Front Row

The rain had started while the coffee was still warming. June set two mugs on the kitchen table and slid Hollis the one with the chip in the rim, the way she always did.

“Say it back to me,” she said. “Out loud. So we both hear it in this room and not just in our heads.”

Hollis turned the mug once before he drank. “The word is cedar. Anybody says it, everything stops. No debate in the hallway.”

“Good.” She sat across from him, bare feet on the chair rung. “And you stay in the chair unless I say otherwise.”

“Unless you say otherwise.” A smile pulled at one side of his mouth. “Which I will pretend is not a terrifying amount of power to hand a court reporter.”

“You handed it to me in the dark six years ago. I’m only writing it down now.” She tapped the table with one finger, counting. “I look at you whenever I want to. You don’t have to perform being fine. If you want my eyes, you get them.”

“I want them.” He said it plain, then flushed anyway. “And the night ends with us. Down here, or up there, or on the couch with bad television. Just us.”

“Just us.” June reached across and hooked two fingers in his. “Half joking doesn’t mean half true. Cedar. Chair. Eyes. Us.”

“Cedar, chair, eyes, us.” He squeezed once and let go. “I’m going to move it before I lose my nerve to the furniture.”

The old reading chair lived in the corner by the pantry, green fabric gone soft at the arms. Hollis got his shoulder under the back and walked it through the kitchen, the legs knocking once on the threshold. Upstairs, the bedroom window was already streaked. He set the chair square to the glass, stepped back, and frowned.

“That’s the street,” he said. “You’d be looking at the neighbor’s gutter.”

“Romantic,” June said from the doorway.

He turned it toward the bed. The angle put the seat half behind the dresser. He tried again, dragging it a foot left, then another, until the window light fell across the cushion and the bed stayed in the open.

“There,” he said. “I can see the whole room. And you can see me.”

June came in and put her hand on the chair back, testing that it didn’t rock. “Twice wrong. Third time you got it.”

“Engineer’s luck.” He was still pink at the ears. “Or stubbornness.”

“Same thing, on you.” She looked at the chair a moment longer than she needed to, then at him. “Come sit with me while I finish.”

In the bathroom he took the edge of the tub, knees apart, hands loose between them. The mirror light was the harsh one. June stood at the sink in a dark dress she already owned, nothing bought for the night, and worked a small gold hoop through one ear. The other hoop waited on the porcelain.

“Tell me what you’re feeling,” she said. “Not the version for company. The one for me.”

Hollis watched the hoop catch. “Scared,” he said. “Glad. Sure. All at the same time, which is rude of them.”

“Scared of what.”

“That I’ll want it and then not know what to do with my hands. That I’ll want it and you’ll think I wanted less of you.” He met her eyes in the mirror. “I’m sure I want it. I’ve been sure since I said it. The scared part is just noise on top.”

June fitted the second hoop and turned. “Do you want to stop?”

“No.” He didn’t look away. “I mean that. Ask me again later if you need to. The answer’s no.”

“All right.” She stepped between his knees. The tub edge was cool through her dress where her leg brushed it. “Ask me.”

“Do you want to stop?”

“No.” Her mouth tilted. “I’ve wanted to know what this is like since the first coffee. Not as a favor. For me. I keep waiting to feel smaller about it and I don’t.”

He nodded, once, like a man checking a gauge and finding it true. His hand came up and rested at her waist, over the dress, and stayed there. She leaned in and kissed his forehead, brief, and felt him breathe out against her throat.

“Rafe will be early,” he said. “He was early to all three coffees.”

“Then we’d better be people with mugs in our hands and not two statues in a bathroom.” She touched his cheek, then let him go. “Come down when you’re ready. Or come down now. I like you now.”

He came down now.

The knock landed while the kettle clicked off. Rain ticked the porch roof. June opened the door and Rafe stood there with his jacket dark across the shoulders, hair damp at the ends, a paper bag of nothing in his hands because he hadn’t brought anything. They had been clear about that.

“Wet,” he said, easy. “Portland kept its promise.”

“Come in before the porch does too.” She took his jacket and hung it on the hook by the door, where it dripped onto the mat. “Coffee’s on. Kitchen’s this way. You remember.”

“I remember the yellow tile.” He wiped his shoes and followed her. Hollis was already pouring a third mug. Rafe stopped in the doorway a second, taking the room in the way he had at the coffee shop, unhurried, then crossed and accepted the mug with both hands. “Thanks. Smells like the good stuff.”

“It’s the same tin,” Hollis said. “We don’t have a company tin.”

“Even better.” Rafe sat where June pointed, the chair that faced the window over the sink. Rain stitched the glass. For a minute they were only three people with hot cups, the talk sliding back into the groove it had worn over three afternoons: a set that wouldn’t stand up, a ferry schedule Hollis didn’t mind explaining, a transcript June had typed until her wrists ached and then refused to talk about because the case wasn’t hers to tell. Nobody performed. Rafe laughed at Hollis’s story about a stuck ramp and didn’t rush the quiet after.

When the mugs were half down, Rafe set his on the table and looked at Hollis directly. Kind, not careful in a way that made a show of care.

“I’m going to ask you plain,” he said. “Same as I asked her when she stepped out for the restroom that second time, and same as I asked you in the parking lot. Are you still in? Tonight. Here. Not because anybody’s waiting on an answer you already gave.”

Hollis’s ears went red again. He didn’t hide it. His hand stayed on his mug, steady. “Yes,” he said. “I’m in. I want to be in the room. I want to see her. I want you to know I’m glad you’re here, not just allowing it.”

June watched her husband’s mouth shape the yes. Something in her chest, which had been braced since the chair wouldn’t sit right, let go and stayed down. She reached under the table and found Hollis’s knee, a press through his trousers, and left her hand there.

“Good,” Rafe said. He looked at June. “And you. Still your night to steer.”

“It is.” She heard how even her voice was, and liked it. “I know the word. So does he. So do you.”

“Cedar,” Rafe said, and drank, and didn’t make a joke of it. “I’m not in a hurry. Coffee’s good. Rain’s doing its job. Whenever you want to stand up, you stand up. If you don’t, I’ll dry my jacket and go home with a story about yellow tile.”

Hollis huffed a laugh, short and real. “Stay for the coffee at least. The tile’s not that interesting.”

They did. Another half mug. June told them about a judge who tapped his pen in perfect four-four time and never noticed. Rafe admitted he built a staircase once that sang when you stepped on the third tread, and the director had called it a feature. Hollis listened with his chin on his hand, blush fading and returning whenever June’s thumb moved on his knee. The want sat in the room with them, not named every minute, visible in how none of them checked a phone, in how Rafe’s eyes came back to June’s mouth and then, deliberately, to Hollis, including him in the look.

June felt it settle into her hands. She wanted the stairs. She wanted the chair by the window occupied by the man who had asked for it. She wanted to know, for herself, what her mouth did when another man was close and her husband was not down the hall waiting to be told later.

She stood.

The chair legs scraped once. Both men looked up. June went to Hollis first. She put her hand on his face, thumb along his cheekbone, and kissed him the way she kissed him when the house was only theirs. He answered it. His hand came up into her hair, not grabbing, and his other hand found her wrist where it rested against his jaw. She felt the warm skin of his palm, the slight shake he didn’t apologize for, and kissed him again, deeper, until the kitchen narrowed to coffee and rain and the sound he made in his throat.

When she drew back, his eyes were bright. Glad. Nervous. Sure. She kept her hand on his face a second longer so he would have that, too.

Then she held out her other hand to Rafe.

He rose without fuss. His fingers closed around hers, a plain grip, nothing owed in it. She didn’t kiss him. Not yet. The kiss she had given was Hollis’s, and the night could still hold whatever came next on the other side of a word. Rafe’s thumb rested across her knuckles. Hollis stood, chair creaking, and June transferred her free hand from his cheek to his wrist, a light circle of fingers, so he was in the line of them and not behind it.

“Upstairs,” she said. “The chair’s by the window. You put it there.”

“I did,” Hollis said. His voice had gone low. “Third try.”

“Lead if you want,” Rafe said to her. “I’ll follow. He can walk with us.”

June nodded. She kept Rafe’s hand and Hollis’s wrist and started for the hall. The stairs rose at the end of it, wood worn pale in the middle of each tread, the banister cool when her elbow brushed it. Rain worked at the landing window. At the foot of the stairs she stopped, one foot on the first step, and looked back.

Hollis was right there, close enough that his shoulder nearly touched Rafe’s, close enough that she could still feel both of them in her hands. He came up to the chair he had asked for, blush high, mouth soft from her kiss, eyes on her like the whole point of the evening had finally stood up and walked.

“Still yes?” she said, because she wanted to hear it in this smaller space.

“Still yes,” Hollis said.

Rafe’s hand tightened once, a question without words. June answered by taking the next step, drawing them with her. The three of them left the kitchen light behind. At the turn of the stairs Hollis’s fingers found hers where they circled his wrist, and he held on, included, glad, following his wife up toward the window and the chair and whatever she chose to do when they got there.