“Thanks,” David says, and figures that’s permission to look in the fridge himself. He finds cream, whole milk, adds just a splash of the latter rather than enduring whatever look he’d get from Natalie if he proceeded to just drink his coffee black as opposed to adding it. He’s used to skim milk, maybe one percent if he doesn’t have a choice. Jake preferred one percent, so they had both at his condo. There wasn’t any one percent in the fridge, though. David looked.

His coffee tastes off. He’s not sure if that’s from the milk or not.

“So, like I was saying—” Natalie says, but she’s thankfully interrupted by Jake walking into the kitchen. David wonders if he rushed, worried David would do something wrong in his absence. He doesn’t take long showers, necessarily, but he was gone for less than ten minutes, for all that it felt like longer.

“Hey, you found everything,” Jake says. “Getting along?”

“Sure,” Natalie says, and David thinks he hears sarcasm in that too. Maybe that’s just the way she talks. He doesn’t know, really. Jake’s told him a lot about his sisters, but David can’t remember any of it right now. One of them is sarcastic, he thinks. Maybe both. Maybe he’s just making that up, hoping that’s true, that it’s something that’s always the case, not David-specific.

“Shower’s all yours,” Jake says. “Feel like an omelette?”

“As long as it’s egg—”

“—white, I know, I got you,” Jake says.

“Thank you,” David says, and beats a retreat to the bathroom. The room’s muggy hot, the mirror still steamed up from Jake’s shower, and it’s little absurd that seeing the echoes of Jake feels almost intimate, considering he’s sleeping in Jake’s bed, has literally shared a shower with him before on days off when neither of them had to be anywhere right away, but maybe it’s because this is likely the closest to Jake he’ll be for the interim. And that’s not Jake’s fault, he knows Jake would leap at a chance to close the door behind them and — well, he already had.