The house had never been this quiet. Not with the car pulling out of the driveway for a dorm four hours away. Not with twenty years of someone else's music going out the door in duffel bags, mid-song, and not coming back.
They hadn't touched the dishes. Twenty-two years of birthdays had taught them not to leave a mess overnight, and tonight the habit broke for a different reason — neither of them had moved from the counter since the taillights turned the corner.
His phone sat propped against the fruit bowl, still playing something from a wedding-era playlist he hadn't opened in years. A song found itself. Neither of them reached to skip it.
"Dance with me," he said, and it came out plainer than he meant it to — no joke folded in to soften it, the kind of sentence he'd have needed three drinks to say straight, twenty years ago.
She looked at him the way she used to look at him across a bar, before there was a mortgage or a kid or a shared last name — unhurried, assessing, like she hadn't already decided.
She set the dish towel down and crossed the linoleum, and he felt the old current move through the room the second her hand found his shoulder. Same current. Just with twenty-two years of insulation stripped off it.
He pulled her in by the small of her back, closer than the song required. She let him. Her breath caught somewhere he felt more than heard.
No one in the house to overhear them not talking. No one down the hall to interrupt anything. Just the kitchen light, and the two of them standing a half-step from remembering exactly who they'd been before they were anyone's parents — neither one moving to close it.