The simple gain: from (that) work in progress

He wore his shorts long and his sandals straight through October, when finally he’d trade them in for his deconstructed Doc Martens, ten years old and split down two seams. She’d met him at Café Conversation, his cousin’s place, where he put such a sugar lip of sweet on the chocolate face of each espresso that the clientele called it candy. Give me some of that candy, Vin. He talked without smash and fraction, without contradiction, without the undercutting hurry of ambition. He preferred, he’d once said, the simple gain.

She wondered about it afterward.

She wondered still. The simple gain.