Three Minutes from the Reception

The band is doing something slow now — she can feel the bass note more than hear it, a low pulse coming through the wall behind the coat-check shelf. She has been feeling it for twenty minutes. That is why she is here. The corridor is fluorescent and narrow, coats ranked on both sides, the hangers tilting where guests have pulled things free.

No one is staffing the window. She counted on that. She counts on most things. Her clutch is small — ivory, borrowed, her mother's — and her right hand is already inside it before the door behind her has fully closed.

Her fingers know what they are looking for. She packed it this morning the way she packs anything she might need: without drama, without negotiation, as a simple fact of preparation. The bullet is smaller than her thumb. She has had it for two years.

She does not think of it as a luxury. She finds the shelf with her left hand and leans back against it. The edge is cool through the dress fabric — a thin ridge of laminate pressing across the backs of her thighs — and the contrast surprises her the way it always surprises her, the cold surface against the warmth she has been carrying since the ceremony. Since the vows, actually.

Since the specific moment she caught the groomsman's eye across the aisle and looked away first and felt the looking-away in her stomach. The band shifts. Something with horns now, distant applause rolling through the wall like weather. She has three minutes.

She knows this the way she knows train schedules and the time it takes to walk between terminals. Her sister will not notice she is gone for three minutes. After three minutes, someone will. Her right hand comes out of the clutch.

She holds it for a moment — just holds it, her thumb resting against the single button, the metal still carrying the temperature of her bag, which is the temperature of her palm, which is warmer than it should be for a room-temperature evening. A coat hanger shifts somewhere behind her. She does not move. The wanting has been specific all day.

Not vague, not ambient — specific, located, a pressure that sat just below her attention during the readings and sharpened during the first dance until she was counting the songs between now and an exit. She exhales. It comes out longer than she puts it in, unfolding in the fluorescent quiet. Her left hand finds the hem of the dress.

The fabric is light enough that it moves with almost no resistance, warm from hours against her skin, the ceremony wrinkles still pressed into the skirt like a record of the day she is briefly stepping out of. Her knees part — just enough, just the beginning of enough — and she feels the cooler corridor air against the inside of her thigh before anything else. The music pulses through the wall. She has not pressed the button yet.

Her thumb is on it.