The rule was hers, technically, though he was the one who actually held to it: no touching until the game ended, not a hand, not a foot, nothing, because otherwise — her words, from the first week they tried this — nobody in this house would ever finish a game.
Eleven minutes now on a single move. She had stopped pretending to read her book around minute six and taken up watching the lamp lay a slow gold line down the side of his jaw instead, which he had either not noticed or decided not to give her the satisfaction of noticing.
She sat cross-legged on the rug in a white shirt of his, the cuffs rolled twice and still loose past her wrists, the hem pooled in her lap, one bare heel hooked over the rug's frayed edge as if she might need the traction later.
A clock ticked somewhere past the doorway, ordinary and unbearable. His knight hung an inch above the board, held there by a decision he refused to rush even for her.
"You're not thinking anymore," she said. "You're just making me wait."
He didn't look up. "Is there a difference."
There wasn't, not really — not with her whole body keeping the clock's time instead of her own, not with him three feet away and a rule built for exactly this.
She reached out, not for him, that would end it outright, and set one finger against her own king, and pushed.
The king tipped, turned a half-circle on its rim, and stopped. "You win," she said, though he hadn't, though the knight still hung over a square he'd never chosen.
He looked up at that. Whatever he saw in her face cost him the rest of the eleven minutes in about one second, and he came across the board on his knees, the pieces going with him, pawns skating off the rug's edge, her king rolling away under the sofa, out of the lamp's reach, to lie on its side in the dark like a thing already conceded.