“We can’t stay here. We’re too visible.”
She heard her breath whistle through her lips, at once relieved and disappointed. He pushed aside the curtain, holding it up to allow her to pass through and letting it drop behind them. In the three feet of space between the door and the curtain, it was too dark—only a sliver of light from the corridor slipped through beneath the door, and he was standing too close. She thought about extracting her wrist from his grip, but suspected that he might not relinquish it easily. Instead she reached out with her other hand to grasp the doorknob. It turned, but the door did not open. She tugged harder, bemused.
“It’s stuck,” she said. “I can’t—”
A laugh, warm and rich, tumbled over her. “It’s not stuck.”
Too close. He was much too close. She felt his breath above her ear, felt the press of his chest against her back.
“It must be stuck,” she heard herself say, in a flustered little voice. “It won’t open.” She gave the handle a tug to demonstrate.
“Jilly,” he said, a hint of amused condescension in his voice. “It’s not stuck. I’m holding it.”
“But why?” In the muted light, she looked up and saw the outline of his hand pressed against the door high above her head. “Robert and Nora—”
“Robert and Nora,” he said, “are kindly providing us with a bit of much-needed privacy.” His hand slipped down the door. His fingers pried hers away from the handle, and she heard the sharp snick of the lock turning.
Her breath caught in her throat. “We—we don’t need privacy,” she said, alarmed by the high pitch of her voice, alarmed by the gooseflesh that had risen at the back of her neck, where she could feel the heat of his body behind her.
“I beg to differ.” His voice was pitched low, the sort of soothing tone that she imagined might be used with a skittish animal.
Her breath whistled through her lips. Her palms turned clammy in her gloves, and her fingers curled reflexively, as if her gloves might slip straight off her arms. She tried to tell herself that it was fear that had caused it, fear that had put the tension in her shoulders, fear that made her breath catch and shudder. But as his hands crept over her shoulders, she knew it for a lie.
She marveled at how the tension in her shoulders faded beneath the pressure of his fingers, as if she had been waiting for him to ease it away. “Someone will know,” she whispered. “Someone will come to the door.”
He chuckled, and the sound seemed blunted by the darkness, as if it had been caught up into it and swallowed into nothingness. Even the murmur of the crowd outside was muffled by the thick curtain shielding them. “If someone does,” he said into the soft hair at the nape of her neck, “they will assume only that we have left the box.”