The clasp at the back of her dress had been simple to fasten alone a hundred times, and tonight, with him standing right there, it would not close.
"Let me," he said, already reaching, and she turned her back to the mirror and gave it to him — the dress, the ten minutes they no longer had, the whole evening they'd planned since the reservation went in three weeks ago.
His fingers found the little hook and missed it, found it again. He wasn't hurrying. She watched him not hurry in the glass, and felt something in her chest slow down to match him.
"You're going to make us later than we already are," she said, no heat in it at all.
"I know." He got the clasp on the third try and didn't step back. His hands stayed where they'd landed, warm through the silk, and his mouth found the curve of her shoulder instead of the door.
She let her head tip, just slightly, toward him. In the mirror she could see both of them — his shirt still open at the collar, her lipstick perfect and pointless, the two of them standing still in a room they were supposed to already be leaving.
"The table's at eight," she said, which was not the same as saying they should go.
"They'll give it away." He said it like a fact he was glad of, and turned her, slow, until she was facing him instead of the glass.
Up close he still had the bow tie undone, hanging loose on either side of his open collar, and she found herself reaching for it the way she'd reach for anything half-finished, wanting to set it right and not quite starting.
"We could still make it," she said, hands at his collar, not moving toward the door.
"We could," he agreed, and neither of them moved toward it either, and somewhere past eight o'clock a hostess crossed a name off a list and gave the good table to someone else, and neither of them, for once, minded losing anything at all.
