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He does not move.

“I know,” he says. “Lot fifty-one, ten o’clock. I read the board.”

“Then you know more about me than I know about you.”

“Yes.” He is quiet for a moment. “You are meant to be down there being looked at. Why are you up here?”

“Because down there they look at my teeth, and you looked at my ear. That’s the short answer.” My breath is short and the dress is not helping. And I’m frightened, and I’d rather be frightened up here with the room working than down there with it not.

“And the long one?”

“Because if I go home I’ll sit in a cold shop with a man I love who is dying, and I’ll be quiet, and I’m bad at quiet. It gets into me.” The words come out faster than I can sort them. “So I’m here instead. Being loud, in a dead woman’s dress that doesn’t fit, talking at a man who won’t give me one fact about himself. And that’s restful. Everything else in my life is a fact I can’t do anything about.”

He crosses the room.

He does it without hurrying and it still takes less time than I expect, and then I have to tip my head back, and the cold comes off him before he has touched me.

“Ask me for something you can have,” he says.

My heart is going hard enough that I can feel it in the ribs of the dress. What I want to ask for is his mouth, and then his mouth lower, and I don’t.

“Take the mask off.”

“No.”

“You said something I could have.”

His hand comes up and stops short of my face. “Anything but that.”

I could argue. I want to argue. Instead I hear myself say, “Kiss me, then,” and the room hands it back to me too naked, and I have half a second to be appalled before he does it.

His mouth is cool, and it goes warm from mine.

He kisses like a man who has read about it. Careful for two seconds.

Then my hands get inside his coat and something in him gives all at once, like the winch, all the resistance and then none, and he has me against the wall with the stone cold through the back of the dress and his hand cupped at the base of my skull so I don’t crack it.

I make a sound into his mouth, and he goes rigid.

“Make that sound again,” he says.

“That wasn’t on purpose.” I am not embarrassed. I thought I would be.

“Do it anyway.”

He puts his mouth under my jaw where the pulse is, and I do it again, and I hear his breath go out of him. A man is losing his footing over a noise I made by accident. I want him to lose all of it.

The dress does not come off gracefully. A hook at the back defeats him, then me, then him again, and I end up bent forward with his hands working blind at my back while I laugh into his shoulder and tell him that if he tears it Katell will come up here personally.

Then it gives. Then I can breathe properly, which I have not done since I put the thing on.

His coat. His shirt. He is pale and he is cold, and a long raised line runs down one side of him, like the seam on a mold. It isn’t a scar. I don’t know what it is. I put my hand on it, and he catches my wrist, so I leave it.

“Sorry,” I say.

“Not for that.”

“The mask, and now this. How many more things can’t I touch?”