Logan woke up, nightshirt suffocating him in his cold sweat. He rolled over and lit the nubbin of a candle next to his bed. He found his glasses next to the soft leather-bound book he used to write in. He flipped to the last poem and tried to remember when he had written it.
Before Max had…died.
Another lifetime ago.
On the next page were tally marks in two columns. He didn't remember which was "heads," but he remembered the question he'd asked before flipping the coin: "Is Max still alive?" It was a sordid game he'd played when he couldn't sleep at night following the raid on Manticore.
Now he took the coin—an antique worth thousands—from where he had wedged it in the binding of his journal and toyed with it. He hadn't meant to tell Max he loved her. Past experience had taught him that she was skittish and moving too fast or getting too "serious" would run her away. But at the time, watching his last few moments of being able to be close to her run out…he was just too mad to care. And he had been too angry to listen for requital as he stalked away. Now he wondered…
Gripping the coin in his fingers, he whispered into the dark—heads she did; tails she didn't—and he let fly.
Max sat on her bed and stared out of her window at the miserably wet city below. In her mind, she played the scene over and over again: their last few seconds. Finally, Original Cindy stumbled into her room, eyes open just a slit against the soft glow of Max's room.
"Boo, when you going to give this up and get some shut eye?" At Max's puppy-dog stare, she sighed through pursed lips and picked up a quarter from Max's nightstand tip jar. "Call it," she said as she tossed it.
Max stared just a moment, calculating both the coin's initial velocity and its speed of rotation. "It'll land tails," she said simply.
"Bummer," Cindy grunted as she shuffled out of the room. "He didn't hear."
Behind her, the coin landed on the bed tails up and bounced onto the floor. Max peeked over to see how it had landed. Bounces were anyone's guess; even she couldn't predict them.
Max picked up her quarter and smiled to herself.