Alex got to the party at nine with her lipstick already gone and her feet already sore, when it was still a party. By eleven it was a room full of people who had run out of conversation and were waiting for permission to leave, and the champagne had gone flat, and somebody had put on a countdown with no sound, so every time the numbers changed it felt like the room was counting down to an obligation.
Sam was in the kitchen. Of course she was. Sam had always been in the kitchen at parties, leaning against the counter with a drink she never finished, hosting from the corner.
“Hi,” Alex said.
“Hi.”
Ten years of no contact compressed into two syllables. Sam looked the same and entirely different. She’d cut her hair. She was wearing a ring on her thumb, not the wedding ring finger.
“Mom’s fine,” Sam said, before Alex could ask. “She asks about you. She still has the photo from graduation up.”
“How is that fair. You get to go first.”
Sam laughed, and it was the same laugh — Alex had forgotten the exact shape of it and was annoyed to find it exactly where she left it.
The party died in stages. First the older people left, then a couple had a low argument in the hall, then the music was turned off and the countdown on the TV became the only light in the room besides the fairy lights still up from Christmas.
At 11:58 Sam said, “I’m going to get some air,” and went out to the porch, and Alex followed her, because she had been following her all night in a way she hoped was subtle and knew it wasn’t.
The porch looked out over the neighbour’s pool, which had a light on at the bottom, so the water glowed. Fireworks started up somewhere two blocks over. The clock on the porch said 11:59.
“Your resolution texts are going to come in,” Sam said. “Everyone’s always so ambitious on the first.”
“I deleted those.”
“Look at you.”
“I’m trying something else this year.”
The countdown finished. There was a cheer from inside, muffled. The fireworks kept going, green then gold then nothing.
Sam said, “Happy new year, Alex.”
Alex said, “Sam.”
And then neither of them said anything for a while, and the silence did the work, and Sam stepped in and kissed her on her own front porch like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.
The house was old and the stairs creaked in the exact pattern Alex remembered, and Sam’s childhood bedroom was still Sam’s bedroom: the twin bed, the shelf of horse books, the glow-in-the-dark stars that had faded to ghosts of themselves.
“Your mom hasn’t changed a thing.”
“She won’t. I’ve offered to buy her a whole new mattress and she says it’s ‘still good.’”
“It’s not still good.”
“It’s not still good,” Sam agreed, and pushed Alex down onto it.
It wasn’t graceful. The bed was too small for two adults and Alex’s elbow found the wall and Sam laughed into her neck, and then stopped laughing.
The thing about being with someone you used to love is that your body remembers the shortcuts. Where the ticklish patch was. The particular place on her hip. How she liked to be held down — just enough, exactly there. Alex had spent the last decade assuming that knowledge had expired, and here it was, still working.
Sam got her hand under Alex’s shirt and stopped. “Do you want—”
“Yes. God. Yes.”
“This is a bad idea.”
“It absolutely is.”
“Okay,” Sam said, and did it anyway.
They knew each other too well for it to be fast. Sam got her out of her jeans and down onto the narrow mattress and put her mouth between Alex’s legs, and Alex had to put both hands over her own face because she had forgotten how quickly Sam found it — the flat of her tongue and then the point of it, patient, unhurried, exactly where it had always been. The bed was too small and Alex’s heel was against the wall and neither of them did anything about it.
When Alex came the first time she came with her fist in her own mouth to keep quiet. Sam came up grinning. “Don’t you dare say anything,” Alex said, and Sam said, “I wasn’t going to say a word,” and then she was on top of her with her fingers replacing her mouth, two of them and then a third. Sam fucked her slow, then not slow. It was too much and Alex told her so. Sam didn’t stop.
They were slow and half-laughing and then not laughing at all, and at some point Sam’s hand was over Alex’s mouth because the walls were thin and her mother was asleep down the hall, and they were both twenty-two again in the worst and best way, and Alex came a second time with her face turned into the pillow and Sam’s forehead against her shoulder, both of them shaking, the glow stars doing nothing at all to light the room.
In the morning the house smelled like coffee and her mother’s radio. Alex’s thighs were sticky and her mouth tasted like the inside of a champagne bottle, and there was a mark on her collarbone that her scarf wouldn’t cover, and she didn’t adjust the scarf.
“Don’t,” Sam said.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t say ‘so what happens now.’ It’s morning. We’ve got coffee. Let’s not ruin it with a plan.”
Alex looked at her. In the daylight she looked tired and real and not at all like a resolution.
“Okay,” she said. “But I’m stealing a shirt.”
“That’s the oldest move in the book.”
“I’m aware. It has a strong track record.”
Sam drove her to the station at noon. The town was doing its January thing: everyone hungover, everyone friendly, the pavements grey. At the platform, Sam got out of the car and stood with her hands in her pockets and said, “I’ll text you.”
“You didn’t text me for ten years.”
“I was busy.”
“Being stubborn.”
“Being stubborn,” Sam agreed.
The train came. Alex got on. She was wearing Sam’s shirt under her coat, and the ring on Sam’s thumb had been, she noticed, on the hand that touched her face at midnight, and she didn’t know yet whether it meant anything, and for the first time in a decade she was willing to find out.
