The photo booth sat in the back corridor past the restrooms, a relic nobody had unplugged, and she'd fed it a five just to have four seconds, four times, entirely to herself.
She was thirty-two and three drinks into a night that had started as someone else's birthday and become, an hour ago, only her own. The curtain was heavy velvet, dark green gone nearly black with age, and she pulled it shut behind her like a door.
The first flash caught the curtain opening instead of closed — a stranger's hand, then his face, leaning in to ask if the thing even took cards anymore — and by the time the light died he was half inside the frame, startled, not yet sorry.
"Well," she said, before he could apologize his way back out, "now you have to stay for the other three."
He didn't ask if she meant it. He sat, the bench narrow enough that there was no way to do it without their knees finding each other, and offered his name. She didn't use it.
Three seconds between flashes, the machine's one mercy and its one cruelty — long enough to notice something, not long enough to decide what to do about it. Frame two: her shoulder had found his. Frame three: his hand had found the bench behind her, not touching, just there, the way a decision sits in a room before anyone says it out loud.
The fourth flash went off a beat after both of them had stopped pretending to watch the lens — her hand at his open collar, his face already turned toward hers, the white light catching motion instead of a pose.
The strip dropped into the slot with its small mechanical sigh. Three clean frames and one bright blur, the fourth reduced to a smear of skin and collar that could have meant anything, could have been read a dozen ways, told nothing and everything at once.
She tore it along the perforation and kept the bottom half, the blur, holding the top three out to him without quite letting go. "Yours," she said. "I'm keeping the one only I know how to read."