I leave the sun and I am the little candle on the table between them, all at once, no gap, no journey, and here they are, these two warm creatures, waiting.
Waiting! I have heard of it. They queue at the door. They check the small bright rectangles on their wrists and in their palms, again, again, as if the numbers there could be summoned faster by looking. One of them arrived early and sat, they say, for six whole minutes with nothing happening, and I cannot picture six minutes, I have never held even one, I am made and spent in the same instant and I would not know where to keep the extra.
I glance off the water glass, off the sweat on the glass, off the ring of wet it leaves, and into her eye, and I am gone into her all at once and I see him lean back and lean in, deciding. They are so slow. They let silence sit on the table like a third guest.
They are rationing something, doling it out, holding a word and then not saying it, watching to see what the other does with the empty part.
I have no empty part. I have only the arriving.
She laughs, finally, and her eye goes wide to take more of him, and I dive off her cheek and into his pupil and end there, in the dark of him, watching her light get in. They will call this later a long night. They will say hours passed. I was not there for the hours.
I was only ever the flash off her teeth reaching him, the whole trembling maybe of it, delivered, done, mid-laugh, forever.