Morning assaulted me—
        incident at wake-up,
        Airbnb became office,
        my very breath on backorder…

        Call it a Skyhouse Ambush.

Afternoon finally blinked…
      By eighteen hundred,
    I was walking to Coal—
           twelve minutes,
             door to door,
     the perfect distance
     to make a day soften.

Quick checklist at Mari’s:
                AC to 78°,
             lights quiet,
        switches sleeping.

Coal grabbed his bed…
     I grabbed our evening.

Lyft to Irby’s—patio trivia.

Coal’s look to me said,
        “You gotta win,”
        eyes fixed on the chimken prize
        like it owed him money.

Then the biggest trivia team
     I’ve ever seen at Irby’s rolled in…

     *ten* deep.

Challenge accepted.

Team C: 114
Team Blake: 109

Guess who Team C was?

New high score by fourteen.
    (Blake topped their best by ten; I had to).

Coal nodded once,
     entirely unimpressed—
     pure professionalism.

All the while,
    our phones aglow,
    each ding draws us closer…

    threads across an ocean.

You, wheels down in Barcelona,
     celebrating with cheering emojis

     and a smile I could feel through the glass.

Back home,
     C and I queued a movie,
     the sleep that followed
     so clean and so heavy—

     the kind that only lands
     if the house is in order… (ambush over)

     and the dog approves.