I stopped a few feet away.
His jaw was tight. His eyes were doing the thing , the look, the one he was bad at not having, but underneath it something new, something that wasn't the dinner table look or the hotel room look. Something that had more edges.
"You should go back in," he said. His voice was even. Extremely, effortfully even.
"Okay," I said. I didn't move.
He looked at his keys.
"Felix," I said.
"Shay,"
"That was nothing."
"I know."
"It meant nothing."
"I know that." The words came out with the slight excess pressure of someone saying a thing they knew was true and found no comfort in. He looked up. Looked at me with the look and the edges. "I know."
"Then why did you leave."
He didn't answer.
The cold moved through the parking lot. Somewhere above us, the party continued , muffled laughter, the bass frequency of music, the ordinary noise of people having a good time in a warm room.
"Felix," I said. Quiet now. Not pushing , just asking. The same question I had been asking, in one form or another, since a hotel room in October. "Why did you leave."
He was looking at his keys again.
The parking lot was very still.
I waited.
Chapter Twelve
Felix
I had a system for leaving parties.
It was not complicated. It involved locating the host, delivering a brief and genuine thanks, retrieving coat and keys in that order, and exiting without the production that some people made of goodbyes , the circuit of the room, the prolonged farewells, the three separate attempts to leave that somehow took forty minutes. I had the exit down to four minutes on a slow night. It was efficient. It was clean. It respected everyone's time.
I had left Reeves' party in approximately ninety seconds with my coat half on and no goodbye to anyone.
I was aware this was not the system.
I was also aware, standing in the parking lot with my keys in my hand and the cold coming off the pavement and the muffled bass of the party filtering down through two floors of building, that I had been standing here for three minutes and had not yet gotten into my car, which was also not the system, and which was because some part of me , the part that had been dismantling systems in small increments for four years , had known the door would open.
It opened.
I looked at my keys.
His footsteps crossed the lot. Not running. Shay never ran at things , he walked toward them with the specific, unhurried purpose of someone who had already decided and was just covering the distance. I had always found this quality either admirable or catastrophic depending on what he was walking toward.
Currently: catastrophic.
He stopped a few feet away.
