By eleven the party had thinned to the kitchen and the cold end of the porch, and the piano in the front room stood forgotten, its lid propped open like a mouth left mid-sentence.
She crossed to it the way she used to, fifteen years ago, without quite deciding to, and sat, and her hands found the treble part before the rest of her had agreed to anything.
He appeared in the doorway holding two glasses he'd forgotten to hand off, and she didn't need to turn around to know he was smiling — she'd have heard it in the quality of his silence.
"You still remember your part," he said. Not a question. He set the glasses on the piano's ledge because there was nowhere else for them, and then there was nowhere else for him either, but the bench beside her.
He took the bass clef the way he always had, a half-beat behind, correcting himself into her tempo, and the bench — built for one person being polite about it — put his knee flush against hers.
They missed the entrance the first time and laughed about it in that particular hush a laugh gets in an empty room, and started again, and this time found it.
Where the parts crossed, bar eleven, always bar eleven, his hand passed under hers for the low notes and stayed a half second longer than the music required, her wrist grazing his knuckles, neither of them missing a beat and both registering exactly what the beat had cost.
By the second page his shoulder had found her shoulder and simply stayed, warm through two thin layers of cotton, and she let the phrasing go soft under her hands, because rushing it would only have ended it sooner.
Neither of them straightened when the last chord went quiet under the pedal. His hand left the music rather than the keys, and came to rest over hers, and the room held only the sound the strings make after the notes are gone — the sound that isn't struck, only allowed.
"We should have finished it years ago," she said, meaning the piece, meaning several other things she wasn't going to name tonight either, and he turned his head the half-inch it took to be closer than conversation, and didn't correct her.