did.

At five-fifteen the alarm went. She reached for her phone and turned it off. Ellis was already awake beside her, or had woken with the sound; she could not tell. She sat up. She put her feet on the floor. She stood.

She walked to the bathroom and washed her face. She came back and dressed in the clothes she had laid out on the chair the night before, which was one of the small competences she was proud of and did not need to explain. Ellis was up now, sitting on the edge of the bed in his boxers.

“I’ll walk you down,” he said.

“Okay.”

She picked up the suitcase by the door. She checked her purse for her passport for the third time since last night and for the last time before she would need it. Ellis put on his coat over his boxers and his slippers and opened the door for her.

They rode the elevator in silence. In the lobby, through the glass, the black car was already there, engine on, exhaust visible in the cold. The driver got out and opened the trunk.

At the curb Ellis took her face in his hand one more time. He kissed her forehead. He said, “Text me when you land.”

“I will.”

She got in the car. The driver closed the door. She looked out the window as they pulled away from the curb and Ellis was still standing on the sidewalk in his coat and boxers and slippers, and he raised one hand, and she raised one hand back, and then the car turned the corner and he was gone from the frame.

She did not cry. She had thought she might and she did not. What she felt was not grief exactly; grief was going to come later, in some airport, at some altitude, in the new apartment when the boxes were still on the floor. What she felt now was the specific weight of the boarding pass in her jacket pocket and the specific temperature of the car’s leather against the back of her hand, and the fact that she had been someone particular for four years and was, at this moment, on her way to becoming someone else, and that the person she was becoming was going to be carrying the person she had been the whole way.

The driver said, “JFK, Terminal Four, correct?”

“Yes.”

“About forty minutes this time of day.”

“Thank you.”

She sat back. She watched the buildings go by. She let it be the drive it was.