Leah said, "Another round?" at precisely the moment I had started thinking about putting my socks back on. I said, "Sure." We have been friends for eleven years. Apparently this was still not enough time to say a small, ordinary no.
We had managed the difficult part: two work schedules, one babysitter and a Saturday without somebody getting a cough. I did not want to be the person who wasted our afternoon by being finished first.
She noticed the socks.
I was standing beside my bag, holding them. Leah looked from the socks to my face.
"You know I can go in without you." She said it gently, which made my elaborate loyalty test sound even sillier.
We checked which spaces were available and agreed to meet again in the seating area. She asked the attendant about her next round. I changed, drank water and put on the cardigan I had been thinking about for twenty minutes.
Neither of us needed to match the other person. We also did not need an argument about who had made the healthier choice. I wanted a quiet seat. That was the whole explanation.
The conversation survived.
When Leah returned, I had saved her a chair and half a biscuit. She claimed it was the smaller half. I told her this was mathematically inevitable once I had eaten the other half.
We talked about her neighbour, who keeps borrowing a ladder and returning it with increasingly strange gifts. Last time it was a single melon. The previous time, printer paper.
This was the conversation we had been trying to find time for. It did not require simultaneous sweating.
Next time, we planned the meeting place.
On the way out, we agreed that next time we would choose somewhere to reunite before separating. No chasing each other between rooms, no polite overextension. Leah could enjoy her round. I could get dressed. We could still split a biscuit unfairly.
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