The heat wave had broken nothing. Two in the morning and the apartment still held the day whole, the ceiling fan pushing the same warm air around in a slow, useless circle.
She found the kitchen lit before she found him in it — the refrigerator door standing open, its cold blue-white light the only thing awake in the whole dark apartment, laid flat across the tile and up one wall.
He didn't turn around. "Couldn't sleep either."
She crossed the floor in bare feet and stood where the cold air fell out of the open door, her tank top gone thin and clinging with the heat, and let it hit her like a change in weather.
He held a bottle by the neck, already sweating in his hand, and passed it back without being asked. It was cold enough to hurt going down, so she pressed the glass to her collarbone instead, and he watched her do that like he was memorizing it.
Neither of them reached to close the door. The compressor hummed on, patient and indifferent, spilling its cold over both of them while the rest of the apartment stayed close and airless at their backs.
His hand found hers on the bottle — not taking it, just resting there, his thumb tracing slow over her knuckles. For a while that was the whole of it: her spine against the counter's edge, his bare chest still damp from failing to sleep, the refrigerator light doing something unglamorous and perfect to both their faces.
"We should shut it," she said, and didn't move.
"In a minute," he said, and didn't either.
The hum went on. Somewhere past the window a car passed and didn't matter. His hand slid from hers to her wrist, unhurried, his mouth close enough to her temple that she felt the words before she heard them. The cold kept coming. For a long minute the whole of the night was just that — one white light, one low sound, and the two of them standing in the only cool place in the city, choosing, without quite deciding to, to stay in it a little longer.