Her key found the lock at ten past one, forty minutes past when the closing shift was supposed to let her go, and the whole ride home she had pictured this hallway dark and this apartment long asleep.
It wasn't. He was still up in the front room, no lamp lit, only the streetlight coming through the blinds in pale stripes across the floor, and when her key turned in the door he didn't reach for the switch.
She stood in the doorway a second longer than she needed to, coat still buttoned to the throat, waiting for her eyes to adjust or for him to say something first. "You didn't have to wait up."
"I know." He didn't get up right away. He just watched her from where he sat, the dark doing something for him that the lamp never could.
She crossed the room the way you cross a room you've memorized — past the near arm of the couch, three steps, four — and he met her before she reached the last of them.
His hands went to the top button of her coat before either of them said anything else, working it loose slow, like a thing he'd been thinking about since before her shift started.
"Long one," she said, and let her shoulders go under his hands, the wool gone damp and cold from a rain she hadn't noticed until just now, standing still in it.
"Heard it start around eleven." His mouth found her temple instead of the lamp cord hanging six inches from his hand, and she understood, all at once, that this was on purpose — that he hadn't wanted the bulb, hadn't wanted her walking into a room where she'd be seen before she was held.
The coat slid the rest of the way off and he caught it in one motion before it reached the floor, like he'd practiced the catch alone in the dark for the better part of an hour.
The lamp stayed exactly where it always stood, cord looped over the shade, switch untouched. Neither of them moved toward it. Some arrivals only survive in the dark, and both of them, without a word between them about it, had already agreed which one this was.