I came in through the propped-back door and nobody had closed it, nobody ever closes it, and I took the smell with me: spilled beer gone flat, someone's cigarette out on the balcony, the sweet dying breath of a candle they lit hours ago and forgot. I lifted the edge of a red cup and it fell and rolled and I was already past it.
I touched the hair on the neck of a girl asleep against the arm of the couch and she shivered and pulled the blanket up and did not wake. I moved the smoke sideways so it curled. I found the two of them in the kitchen leaning close, talking low, and I carried her whisper straight into his face, warm, and he laughed, and I kept the laugh a moment and set it down in the hallway where no one heard it land.
They gather like this, pressed into one warm room, holding cups they will lose and phones they keep checking and each other's sleeves, staying, staying, as if the night could be kept if they just did not leave. I do not understand it. I came from a field forty miles off that smells of cut grass and I am going somewhere none of them will follow.
The door swung. Somebody slammed it against me and it did not matter, I was already in the stairwell, already carrying out the last of the music thinned to almost nothing, a smell of oranges from a peel on the counter, one word somebody said that I will set down over a parking lot they'll never see. They stayed.
I took what I could and I left, the way I always leave, before they even noticed the cold.