Delia dropped the lid of the paint tin into the paint.
She looked down at it. Soren looked down at it too.
“Don’t,” she said.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’re considering it.”
He crouched beside her, pulled the lid out by its rim, and set it on the folded newspaper. Pale green paint ran slowly over the printed face of a man announcing something about roadworks.
“There,” he said. “No comment.”
They had not intended to spend Saturday evening painting a small bookcase. Delia had bought it secondhand that morning after deciding the piles beside her bed had begun to resemble a structural problem. She had imagined a quick coat of paint, an hour to dry, and a pleasant evening with Soren. She had forgotten that the bookcase had a back, an underside, and several corners inaccessible to a normal human wrist.
Soren had arrived at four with a headache from the drive and had offered to help before he took off his shoes. She should have told him to sit down. Instead she had handed him a brush, pleased by the prospect of finishing sooner.
Now it was six thirty, they were both hungry, and one shelf appeared to have been painted with a damp sponge.
“This bit needs another coat,” she said.
“It needs to dry first.”
“I can see through it.”
“Yes. That’s why it needs another coat.”
She looked at him. He rubbed his forehead with the back of his wrist, leaving a tiny green mark near his hairline.
“I’m not arguing,” he said.
“It sounds like you are.”
“I’m hungry.”
“So am I.”
They regarded the shelf as though it had caused their problems deliberately. From the street below came the repeated beep of a vehicle reversing, then a man’s voice calling that there was plenty of room. Delia put her brush down too hard. A drop landed on her bare foot.
“Great.”
Soren stood. “I’m going to wash my hands.”
“Fine.”
He stopped in the doorway. “Delia.”
She hated how quickly the sound of her name in that tone made her expect a larger conversation. “What?”
“Can we get something to eat?”
The simplicity of it caught her. She looked at the bookcase, at the wet lid, at her foot.
“Yes,” she said. “Please.”
In the bathroom they tried to use the sink at the same time. His elbow knocked hers. She moved aside, then laughed because there was paint on his forehead and he had managed to miss it entirely.
“Hold still.”
She dampened a washcloth and wiped the mark away. He closed his eyes while she did it. The skin at the corners of them looked tired.
“Head still bad?”
“Better. Mostly hungry now.”
“You should have said.”
“I did.”
“Earlier.”
“You also could have fed me before making me do manual labor.”
She smiled despite herself. “Fair.”
He opened his eyes. “I’m sorry I got sharp.”
“Me too.”
She hung the washcloth over the edge of the bath. He touched the back of her neck, briefly, and she leaned into his hand before going to find her shoes.
They walked to a place two streets away where she knew the food arrived quickly. The evening was warm enough that people had pulled their chairs toward the shade. A server brought water and told them one item on the menu was unavailable. Delia, who had been considering it, chose something else without much interest. She wanted food, his headache gone, and the evening recovered.
Soren drank half his water. “How’s the session looking?”
“Twelve bookings.”
“That’s good.”
“Yes. Four spaces left.”
“You say that like they escaped.”
She smiled. “I’m trying not to count them.”
He leaned back. “Tell me what happens when people arrive.”
She began explaining the room, then stopped herself before describing the entire seating plan. “They choose somewhere to sit. They can bring an object, but they don’t have to. I have a few things there.”
“The spoon?”
“The spoon survived. The key is under review.”
“Harsh.”
“It knows what it did.”
Their food arrived. For a while they concentrated on eating. Soren’s face lost the pinched look it had held since he arrived, and Delia felt her own shoulders lower. At the next table a small child was trying to fit a whole napkin into a drinking glass while the adults discussed a roof. Delia watched the operation with professional concern and did not intervene.
“I’ve got the cinema covered for the twenty-first,” Soren said. “Not the whole day. But the evening.”
“Good.”
“Next Saturday I can’t.”
She had known July fourteenth would be difficult. He had told her about the booking at the Lantern before her pilot date was confirmed. Still, hearing the final answer caused a small dip inside her.
“All right.”
He put down his fork. “I’d like to be there.”
“I know.”
“I could ask—”
“Soren. It’s all right.”
He looked at her for a moment, checking. She made herself continue before he could mistake her disappointment for something he needed to solve.
“I wish you could. That’s different from needing you to rearrange everything. Yasmin’s coming. I’ll call when it’s over.”
“I’ll be out of the screening by nine. If you call earlier, leave me a message and I’ll come out when I can.”
“It’ll be after nine by the time I’ve put everything away.”
“Then I’ll be waiting.”
He picked up his fork again. Delia took a drink of water. She had imagined him in the room, watching her do something she cared about. The picture took a moment to set aside. Once she had, she could see the actual room more clearly: strangers who did not know her, Yasmin in a chair, the clock she would try not to watch. There was enough there to occupy her.
After they ate, they walked farther than they needed to. Soren asked about a narrow building with a stone face above its door, and Delia told him what she knew. Then she admitted she had always thought the face resembled a disapproving fish.
He stood back to look. “It does.”
“Thank you.”
“Now I can’t see anything else.”
They crossed to the quieter side of the street. A secondhand shop had put a rack of books outside, though the owner was beginning to close. Delia stopped long enough to find a paperback with a lurid illustration of a creature rising from water. Soren read the back over her shoulder.
“That would make an awful film.”
“You mean an excellent film.”
“I mean I want to see it immediately.”
She bought the book for two dollars. The owner gave her a bag, which she declined because she wanted to keep looking at the cover. The creature possessed too many elbows and an expression suggesting it regretted leaving the water.
“We had something like that in the first cinema I worked at,” Soren said. “In the foyer. A cardboard display.”
“You didn’t begin with your own?”
“No. I was seventeen. Mostly I cleaned things other people had done.”
“An important part of the industry.”
“Underappreciated.”
They paused at the corner to let a cyclist pass. Soren took the book from her and examined the creature.
“Ours had a moving arm. Battery inside the back. It was meant to reach toward people.”
“That sounds horrible.”
“It was very slow. Mostly people walked past before it reached them.”
“A terrible predator.”
“One night the arm got stuck against the wall. Kept making this grinding noise. I thought I could fix it.”
Delia looked at him. “Could you?”
“I pulled the whole thing over. In front of about forty people.”
She began to laugh.
“The arm was still moving,” he said. “I remember that very clearly. Everything flat on the floor, one hand waving.”
She put a hand against his arm to steady herself. He waited, grinning, while she recovered enough to ask whether he had lost the job.
“No. The manager said at least it had finally frightened someone.”
They crossed the street. Delia tried to picture him at seventeen, all elbows and embarrassment, standing over the fallen monster. She could almost see it in the way he ducked his head when she looked at him too long.
“Did you always want your own place?”
“Not then. I mostly wanted to stop smelling like the carpet.”
“What did you want to be?”
He considered. “For a while, a drummer.”
“Can you play?”
“Not well. That was a problem.”
“A small one.”
“What about you?”
“I wanted to work with animals. Then I discovered animals weren’t always pleased to see me.”
“And people are?”
“They complain in words. I find that helpful.”
He laughed. She told him about a brief childhood plan to keep a goat in a yard much too small for one, and how her mother had asked whether she intended to take it on the bus. She had spent several days considering the transport arrangements before understanding that the answer was no.
Soren listened with the book tucked beneath his arm, asking questions that made the memory return in odd little pieces: the drawing she had made, the name she had chosen and now refused to repeat, the earnest belief that practical preparation could overcome any adult objection. By the time she finished, they had reached the next block without noticing.
He handed the paperback back to her. “I would have liked that girl.”
“She would have made you build a fence.”
“I seem to have ended up painting a bookcase.”
She leaned against him as they walked, laughing again.
“Read me the first line,” Soren said.
She did. They both stopped walking.
“Again,” he said.
She read it again, more dramatically. An older couple passing them glanced over, and Delia began laughing halfway through the final phrase. Soren took the book while she recovered and attempted the next paragraph in a voice that was much worse.
By the time they reached her building, her cheeks hurt.
Inside, the bookcase waited in its nest of newspaper. The paint had dried enough to reveal every place they had missed. Delia turned on a lamp and examined it with less hostility.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
“A wise bookcase decision.”
She set the paperback on the table and went to open the bedroom window. When she came back, Soren was crouched beside the bookcase, gathering the brushes into a jar.
“I thought we said tomorrow.”
“I’m just moving these before one of us steps in them.”
She watched him shift the jar to the kitchen counter. The green mark had returned to his wrist, or perhaps she had never washed that one away. His shirt was wrinkled from the drive. He looked nothing like the man she had first seen behind the cinema counter, except that he did, completely: the same hands, the same slightly uneven smile, a person whose ordinary fatigue she had begun to recognize.
The words arrived with such force that she almost said them from across the room.
Instead she took one step toward him. “Soren.”
He turned. “What?”
She had rehearsed no version of this. Her mouth felt suddenly dry. She disliked the idea of making him stand beside a jar of dirty brushes while she delivered an announcement, but moving somewhere else would turn it into an event and she could not bear that either.
“I love you,” she said.
He went still.
The silence was no more than a second or two. Delia had time to notice a car passing outside, the hum of the refrigerator, her own hand held uselessly at her side.
“I was trying to find a better time,” he said.
She let out a breath that nearly became a laugh. “For what?”
“To say that.”
“Oh.”
He crossed the space between them. “I love you.”
She put her hands against his chest, needing something solid beneath them. His eyes were bright and serious. She had not expected the words to change his face, but they did, or changed the way she could look at it.
“You could have said,” she whispered.
“Apparently so could you.”
Then he kissed her, and she stopped trying to arrange the moment. His hand slid into her hair. She held the back of his shirt, feeling the warm skin beneath it, and when he drew back she followed him for another kiss.
They ended up on the sofa with the lamp still on and the window admitting the sounds of a Saturday night outside. Delia sat sideways, her legs over his lap. He ran his thumb along her ankle, slowly enough that she could feel each pass.
“How long?” she asked.
He considered. “I don’t know exactly.”
“That’s a very unhelpful answer.”
“I know.” He looked at her. “I kept finding things I wanted to tell you. Stupid things. Then when I had time, I didn’t want to call anyone else.”
She swallowed. “I nearly said it last weekend.”
“After you insulted my film?”
“Constructively.”
“That would have been confusing.”
She laughed and leaned her forehead against his. He smelled faintly of soap and the warm evening. For a while they stayed that way, neither speaking.
Later, in the bedroom, he caught the hem of her shirt with a questioning touch. She lifted her arms. The rest of the evening grew quiet and close, the door left half open behind them, the unfinished bookcase out of sight.
When she woke briefly in the night, his arm lay across her waist. She touched his hand. He moved in his sleep, drawing her nearer, and she settled against him with the words still new in her mouth.