Perfect Strangers

Theo counts ice cubes melting in his gin. Three. Two and three-quarters. The bartender's watching him in the mirror, pretending not to.

He sets the glass down. Baccarat crystal meets Brazilian mahogany with a sound like a judge's gavel. The gin ripples, then stills. Surface tension holding everything together by a molecular prayer.

Vivian hasn't looked at him in twenty-three minutes. He knows because he's been counting.

The hotel bar costs nine hundred dollars just to sit in. Leather the color of dried blood. Brass fixtures that haven't been polished since the eighties because patina sells authenticity. The bartender wears a vest worth more than most people's rent. His hands move like he's a priest at a funeral.

Vivian's thumb scrolls. Swipe. Delete. Swipe. Delete. Each motion surgical. Her nail polish catches the light like fresh wounds.

"The wedding's in three hours."

Her thumb freezes mid-swipe. The screen's blue light turns her face cadaver-pale. She doesn't look up.

"I know."

Behind the bar: bottles arranged like tombstones. Johnnie Walker Blue. Hennessy Paradis. The good poison. Each one catching light like stained glass in a church nobody prays in anymore.

Theo watches Vivian in the mirror. She's wearing the black Givenchy. Not the wedding dress. That's hanging three floors up in their suite. Waiting. Like evidence at a crime scene nobody's discovered yet.

"Your father called." Still scrolling. "Four times."

"Always four." Theo rotates his glass. Quarter turn. Ice shifts like broken bones. "His anxiety has a signature."

Her laugh flatlines. She sets the phone face-down.

"Tell me something real."

Theo's fingers spread on the bar's edge. His knuckles are white. The tendons in his hand look like bridge cables about to snap.

"Last Wednesday. The Blackstone. Ninth floor."

A muscle in her jaw twitches. Barely visible. But Theo's been studying her for three years. He knows her tells like a sniper knows wind patterns.

"Room 917," he continues. "You were leaving when I arrived."

"Arrived for what?"

"Same communion you'd just taken."

The bartender's hands stop moving. Even the brass fixtures seem to lean in.

Vivian turns. Slow. The movement of someone who's already chosen the knife but hasn't decided where to cut.

"How long have you been watching?"

"How long have you been performing?"

"I asked first."

"Four months." The ice in his glass cracks. "Christmas at your mother's. You left your phone by the Chablis. Adrian called twice. Mouth breather."

Her smile could perform surgery. "Adrian's an artist."

"Catherine's sloppier. Lipstick on my collar bone like a signature. Parks in handicapped spaces."

"Tells you everything." She lifts her gin. When did she order gin? When did they start drinking from the same bottle of poison?

They're both sweating now. His Hermès tie feels like a noose. Her dress clings in ways Givenchy never intended.

"So we're both archaeologists," she says.

"Digging through empty rooms."

"The question is—" Her hand hovers over her phone. The diamond on her engagement ring refracts light like a weapon she forgot she was carrying. "Do we burn it down?"

Silence.

The mirror shows them in duplicate. Two people dressed for a funeral. Attending a wedding. Planning a murder-suicide.

"We could confess." His voice stays level. Corporate-meeting level. Discussing projections while the FBI enter the building.

"Could."

"Cancel everything."

"Tell the truth."

Neither moves. Outside, Manhattan screams its usual song: sirens, horns, the sound of money changing hands at light speed. Inside, just their breathing. Synchronized. Like two people who've been fucking or fighting for so long they can't tell the difference.

"Or." She leans forward. Her breath smells like gin and what comes after gin. "We marry each other."

"Knowing."

"Because we know."

Their glasses meet. Clink. The sound of a detonator being armed.

"To the Blackstone," she says.

The gin goes down different now. Tastes like copper pennies. Like battery acid. Like truth.

Vivian checks her phone one last time. Her thumb hovers over something. Someone. Then swipe. Gone. She smiles. It's the smile of someone deleting evidence while the house burns down.

"Adrian's bringing his wife."

"Catherine's bringing her husband."

"Beautiful."

The bartender slides the check across mahogany. Four hundred and thirty-seven dollars for two hours of drinking their way toward mutually assured destruction. Theo signs. His signature looks like an EKG flatlining.

They stand. Take hands. His palm is dry. Hers is cold. Together they feel like shaking hands with your own corpse.

The elevator arrives. Ding.

Inside: mirrored walls. Infinite versions of themselves, fractured and multiplied. All broken. All perfectly dressed. All walking into the same beautiful disaster.

Second floor. Ding. An elderly couple enters. Sees them. Smiles. "Newlyweds?"

Vivian nods, smiles, kisses Theo on the cheek. Her lips are cold. The gesture perfect. Practiced. Like she's done this before with other men in other elevators on the way to other disasters.

The woman clutches her husband's arm. "How wonderful. You look perfect together."

Theo's hand tightens on Vivian's. A pulse of pressure. Morse code for we're so fucked.

She squeezes back. I know.

Seventh floor. The couple exits. Waves. The doors close.

Vivian turns to him. Lipstick still perfect. Eyes like bullets. "Ready?"

"For what?"

"To pretend we're in love."

"Who's pretending?"

She kisses him then. Not gentle. Her teeth catch his bottom lip, pull, release. Tastes like gin and disaster and the specific hunger of people who've already decided to detonate. His hand goes to her throat, thumb against her pulse. It hammers against his skin.

She pushes him against the mirrored wall. The handrail digs into his spine. His other hand finds her hip, pulls her against him. The Givenchy dress rides up. Eight thousand dollars of fabric bunching under his fingers.

They're destroying each other's mouths. Breathing hard. Her lipstick smearing across his jaw like she's marking her territory. His hand tightens on her throat, just enough for her to feel it, to know he could, to understand they're both capable of anything now.

The elevator rises. Cables strain. Gravity pulls. Physics insists on consequences.

Ding.

Ninth floor.

They break apart. Her lipstick's ruined. His mouth looks like crime scene evidence.

"Three hours," she says.

"Two hours fifty-six minutes."

"You're still counting."

The doors open onto a hallway that costs too much and promises nothing. They walk toward their suite holding hands like condemned prisoners approaching the chair. Like accomplices about to commit the perfect crime. Like two people who understand that love and mutual destruction are sometimes the same thing.