The Night We Didn't

The key turned at eleven forty, which was a problem, because Avery Quinn was standing in Theo Lang's galley kitchen in Theo Lang's white Oxford with a dish towel full of red wine and no decent explanation that was not the truth.

The truth was: Lina had said he was in Lisbon until Thursday. The truth was: Avery had spilled a glass of his own Barolo down her blouse like a person who could not be trusted with liquids or with the idea of him. The truth was: she had opened his closet because the alternative was sitting in a stained silk shirt at midnight feeling twenty-two and stupid. The Oxford still smelled like him. Cedar. Airport soap. The particular warmth of a man who lived out of a duffel and somehow still folded his shirts.

Theo stopped in the doorway with rain in his hair and a camera bag cutting a line into his shoulder and the look of someone who had walked into the wrong year. Thirty-six. Dark coat. The mouth Avery had been carefully not thinking about since Lina's wedding, when they had danced one song too close and then fled to opposite coasts like adults.

"You're in my shirt," he said.

"You're in Lisbon."

"I quit Lisbon." He set the bag down as if it might explode. His eyes did a slow, involuntary inventory: her bare legs, the shirt hitting mid-thigh, the wine on the towel, the fact that she had not moved to cover herself, which was either bravery or shock. "Lina said the place was empty."

"Lina said a lot of things." Avery's voice came out lower than she wanted. The kitchen was too small. He was too tall for it. She could feel the heat of him from four feet away, which was chemistry, which was humiliating, which was also the only honest thing in the room. "I can go to a hotel."

"It's raining."

"I own a coat."

"Avery." The way he said her name had always been a little ruinous. He had said it like that in college, across a sticky table, when they were almost and then he took the Johannesburg assignment instead. He had said it like that last year with his hand at the small of her back on a dance floor. He had never said it in this kitchen, with her wearing his collar. "Don't go to a hotel. I walked out of a job today. I came home because I was tired of photographing other people's lives. I did not come home to throw you into a cab so I can be noble."

She should have buttoned another button. She did not. The air between them felt like a held note. She could see his pulse in his throat. She wanted, with a clarity that made her angry, to put her mouth there.

"If you stay in that shirt," he said, quieter, "I am going to have a very specific night. I am trying to be a person you can still look at in the morning. Help me out, or don't. But do not pretend this is housesitting."