I thought:ask me. Please. Just ask me.
He didn't.
He stood across the room and was very still and looked at me with the look , the one from the dinner table, the one I'd been losing threads over since October, the look of a man who wasn't trying to look away , and he did not ask me anything and he did not move and he did not give me the thing I had been waiting two years for and I was so tired.
I held his gaze for one second.
Just one.
Then I turned to Kieran.
It was brief. That is the first thing. Brief and simple and over before it had properly started , Kieran, surprised, present, making a small questioning sound, and then the warm uncomplicated press of a mouth that meant nothing, nothing, nothing. Kieran kissed back the way friendly, slightly drunkpeople kissed at parties , easy, light, already smiling, no weight to it.
It lasted maybe four seconds.
I pulled back. Kieran was grinning in a slightly baffled, entirely unbothered way, the face of a man who has been kissed at a party and is fine with it. "Okay," he said. Not a question. Just , acknowledging a data point.
"Sorry," I said.
"I'm not," he said, easily, and turned back to the room, because Kieran was a person who moved through the world without accumulating drama, which I respected enormously.
I turned back.
Felix was gone.
Not across the room. Not near the window. Not anywhere in the warm amber noise of Reeves' apartment. The door to the hallway was closed. The space where Felix had been standing was just , space.
I stood in the middle of the party.
The room continued around me, Mivo laughing, music, someone telling a story I had heard before. Warm and loud and alive in the way I had been alive in it twenty minutes ago, before.
I picked up my jacket from the back of the chair.
"Shay," Kieran, behind me.
"I'm good," I said. "I'll text you."
I went to find my coat.
The hallway outside was quiet. The building hallway , fluorescent, impersonal, the corridor outside someone'sborrowed apartment at ten,thirty on a Friday. The door to the stairwell was just closing.
I didn't run. I walked quickly, with purpose, the way you walked when you were not running but also not walking, and I hit the stairwell door and went down two flights and came out into the lobby and through the glass I could see the parking lot and Felix's coat.
The cold hit me when the door opened.
It was the late,season cold , the specific kind, clarifying, the kind that made everything feel more precise. I had stood in this cold before, outside a bar three blocks from a hotel, walking with our shoulders close and too much unsaid.
Felix was at his car. Coat half on , one arm in, the other hanging, the specific configuration of a man who had left before he'd finished leaving. His keys were in his hand. His jaw was tight in the way it got when he was holding something at a controlled distance and the distance was narrowing.
He heard the door.
He turned.
We looked at each other across the parking lot.
The cold was very clear. The lot was quiet , just the ambient noise of the city, a few cars, the distant sound of the party two floors up, muffled now to something almost unrecognizable.
I crossed the lot.
