She came in from the dinner with one hand pressed flat to her collarbone, holding the blouse shut where the button at her breastbone had already let go. She had felt it give somewhere between the second course and the door, a thread worn thin by years of careful hand-washing, and had spent the rest of the night talking normally with her hand in her lap like nothing was wrong.
"Hold still," he said, before she had even finished explaining it, and went for the sewing tin on top of the bookshelf without being asked twice.
She held still. He did not ask her to take the blouse off, and she understood, the way you understand a thing from someone you have slept beside for fifteen years, that he meant to do it with her still in it — faster that way, and there was something in his face that wanted it that way too.
His grandmother had taught him this: two fingers always flat under the cloth, so the needle never once touched the skin beneath it. He said so under his breath while he threaded the needle by the lamp, more to steady his own hands than to tell her something she did not already know.
"Don't breathe," he said, when the needle was close, and she laughed once, low, and held the breath anyway, feeling the cool flat press of his knuckles against her sternum and the small, exact tug of thread through silk just above it.
There were no scissors on the side table, so when the button was on and sound he bent his head to her chest and closed his teeth around the thread, and she felt the warmth of his breath there a half-second before she felt it give.
"Done," he said, and did not lift his head right away, and his thumb stayed on the button he had just fixed, as if making sure of his own work, or not quite ready to call the job finished.
The evening was over. Nothing was waiting on the other side of it, and there was no one left to perform the night for. His fingers found the button again — not to check it this time — and began, slowly, to undo what he had only just sewn shut.