She was the one who asked him to pull in — tipped her chin at the all-night wash glowing up out of the empty lot before he'd even eased off the gas, like the idea had been sitting in her all through dinner and she'd only now decided to spend it.
The arm came down behind the car with a thunk, that small industrial finality, the token already swallowed, the tires finding the track, and then there was nothing left for him to do but hold the wheel at ten and two for a car that no longer needed steering.
The first brushes hit the glass like a held breath let go, long blue strips slapping down from both sides at once, and the dash lights went soft and underwater, and she laughed once, short, into the dark.
SOAP, said the lit sign over the exit, and then it blinked out and RINSE took its place, and neither of them had moved an inch toward the other, which she was starting to understand was its own kind of motion.
His hand sat on the gearshift because there was nowhere else for a hand to go in a car left in neutral for the belt, and when hers came down over it, slow, like she was checking whether the metal had gone hot, he didn't turn his palm to meet her. He only let it stay, the two of them matched and still, watching foam climb the windshield in sheets gone violet where the tunnel lights caught them.
"You timed this," she said. Not quite a question.
"I did not," he said, which was true, and also not the point, and she let her thumb move once across his knuckles and then go quiet again, because stillness, it turned out, was the whole trick of the thing.
SPOT-FREE RINSE came up next in its small orange letters, and under it the brushes finally let go, spinning down to nothing, and the glass cleared in long, patient arcs, like something being allowed to remember what the outside looked like.
Then DRY, and the roar started, a wall of warm wind that made talking pointless and left looking at each other the only thing worth doing, her face lit amber, then dark, then amber again as the nozzles swept overhead.
The green EXIT sign woke above the tunnel mouth, and the belt let the car go loose into the open lot, and he did not shift into drive. He sat with her hand still over his, the engine idling under them both, the lot empty and lit gold all the way to the street.