The neon at the end of the block was the last thing burning on the street, and Nora had been watching it through the high basement window while the wash ran. Pink buzz, bodega sign, nobody under it. Thursday, ten past eleven, and she should have locked the custom lab an hour ago.

She hadn't.

The last roll of the night sat by the sink in its little black cassette, and she knew whose it was before she checked the label. She knew the handwriting on every drop envelope by now, and his slanted caps especially, THURS printed in the corner like the day itself was the name. Seven weeks of Thursdays. She had developed his evenings the way she developed everyone's — in darkness, by touch, without thinking too hard about hands.

Tonight she was thinking about the hands.

Down to the last roll of the week, she had told herself at nine, and then home. Except home was an apartment where Mark's desk lamp burned past deadline and the bed stayed half made, a monument to mornings neither of them lingered in.

Somewhere between the stop bath and the wash, her white tank had given up. The wet tank had pressed against her chest and the water had gone straight through, and under the safelight everything was red anyway, so what was the point of tugging the apron straight. She left it tied loose on the one side. She was aware of leaving it. That was the part she refused to look at directly.

The yellow glove stayed on her right hand because it was easier than deciding to take it off. The left was bare but for the gold band, and the wash water found it, ran its length, dripped from it. Mark's mother's ring. Mark, who was on night edit and didn't call before deadline — she had stopped waiting on that in year two — but tonight the phone's silence had a weight to it, like something set down on the counter that she kept noticing.

She heard him on the iron stairs before she saw him. Every regular had his own step coming down; his came slow, a man giving himself two chances to turn around.

Behind her, the drying rack held nothing but its clips, ticking in the fan's breath. The front lights were off. The whole lab ran on red and patience.

The door was ajar. She had left it ajar. At the top of the stairs, the red EXIT sign glowed its one instruction; she had a story ready about the sticky hinge, and she let the story sit there, unused, because they both knew better.

"You're still open."

He stopped in the doorway, red light lying across his face like he had walked into a photograph still developing. The sharp bite of the chemistry reached him before the light had. His coat was wet at the shoulders; the street noise died behind him.

"Barely."
"The last roll," he said. "I can come back."
"It's not in the tank yet." She turned the cassette over in her fingers, once. "I saved it. Don't ask me why I saved it."

A lie and a small honest thing, both at once, and she watched him decide not to name what it was.

"Nothing left but the developing," she said. "That's the part that can't happen under white light. It takes two hands in the dark — you learn fast, or you lose the whole night. You can come in and put it in with me. The timer's off; nothing in here is counting. Or I hand you the envelope now, you take those stairs up, and tonight stays what Thursdays are."

The enlarger timer sat dark on its shelf. She had switched it off an hour ago, telling herself it was to spare the bulb. The clock in her chest was another instrument entirely, and it was running.

He didn't answer with words. He took his coat off and folded it over the counter's edge, like a man who intended to need it again later.

Continue this scene in Last Roll →

The Red

The inner door closed out the last of the ordinary light, and the darkroom took over — red on the trays, red on the tile, red along the wet line of her tank where she had stopped pretending not to notice. She snapped the glove off at last, one elastic pop, and felt absurd and electric doing it.

In here there was no counter to stand behind. No apron string to wind around a finger instead of answering a question. She set the film's leader into his fingers and laid her hands over his hands, and walked him through the first curl of the reel, steel whispering against steel. His breath had found her temple. She had not measured when it arrived.

"It only does this in the dark," she said.
"So do I," he said.

She laughed before she could stop it — a small, complicit sound she had never once made in this basement.

The ring was still on. She found that out in the dark too — her own knuckle, the hard circle of gold, louder under the safelight than it ever was in daylight. She left it where it was. One decision she refused to make tonight.

There was a version of her that was a good wife, tired at the end of a double shift, faithful in the boring ledger way. She could feel that version standing politely at the edge of the room with her keys in her hand, waiting to be walked home. Nora didn't turn around. In the dark, you are allowed one undeveloped thing.

The film hung between them, half-wound, light-shy, patient as a held breath. The tank waited on the shelf at his hip.

"You can lift it for me," she said. "Hold it steady while I wind."

She didn't move toward the shelf. Neither did he.

"Or," she said, "you pull the blind down first. It goes all the way."
"Nora."
"I know my name."

A breath. In a darkroom, that was all the truth needed to come up.

"Mark has never once seen me do this," she said. "Nobody has. Whatever this is."

Her hand went to the blind above the door — his hand was already there, or hers was; in the red she honestly couldn't have said whose.

"Well?" Her mouth was close enough to his jaw to feel the heat off it. "Which is it?"

Above them the neon buzzed on for no one.