Midnight Ember

The bottle of cheap bourbon slipped from my fingers and hit the kitchen tile with a sound like a gunshot. Glass sprayed across the floor, amber liquid pooling around the shards, and I stood there in my bare feet with my heart hammering because I knew exactly who was going to come through that door.

I didn't have time to clean it up.

The door swung open. Maya stood on the threshold in a rain-soaked trench coat, her dark hair plastered to her temples, drops of water sliding down her neck and disappearing into the collar. She looked at me. Then at the broken bottle. Then back at me.

"You've got to be kidding," she said.

"I was reaching for a glass."

"With your hands?"

"It slipped."

She stepped inside and closed the door behind her, and the small apartment felt smaller. That was the thing about Maya. She took up space without trying. She'd been doing it since we were twelve years old and she'd beaten me in every science fair for six consecutive years. Since high school when she'd argued her way onto the debate team as a freshman and demolished seniors. Since college when she'd told me, at a party neither of us wanted to attend, that I was wasting my potential and she was tired of watching it happen.

We hadn't spoken in eight months.

She hung her coat on the hook by the door, and I noticed her hands were shaking. Not from cold. Maya didn't get cold. She got angry, and she got determined, and she got that particular expression she was wearing right now, the one that meant she'd made a decision and God help anyone standing in her way.

"You should sit down," she said.

"I'm fine standing."

"You're bleeding."

I looked down. A crescent of glass had opened a thin line across the top of my foot, and blood was mixing with the bourbon on the floor. I hadn't felt it.

"Shit."

"Sit."

I sat. On the edge of my couch, which was really just a futon I'd never bothered to replace, because replacing furniture required a level of adult investment I hadn't gotten around to. Maya found a towel in my kitchen, wet it under the tap, and crouched in front of me. She pressed the cloth to my foot without asking permission. Her fingers were cold and certain.

"This is going to sting."

"I know."

She looked up at me. Her eyes were the same brown they'd always been, but something in them had shifted. Softer, maybe. Or maybe I was projecting. I'd been projecting things onto Maya Chen since I was old enough to know what wanting felt like.

"Why are you here?" I asked.

"Because I'm tired."

"Of what?"

"Of not being here."

She said it without looking at me, her attention fixed on the cut on my foot. The rain kept hitting the window in sheets. My apartment smelled like bourbon and wet wool and the faint lavender of whatever soap she used. I wanted to say something clever. I wanted to tell her she had terrible timing. I wanted to tell her she'd ruined my evening, that I'd been perfectly content drinking alone and feeling sorry for myself, that her presence was an intrusion I hadn't asked for.

None of that was true.

"You could've called," I said.

"You wouldn't have answered."

She was right. I wouldn't have.

Maya stood up and tossed the towel into the sink. She surveyed my apartment the way she surveyed everything, quickly and without sentiment. The dishes piled in the drying rack. The stack of unopened mail on the counter. The single framed photo on the shelf, the two of us at seventeen, arms around each other at a bonfire the summer before everything got complicated.

"You look like hell," she said.

"Thanks."

"I mean it. When's the last time you ate something that wasn't delivered in a paper bag?"

"Thursday."

"Today is Thursday."

"Then I guess it's been a while."

She opened my refrigerator. I watched her assess the contents, which were: half a jar of pickles, three cans of beer, a sad lemon, and a box of baking soda that had been in there since I moved in. She closed the door and turned to face me, and there it was again, that expression. The one that said she'd made a decision.

"I'm going to make you dinner," she said.

"You don't have to do that."

"I know I don't have to."

She opened cabinets until she found a pot, filled it with water, set it on the stove. She moved through my kitchen like she'd been there a hundred times, and she had, once. Before. Back when we were still speaking. Back when she'd show up unannounced on Sunday mornings with coffee and bagels and complaints about her law firm, and I'd pretend to be annoyed and make room for her on the futon, and we'd spend the whole day arguing about movies and music and whether it was possible to be truly honest with another person. She'd said no. I'd said yes. We'd never resolved it.

"You're staring," she said.

"You're in my kitchen."

"I'm making you dinner. There's a difference."

She found a box of pasta in the back of a cabinet, held it up like a trophy. I hadn't known it was there. She boiled the water, salted it with a pinch from a nearly empty shaker, and stood with her back to me while the pasta cooked. The rain had softened to a drizzle. The apartment felt warmer, or maybe that was just the steam rising from the pot.

"Why now?" I asked.

She didn't turn around. "Because I got tired of being angry."

"At me?"

"At everything."

She stirred the pasta. I watched the muscles in her shoulders move under her thin sweater, and I remembered what it felt like to touch her there, the curve of her back, the warmth of her skin. We'd only done it once. One night, three years ago, after her father's funeral. She'd shown up at my door in a black dress and I'd held her and one thing had led to another and in the morning she'd left before I woke up. We'd never talked about it. We'd gone back to being friends, then to being enemies, then to being strangers.

The pasta was done. She drained it, found two bowls, divided it evenly. There was no sauce, so we ate it plain, sitting on opposite ends of the futon with our knees almost touching. It was the best thing I'd eaten in months.

"I don't know how to do this," she said, her mouth full.

"Do what?"

"Be here without wanting to fight you."

"You could try not fighting me."

"I don't know if I know how."

I set my bowl on the floor. She watched me, her fork paused halfway to her mouth. The rain had stopped completely now, and the apartment was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the sound of our breathing.

"Then we figure it out," I said. "Or we don't. But you're here now, and I'm not going to pretend I want you to leave."

She set her bowl down too. Her hand found mine on the cushion between us, and her fingers were still cold, but they curled around mine like they belonged there. Like they'd been waiting.

"Okay," she said.

And that was it. That was the whole decision, the whole turn of the night, the thing that would change everything. She didn't kiss me. Not yet. But she didn't let go either.