Six A.M., Locker Still Open

She starts counting before she means to. The last footstep — heels on tile, unhurried, someone who has nowhere to be at six-fifteen on a Tuesday — and then the soft hydraulic sigh of the outer door, and she is already at three before she decides that counting is what she is doing. Four. Five.

The fluorescent light above her locker row hums at a frequency she has never noticed before this morning. She has been in this room a hundred times. The light has always been here. She is only hearing it now because the room has gone completely still and her body is paying attention to everything.

Six. Seven. She doesn't move yet. The gym bag is open at her feet, unzipped since before class ended — she had done it in the dark of the spin room, one hand dropping to the bag she'd parked beside the bike, fingers finding the zipper by feel while the instructor counted down the last hill.

She had not looked down. She had kept her face forward, her expression the same flat concentration as everyone else's, and her fingers had drawn the zipper back four inches and left it. That was the first theft. Taking the time to prepare.

Her leggings are still damp at the inner thigh from class. The compression fabric holds the heat close — her own heat, generated, earned, now sitting against her skin like something she put there on purpose. The waistband presses just below her navel. When she exhales, she feels it.

Eight. Nine. She is watching the gap between the lockers and the far wall, the angled mirror above the sinks that shows her the door. The door is closed.

The mirror is empty except for her own reflection at the far edge: one woman, standing very still at an open locker, gym bag at her feet, both hands visible and not doing anything yet. Her left hand is on the locker door. The metal is cold — genuinely cold, the way metal is cold in January in a room with no windows, radiator heat that never quite reaches the floor. The cold travels up through her palm and she does not move her hand away from it.

Ten. She reaches into the bag. The bullet is exactly where she left it, inside the front pocket, the smooth cylindrical weight of it against her fingers before she has closed her hand around it. She does not take it out yet.

She holds it through the fabric of the pocket — her thumb finding one end, her forefinger the other — and she stands there holding it like that, the outer door still closed in the mirror, the fluorescent light still humming, her pulse doing something specific and countable at the crease where her right thigh meets her hip. She had packed it last night. That was the real theft — the decision made in the ordinary light of her apartment, her gym bag open on the bed, her hand placing it there with full knowledge of what the morning would require. She had zipped the bag closed and gone to sleep and not thought about it again, which was its own kind of lie.