#m:it

Patty glanced out the window at the darkened yard, wondering how time had slipped by so fast. She wasn’t even sure when she and Stan had wandered off into this empty room. They seemed to gravitate to it, away from everyone else, naturally. But it was getting late now and she knew she had to go back to her own house.

Their eyes met as she looked back and a conversation seemed to pass between them silently. Stan smiled. “Can I walk you back?”

“I’d really like that.” She stood and slipped on her coat, struggling to fasten the buttons. A mix of nerves and alcohol and will I see him again? made her fingers shaky and uncoordinated.

Smoothly, he replaced her hands with his own, buttoning her up easily. “So you can talk for three hours straight without so much as a slurred word or lost thought, but you can’t put a piece of plastic through a hole?”

“Talking is my super power,” she admitted, at least when she was talking to the right person. “What’s yours?”

He stepped away and blew out a breath. “You’d make fun of me.”

“I would never.”

He raised an eyebrow, face falling into a blankly disbelieving expression. “Just twenty minutes ago you laughed yourself to tears because I didn’t know who Nine Inch Nails was.”

The mention of it set her off into a short fit of giggles again as she remembered his face of absolute bafflement when she had said she hated Nine Inch Nails. “Only the nine inch ones?” she repeated, mocking him gently.

He rolled his eyes and opened the bedroom door, not responding to her teasing. “After you.”

They slipped through the throngs of people still partying and out the front door, where they were met with an immediate gust of cold wind. She pulled her hood up and wrinkled her nose, feeling far more sober in the winter air, far more grounded in reality. Alone with Stan felt like a world all its own.

He kept close as they walked, standing on her left and blocking some of the wind, their arms occasionally brushing. Such a simple touch, yet butterflies stirred in her stomach anyway. “You must be used to this cold, living in New York.”

“Well, it’s not my favorite, but I grew up in Maine, so I'm…” A strange look crossed his face as he trailed off.

“I don’t want to imagine how much colder it is there,” she said after she realized he wasn’t going to finish.

His face cleared again and he gave her a small smile. “It wasn’t all bad. I think I had some really good friends there.”

“You’ll have to tell me about them sometime.“ 

“Yeah,” he answered quietly. “Maybe over coffee?”

“I’m free tomorrow,” she said quickly, then blushed at her own enthusiasm.

“I can pick you up. How does one sound?”

She nodded, thoughts caught up in the way his eyes seemed to dance and sparkle when they looked at her. “Perfect,” she whispered. 

“Perfect,” he murmured back.