Soren emerged from the parking garage with his jacket over one shoulder and the expression of a man who had been personally insulted by a machine.
“Did you find it?” Delia asked.
“Eventually. There’s a sign that points left. Left is a wall.”
“The ramp is just before the wall.”
“I know that now.”
He stopped in front of her. For a second they looked at each other as though an introduction might be required. He was wearing the shirt from the photograph. She had changed twice and then put on the first thing again.
“Hello,” he said.
She put a hand on his arm and kissed him. His jacket slipped from his shoulder; he caught it without quite taking his mouth away, and she laughed against him.
“Hello.”
The museum doors opened behind her. A family came out arguing over whose turn it was to hold a paper crown. Delia moved out of their path, taking Soren with her by the sleeve. She took his cinema-history book from her bag and returned it. He tucked it under his jacket.
“Is that your work?” he asked, watching the crown go by.
“Not personally. But I support it.”
Inside, she bought two tickets before the desk attendant could wave her through. Her staff access covered her, of course, but today she wanted a ticket in her hand. Soren reached for his wallet. She told him he had driven three hours and could buy something later.
“Something expensive?”
“We’ll see how you behave.”
The attendant smiled at her with more interest than Delia would have liked. She led him upstairs before anyone else could greet her. On the landing, he paused beneath a large photograph of the street outside taken decades earlier.
“That corner shop is still there.”
“Different shop. Same building.”
“The windows look wrong.”
She glanced at him. Most people looked at the cars first. He was studying the reflected light in the upper windows.
“They changed them when they divided the rooms upstairs,” she said.
“That’s a shame.”
“It was cheaper to heat.”
“Fair enough.”
She liked that he let the correction stand. They moved into the street-life display, where the new labels were indeed larger. Delia tried to look at them without looking as though she was checking the alignment. She failed. Soren followed her gaze.
“Yours?”
“The words. Someone else did the sensible part with the spacing.”
He bent to read a label about the old bus routes. She gave him time. It was difficult not to tell him what to look at, what mattered, which photograph would be worth the next ten seconds. At work she knew when to step back. With him, she wanted to show him everything at once.
“My mother drove that route,” she said finally, pointing at a later photograph.
“The one you said made everybody move down?”
“That’s all routes. Moving down was her life’s work.”
They stopped at a case of objects from local shops. Soren liked a battered wooden drawer with tiny compartments. Delia liked the notebook beside it, full of prices that had been crossed out and rewritten. She could picture the hand pausing over each change.
“I’d have kept the drawer,” he said.
“You’d keep everything.”
“Not everything.”
“You have a poster with half the title missing.”
“It’s a very good half.”
She was about to answer when a raised voice came from the next room. An older man stood beside a low bench, leaning on a cane. He was telling his companion that he could see perfectly well and did not need to sit. His companion, who had been trying to move the bench, looked close to losing patience.
Delia took one step, stopped, then saw that the bench had caught on the edge of a floor mat.
“Excuse me a moment.”
She went over and asked whether she could help move it. The companion nodded. Together they shifted it a few inches, enough to clear the mat and turn it toward the display instead of away from it. The man looked at the new position.
“There,” his companion said. “Now you can—”
Delia asked him whether he recognized the building in the photograph. He did. He had worked on that street when the bakery was still there. He sat down to point out the delivery entrance, and for a minute she listened to him describe the smell in the alley at five in the morning.
She thanked him, told the companion where to find the lift, and returned to Soren.
“Sorry.”
“For what?”
“I said I wasn’t working.”
He looked back at the bench. “Did you know him?”
“No.”
“You looked like you did.”
“He knew the bakery. That was enough.”
She felt oddly shy after saying it. She had wanted Soren to see her work, but being watched doing it was different from showing him a display she had already finished. He didn’t compliment her. He asked whether the bakery was the one in another photograph, and she took him to look.
By the time they came downstairs, she had forgotten the next item on her plan. Rain tapped the glass doors. Soren checked the sky and asked whether she wanted lunch.
“There’s a place around the corner.”
“How far around?”
“About five minutes.”
It was closer to ten. She was so used to the route that she hadn’t counted the blocks, and by the time they reached the restaurant his jacket shoulders were wet. Inside, every table was full and music bounced off the bare walls. Delia saw his face tighten before he could conceal it.
“Too loud?” she asked.
“A little.”
“It’s usually better at the back.”
They waited for a table. At the back it was no better. A large group beside them was celebrating something, and a person at the other end of the room kept dragging a chair across the floor. Soren leaned forward twice to hear her. The third time, she stopped speaking.
“We can go somewhere else.”
“We’ve only just sat down.”
“We haven’t ordered.”
“I don’t want to be difficult.”
The phrase made her feel difficult herself. She had selected this place because she liked it, because it belonged to the version of her city she wanted him to enjoy. Now she felt responsible for its noise and its crowded doorway and the fact that a wet sleeve was touching his wrist.
“It isn’t an exam,” she said, more sharply than she meant.
He looked at her. “I know.”
“Sorry. I had a picture in my head.”
“Of lunch?”
“Of you liking lunch.”
His face softened. “I would like lunch. Somewhere I can hear you.”
They left with an apology to the server. Two streets away, they found a small place with a counter, six tables, and no music at all. The food was ordinary and hot. Soren took off his jacket and hung it over the back of his chair. Delia could finally hear the small laugh he made when he was genuinely amused, rather than seeing his mouth move across a table.
“I don’t hate your city,” he said.
“You haven’t seen enough of it.”
“I do hate the sign in the garage.”
“I’ll put that in the visitor survey.”
He reached across the table and touched her fingers. She turned her hand under his, and for a few seconds neither of them spoke. Her body recognized him more quickly than the rest of her had. She wanted to lean across the table and kiss him again, which would have been awkward with the plates between them and the server passing behind her chair.
After lunch they walked toward her apartment. The rain had stopped. Soren noticed the slope of the streets, the number of buses, a tree pushing up the pavement. Delia noticed which parts of the route she was tempted to apologize for. She kept most of the apologies to herself.
Yasmin was waiting outside her building with a roll of paper under one arm.
“There you are. I texted. I can’t stay, I only need the large clips you said I could borrow.” Her eyes moved to Soren. “Oh. This is him.”
“This is Soren,” Delia said.
“Yes. Hello. Sorry, I’ve spent the morning hanging student work and my hands are full of tape.”
She showed him a thumb with a strip of tape still attached. He took the paper roll before it slipped, and Yasmin let him, already looking for her phone with the freed hand.
Delia led them upstairs. In the apartment, she found the clips in the desk drawer while Yasmin described a display board that refused to remain upright. Soren suggested turning its feet. Yasmin looked at him.
“Do you think I haven’t tried that?”
“I was hoping you hadn’t.”
She laughed, quick and loud. “So was I.”
Delia gave her the clips. Yasmin asked whether she wanted to come by the school event in June, then interrupted herself to say she’d send the details because she couldn’t remember the date without looking. She had promised to be back twenty minutes ago. She took the roll from Soren and kissed Delia’s cheek.
“Nice to meet you. She makes good plans, but don’t let her schedule your breathing.”
“Yasmin.”
“Mine, either. I’ll call you.”
The door shut. Delia stood with her hand on the latch, embarrassed and annoyed in roughly equal amounts.
“She likes you,” she said.
“Does she?”
“She would have been more polite otherwise.”
Soren was looking at the notes on the desk. He did not pick them up. “Is that the room you sent me?”
“Yes. I haven’t got permission to do anything with it yet.”
“Where do you stand?”
“What?”
“When you’re leading it.”
She moved beside him. On the plan she had drawn chairs, tables, a clear route to the door. She had not marked a place for herself.
“Probably here at the start,” she said. “Then I move around.”
“At the cinema I hide at the back.”
“You don’t hide.”
“I do if somebody hates the film.”
She leaned against him, letting her shoulder touch his arm. The apartment had not changed because he was in it. The shelf still leaned; the chair still needed mending. But he was standing close enough that she could smell the rain in his jacket, and she no longer wanted to rearrange the room.
He kissed her by the desk. She put both hands against his chest, felt him draw a breath, and forgot the notes entirely.
Later they went out again, without consulting the itinerary. They walked through a small park and argued mildly about whether a sculpture looked like a bird or a collapsed umbrella. At a bench, Soren stopped to retie his shoe. Delia sat down while he bent over it.
“This is the pair I wear when I want to look as though I own more than one pair,” he said.
“Do you?”
“Yes. The other pair is more comfortable.”
She looked at the red mark above his heel. “You should have said.”
“I thought we’d stop walking eventually.”
“We can get a bus.”
He stood, tested the shoe, and said that would be good. She led him to the stop on the far side of the park. They had missed a bus by a minute, which gave her time to search her bag for a small bandage. She carried them for work, though none had ever been required for an injury caused by history.
He put it over the sore spot while she held his jacket. A teenager at the other end of the shelter was playing music through a phone. Soren glanced toward the sound but said nothing. Delia began to laugh.
“What?”
“Nothing. I was just wondering how much noise one day can contain.”
“Apparently quite a lot.”
“I’m used to it.”
“I know.” He straightened and took his jacket. “I get people coming into the Lantern who can’t stand the sound of the sea through the open door. They ask me to shut it.”
“Do you?”
“If the film’s starting.”
The bus arrived. Delia found two seats together, and Soren folded his legs into the narrow space. On the way back toward her neighborhood he asked about a painted wall, then a building with a clock that had stopped. She knew the story of one and made up a plausible explanation for the other before admitting she had invented it. He asked her to keep the invented version.
At a sudden stop, his knee knocked hers. He apologized, then left it touching when she pressed back. She watched their reflection in the window, blurred by the passing buildings. They looked like people going somewhere together, though neither of them knew where they would eat. When the bus turned, he caught the rail with one hand and steadied her with the other. She held his wrist until the road straightened, then kept holding it for another block.
They got off near a restaurant she had never tried. The menu in the window looked manageable, and the room beyond it had enough soft surfaces to absorb conversation. This time he opened the door before she could weigh the alternatives.
During dinner he told her about the first flat he had rented, where a neighbor used to practice the same few bars on a trumpet every evening. She described the woman who had lived downstairs from her and insisted that Delia’s vacuum cleaner was running at midnight when Delia was away. Neither story made either place sound attractive. They kept adding details anyway, competing for the worse accommodation until Delia nearly spilled her water.
He bought dinner as promised. When he took her home, he came up long enough to kiss her in the doorway, then left for his hotel.
She watched from the window as he checked the direction on his phone, turned the wrong way, stopped, and turned back. She was still smiling when his message arrived.
No nightclub. I may have been misled.
She wrote that the visitor survey would be merciless. Then she set her work bag beside the door for the morning and went to bed with the window open to the city noise.