The ice machine sat at the end of the corridor like something the hotel was faintly embarrassed by — fluorescent, humming, lit whiter than every other light on the floor — and at two in the morning it was the only thing awake besides the exit signs.
She'd brought the plastic bucket down because the room was too hot and she was too far from sleep to care, and she was still holding it, empty, when the door at the far end opened and a man in an unbuttoned shirt came down the hall in bare feet, carrying the twin of it.
"It's broken on six," he said, which wasn't really information, more an opening. "Four works fine," she said, and neither of them turned back toward their own floor.
He fed the machine and it clattered and dropped, clattered and dropped again, and the two buckets sat under the chute not quite touching, close enough that the cold coming off the ice reached them both at once.
"Can't sleep either," she said. Not a question.
"Depends what either means."
The machine went quiet before either bucket was full, some interior decision made without consulting them, and the silence after had a different weight than the noise had — the kind that made her notice the carpet's pattern, the exact six inches between his shoulder and the wall.
Down the corridor the doors stood shut in one long identical row, each one a decision already made by somebody else about what happens at two in the morning, and neither of them looked toward either door. Hers. His.
She set her bucket down instead of picking it up. He didn't reach for his. The machine ticked once, cooling, and the two of them stayed a while longer in the fluorescent alcove, in no hurry to answer the only question either bucket had ever really been for.