Until Proven Innocent

ONE

Ray is, remarkably, both awake and upright, a rare sight for a Sunday morning. He's polishing a grandfather clock and making a noble attempt at whistling a Led Zeppelin song, and merely points a finger up the stairs and grunts: "bedroom. Warning: his latest fuck hasn't left, yet."

"Thanks for the heads up."

"You drag her out, and I'll make us coffee."

Morgan climbs the stairs to Hugo's room and pushes open his door. He's asleep, still, arm resting over the girl beside him. She's got wispy brown hair and equally as soft features, not quite defined enough to be memorable. Her face looks like it might dissolve, if you splashed it in water, and Morgan wonders briefly why Hugo has invited her into his bedroom. They've got the same hunger for permanence, and Morgan has seen enough of his one-night stands to know he normally picks them a little more solid than this.

"She's new," Morgan comments, turning her gaze back to Hugo, who's reached over and slipped his glasses onto his face. He gives her a fuzzy smile. "How long do you think this one's got in her, you little sexual dynamo? One more? Two?" She leans closer. "A date?"

He snorts. "Since when do they ever want a date?"

"The day you stop bedding lost causes, kid, I'll let you know." She glances back over at the girl curled into Hugo's side with vague disdain. "You do know how to pick them. A Plain Jane with commitment issues. What a twist."

"She's not plain. She's got--"

"-- a story, let me guess. Well, coincidentally, so have I. And this one isn't about daddy issues," Morgan says, jerking her head back in the direction of Hugo's bedroom door. "Get dressed. Ray's making coffee."

"He's up?"

She nods. "Up and sober. Stranger things, Hugo, stranger things." She nudges the door open with her foot and Hugo's embraced by the smell of Sunday mornings: black coffee so bitter it seeps through your airways and you taste it before it's even cooled, the sting of lime-green shower gel, and burnt toast. Ray can't cook for shit. The taste has grown on them both. "Now seriously. Get up. And tell heart breaker number sixty-seven to get out."

"She's sleeping."

"Bless. Have her out in five."

Hugo, as per, bends to Morgan's whim: he untangles himself from the Plain Jane, - who is, in fact, called Lauren, and has no daddy issues other than her unpredicted daddy kink, decidedly the most notable thing about her - pulls on some jeans and then shakes her shoulder. There's a slow moan, and then her eyes fold open.

"My friend is here," he says, not because he thinks sleeping with someone should be followed up by such idle chat as what a nice morning and your shirt is over there and you can use the toilet before you leave but because experience has dampened down his romantic inclinations. He's slept with enough people where the precedent was a bar, a wink, and a slip of the hand to know that occasions like these are not followed up by coffee and exchanging of childhood stories and thoughts on the Big Things In Life, like gods and astrology and death. It's probably a blessing, in this case. Hugo isn't sure he wants to hear what a girl with a kink that served as the iceberg to his boner's Titanic, if you will, thinks about God. Not when she's essentially killed Him. "She asked if you could leave."

Evidently, the girl is as adapted to this ritual of bed-hopping as Hugo himself, because before her eyelids have quite peeled themselves from her pupils she's up and slipping her bra back on. A gift, in Hugo's opinion, that is only gained when you can leave your house on a Saturday night knowing the odds of you returning later are equal to that of you not. It's game, for some - whose bed will I wake up in tomorrow? Will I wait around or leave through the window? Will I smirk when I pass them on the street or shall we pretend we've never swallowed each other's moans, never traced the lines of each other's spines or felt our pulses lock into one tempo? Point a finger, buy a drink, break a heart. Repeat.