You have read a thousand of these. This one waits for you to decide.

EElena's gin and tonic is down to ice, and through the archway the departure board keeps flicking CANCELLED like it enjoys it. Marcus has been two stools along since she sat down — whisky, no phone, no luggage tag she can see — saying nothing, which in a hotel bar at one in the morning is its own kind of manners. The barman works a cloth around a tumbler with the patience of a man paid by the hour. Nobody in the Terminus is here by choice.

Then Marcus stands, carries his glass the two stools over, and sets a fresh gin and tonic beside her empty one. Lime this time. He lays a note on the bar for it before he sits, so there's no doubt whose it is, and turns the glass a quarter-turn until the lime faces her — a small, careful thing from a man who'd crossed the room as if he'd never had a second thought.

He doesn't look at her yet. He settles, takes a sip he's in no hurry over, and then he does.

"Seemed unfair," he says, nodding at the drink, "leaving you to run dry." A beat. "I'll trade you for it. Your name — the one your friends use, or the one you give strangers in hotel bars. I won't know the difference." He lifts his whisky an inch. "You will."

NNobody in the Terminus Hotel bar is here by choice. Out past the lobby the departure boards still cycle their cancellations — Perth, Singapore, Auckland — in amber letters nobody reads anymore, and Marcus sits at the bar with a scotch half-gone, a man whose evening was supposed to be three time zones away by now. The stool beside him has been empty for an hour. Then Elena takes it.

She settles a coat across her lap, sets a gin and tonic down without a sound, and doesn't look at him. Not yet. She'd glanced once on the way in, the quick scan of someone who travels enough to read a room. The stool she chose wasn't the nearest open one. It was his.

She watches the window a moment — the rain, her own reflection, him in it — then turns, and the look she gives him lasts a beat longer than casual.

"I promise I'm not going to ask about your flight." She lifts her glass an inch toward his. "So. Business — or someone waiting?"

She doesn't soften it with a smile. Her glass stays where it is, an inch from his, and the question sits between them, patient, not going anywhere. She has given him one condition and nothing else. Now she waits.