"Kiss!"
Then two voices. Then ten.
"Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!"
The piano stopped. Margot heard it stop: Mr. Farrow, in the middle of a phrase, lifting his hands from the keys.
"Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!"
Wes looked at her from under the ridiculous pom-pom. In the narrow space his face was very near, and his eyes were doing the thing they did in meetings when a client said something foolish and he was deciding whether to be kind about it.
"Want to disappoint everybody?" he said. Teasing. Light. Holding the door open for her.
And she heard herself say it, softly, not cruelly, not even quite as a joke. It was the truest thing she had said to him in eighteen months.
"I thought that was your specialty."
He did not flinch. That was the thing she would remember. He took it the way you take a hand someone offers you on a staircase. Something passed over his face, recognition maybe, the look of a man handed a bill he had always known was coming. And then neither of them was laughing anymore.
They leaned in. It wasn't something either of them decided. It was more like gravity. His nose brushed hers. She could smell the winter on him, still, from outside, and the cedar, and the cider on her own breath. Her eyes closed. She felt his close too. She felt it, somehow, the way you feel someone go still beside you in the dark.
The chanting outside rose.
Somewhere, a hand, hers or his, she honestly never knew which, closed on the cable release.
The second flash.
The camera whirred. From the front slot, slowly, almost reluctantly, a print slid out: square, white-bordered, and entirely blank, a small pale window onto nothing at all, waiting.
* * *
When Margot opened her eyes, he was still there, an inch away, and they had not kissed.
She was sure of it. She would be sure of it later, too, when half of the fourteenth floor was sure of the opposite. The flash had gone off into the space between them, into that last inch, and the light had been so bright and so sudden that it had felt like a hand on her shoulder. Both of them had opened their eyes into it. Neither of them had moved.