Then he looked at the couch. Then at Theda, who was sitting, she realized, almost exactly in the middle of it.
She moved over. He sat down at the far end. The couch, between them, let out another long, sad sigh and a twang. They both sat very still, and the Zenith hummed, and the coffee steamed, and neither of them pressed play.
"Wait," Nicky said.
He got up again and went over to the lockers. He opened one, which had DeLUCA stenciled on it, and rummaged, and came back with a rough gray wool blanket with RIPTA stamped on one corner in faded blue, the kind of blanket kept in a locker for naps on a split shift. He folded it lengthwise, carefully, into a long gray roll, and laid it down on the couch between them, so that it ran from the back cushion to the edge of the seat like a little stone wall along the edge of a field.
Theda looked at the blanket. She looked at him.
"What's that?"
"Research," said Nicky. "The Walls of Jericho. Carmela says you've got to live in the part."
"That's for my protection?"
"It's for mine. You've got a very strong personality and you've only got one shoe. I've got no idea what you're capable of." He settled back against the arm of the couch, with his coffee on his knee and the remote control, which was attached to the VCR by a long gray cord, in his other hand. Then he looked at her across the blanket, and his face did something she would think about for a long time afterward. It went shy. Not embarrassed, as it had been in the store; actually shy, as if he'd come up against something he didn't have words for, and decided to use the wrong ones on purpose.
"So," he said. "Let me ask you something."
"What."
"I paid your bus fare. I bought you a cup of coffee. I brought you to a movie. I'm sitting next to you on a couch with the lights down." He gestured with the remote at the room around them, at the lockers and the tire calendar and the long fluorescent tubes buzzing overhead, which were not, actually, down. "So this is technically our first date?"
Theda opened her mouth. Nothing came out of it, which was rare. She closed it again.
"It is not," she said.
"Technically."