the landing

june 20, 2026

They made it exactly to the top of the stairs before it came apart.

It had been coming the whole drive home, in the particular silence of two people each rehearsing. Dana got the key into the lock and that was as far as the night got to being ordinary.

“You’re not even going to say it,” Marcus said behind her. Not a question.

“Say what.” She didn’t turn around.

“Whatever you’ve been chewing since Kessler’s. You’ve got the jaw.”

“I have a jaw now.”

“You’ve had it for an hour.”

She turned around then, on the landing, one foot still on the top stair, and the thing she’d been holding got out before she’d decided to spend it. “You let him say it. ‘Dana doesn’t really do ambition.’ Right across the table. And you laughed.”

“He was joking -”

“You laughed, Marcus.”

“What was I supposed to -”

“One word. Anything. You had the whole table and you picked his side and then you drove us home like I was the one being difficult.”

“Maybe I laughed because it’s true.” It came out of him fast and clean, the way the worst ones do, already gone before he could weigh it. “You quit the program. You quit the gallery thing before that. You quit every single -”

She shoved him. Both palms, flat, in the chest, and he went into the wall hard enough that the framed print - the one from Lisbon, the one they’d fought about hanging - jumped on its nail and held.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t you narrate me.”

He came off the wall. Not away. Toward. Got a fist in the front of her coat, and she got one in his, and for a second they only held each other there, snarling, faces too close, breathing the same hot air on the eight square feet at the top of their own stairs - and the thing between them changed temperature without changing direction.

She kissed him like she was still winning the argument. He kissed her back like a man conceding nothing. His hand fisted in her hair and it was not kind and the sound she made was not kind either and she shoved him again, backward this time, through the door she’d never managed to open, into the dark of the apartment.

They didn’t make it past the entry. He had her against the door he kicked shut behind them, her coat off one shoulder and not the other, and it was not making up, it was the same fight with the words taken out. She bit his lip hard enough to taste it. Felt him laugh into her mouth, furious, like she’d proved his point and he didn’t care. Her back hit the door with every thrust and she took it and gave nothing back, and neither of them said a single true thing because they’d already said the true things on the landing and this was what was left.

Afterward they were on the floor of the entry, backs against the same door, the cold coming up through the boards. Her coat was still on one arm. Neither of them had turned the light on.

“I didn’t pick his side,” he said, to the dark.

“You did. You just didn’t notice. Which is worse.”

He didn’t answer. Below them, through the floor, the downstairs neighbor’s television laughed at something, a long muffled run of it, going on about its own business.

She found one shoe. She didn’t put it on. Neither of them got up. They sat against the door in the cold with the true thing still in the room beside them, breathing hard, already separate, and nobody reached over to move it out of the way.