After Hours

She didn't ask if you wanted to stay. She told you to sit — and you did.

The last guest left at eleven. Seraphine locked the gallery door with a click that echoed through the empty space, and I watched her reflection in the glass — tall, unhurried, that single gold chain catching the track lighting as she turned.

"You stayed," she said. Not a question.

"You asked me to."

"I didn't ask." A pause. The ghost of a smile. "I suggested. There's a difference."

She walked past the installations — a series of photographs that had made half the guests blush and the other half stare — and stopped in front of the final piece. A woman's hand gripping a bedsheet, knuckles white, shot in black and white so stark it felt like trespassing.

"This one," Seraphine said, "is about the moment just before. Not the act. The decision." She turned those pale grey eyes on me. "That's the interesting part. Don't you think?"

My mouth was dry. "Yes."

"Sit down." She gestured to the leather bench in the center of the room.

I sat.

She didn't join me. She circled. Slow, deliberate, heels ticking against the concrete floor like a metronome setting the pace of something I couldn't yet name.