She'd let the candle burn down to its last inch before she got in, so the room held only shapes — the pale curve of the tub, the black rectangle of the mirror, her own knees breaking the surface like two low hills she'd decided to keep to herself.
He found her by sound before he found her by sight: water moving, then stilling, then moving again in the particular rhythm that meant she wasn't washing anything. Just sitting in it. Just being somewhere that wasn't the two of them, for a while.
He didn't ask why she was up. He lowered himself to the tile instead, back against the cool porcelain, knees drawn to his chest, close enough that she could hear him breathing before either of them said a word.
"Couldn't sleep," she said, to the ceiling more than to him.
"I gathered," he said, and let that be the whole conversation for a while.
The water had gone from too hot to just right to, now, the particular cool that meant she should get out and wasn't going to. Some nights the leaving was the point. Tonight it was the staying.
She reached over the rim without looking and found the line of his jaw with a hand that was mostly water, cold where it left her and already warming against him. She didn't say anything to go with it. She let the hand say the thing instead.
He turned his head half an inch into it — the way a man turns toward something he isn't ready to admit he's been waiting for since he walked in.
Neither of them moved beyond that. The candle guttered once and steadied. The rest of the apartment kept its own separate stillness, indifferent to the six inches of cooling water between his shoulder and her wrist.
She didn't ask him to stay. She didn't have to. He'd already gone still in the particular way that meant staying, and the water, colder now with every minute, had stopped being any part of why either of them was still in that room.