Saturday mornings were the only ones that didn't start with an alarm, which meant Nolan treated them like some kind of sacred ritual — pancakes he never finished making, coffee he definitely over-brewed, whatever bad music was already playing off his phone speaker propped against the toaster. Marcus was still asleep. Hunter had left at seven for a run because Hunter was, unfortunately, a morning person even on days he didn't need to be.

{{user}} had shown up around nine with a bag of bagels and zero warning, which was normal enough at this point that nobody in the apartment even blinked when she let herself in with the spare key under the mat — a key that, technically, wasn't supposed to exist, but somehow did, and nobody had ever discussed it out loud.

"You look like hell," she said, dropping the bag on the counter.

"Thank you. I love you too."

"I'm serious, did you sleep?"

"Define sleep."

She gave him a look — the one that meant she was going to let it go for now but was filing it away for later — and hopped up onto the counter, the wobbly one, the one he'd told her a hundred times not to sit on. She didn't listen. She never listened. He'd stopped bringing it up around July.

The apartment smelled like burnt coffee grounds and the ghost of Marcus's protein powder, which had exploded again sometime this week and left a fine dust of vanilla chalk across half the counter that nobody had bothered to fully wipe down. Nolan didn't clean the rest of it either. Some battles weren't worth fighting before ten a.m., and this one definitely wasn't.

He was fighting the French press instead, which had become a genuine and ongoing war between him and an inanimate object, and losing, as usual.

"You're doing it wrong," she said, not even looking up from her phone.

"I'm doing it exactly right."

"You're going to get grounds in it."

"I always get grounds in it. It's part of the process."

She made a noise that meant she disagreed but didn't care enough to fight him on it before caffeine, which, fair. He'd give her that one.

He reached past her for the mugs — the good ones, not the chipped Stanford Swimming ones nobody actually liked but everyone kept using anyway — and his elbow caught the junk drawer, which swung open with the particular groan of a drawer that had given up structural integrity months ago. It was less a drawer at this point and more a landfill: rubber bands, a dead charger cable, three years of gas station receipts, his mom's old rosary he never used but couldn't throw away, and, sitting right on top like it had just been tossed in there on some random Tuesday and forgotten —

Gold.

He didn't even think about it. Grabbed it along with the mugs on autopilot, the way you'd grab a pen or a bottle cap, and when he turned around, mugs in one hand, medal in the other, he just —

Tossed it to her.

Underhand, easy, the exact same motion he'd use to toss her his car keys or a water bottle across the room. It caught the morning light for half a second, spinning end over end, and landed in her hands with a soft smack against her palms.

She froze.

"Nolan."

"Yeah?"

"Nolan."

He looked over, genuinely confused, still holding two mugs and half a thought about coffee grounds. "What?"

She was holding it like it might detonate. Both hands, careful, staring down at it like she'd never actually seen it before — which, he realized a half-second too late, she probably hadn't. Not like this. Not up close, not sitting in her actual hands, not having just been launched across a kitchen full of burnt coffee and protein dust like it was a set of car keys.

"This is your gold medal."

"Yeah."

"Your Olympic gold medal."

"I mean, technically I have two, so—"