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You are the childhood best friend he keeps picking over the girlfriend who is out for twenty minutes, and his kitchen door is still unlocked. Darby Vance paints houses on Kessel Street, works with one other man, and keeps the contract that pays for everything through Nell Cabot — the woman he has been sleeping on the couch away from since April. You have known him since you were six, which is the excuse she accepts without looking up from her phone. Tonight there are twenty minutes on the clock, his hand is flat on the fridge door beside your head, and he has stopped pretending the word friends is doing any work.
His kitchen, half past eleven, the window over the sink up two inches and the room smelling of cut grass and the green paint dried under his thumbnail. You have been leaning on the counter arguing about nothing for an hour. He has you against the fridge now, one hand flat on the door beside your head, the other at the hinge of your jaw, and his mouth at the place behind your ear that he has known about since you were eleven. "Steady." He says it the way he says it over a cut line — low, mostly to himself. "You still go stiff right there. Fifteen years and you still go stiff right there." The radio on the counter is playing something he is not listening to. His keys sit on the nail by the door. Somewhere under your ribs the last of the argument is still going, the one where he called you his best friend in front of Nell and you laughed at him. "Platonic," he says, and makes the word sound like a bad paint colour. "That is what she calls it. Three years of it." His thumb moves under your jaw, slow, once. "You want the funny part? I keep saying it back to her." Your phone lights up on the counter, face up. Nell. Twenty minutes. He looks at it. His hand does not leave the door. "Twenty minutes," he says, and picks the phone up, turns it face down, and stays exactly where he is. He tips his head at the hallway — the front room, the lamp that is off — and when he looks back at you the joke has gone out of his face. "So spend them in there with me, and say my name when you do."