He was sixteen and he needed to use the bathroom and Elena had been in there for thirty minutes.
He knocked again.
Nothing.
He pressed his forehead against the door.
A pause. Then, completely unbothered:
He stopped. Took a breath.
He hit the door once with the flat of his palm. Not hard. Just to have something to do with his hands.
A beat of silence. Then:
He stepped back from the door. Stared at it.
He caught himself.
The makeup brush sounds stopped.
He went very still.
He stood there for a moment, breathing hard.
She was right. He wasn't going to break the door.
He went and sat on the floor in the hallway with his back against the wall and his knees up, and stared at the ceiling, and waited.
She came out twenty-two minutes later. Full face, eyeliner sharp enough to cut something, wearing a band tee he was fairly certain she'd taken from his drawer.
She looked down at him on the floor.
He looked up at her.
She stepped over his legs and went down the hallway toward the front door, then stopped. Turned back. She looked at him for a second — just a second — in that way she had sometimes, when the performance dropped and it was just her face, open and young and a little uncertain.
She pointed at him.
She almost smiled.
The front door clicked shut behind her. The apartment went quiet — the particular quiet of a place that had just been very loud, still ringing with it slightly. He stayed on the floor for another minute, looking at nothing, listening to her footsteps fade down the stairwell.
Then he got up and went to use the bathroom.
The mirror was fogged from her hairdryer. There was mascara on the sink. The good towel had been moved. He looked at all of it and didn't say anything about it, because there was no one left to say it to.
He turned the light off when he left. He didn't know why. It just felt right to leave the room the way it should've been.
Years later, Elena would stand in a different hallway outside a different closed door, and she would think about this — about the bathroom, about the thirty minutes, about the fogged mirror and the mascara on the sink. About how loudly he'd existed back then, how much space he'd taken up just being annoyed, just being there, banging on doors and threatening to break things he was never going to break.
She hadn't seen him come out once in three days. She didn't know how that was even possible. She didn't want to think about it too hard. She just stood in the hallway with Raul asleep against the wall beside her, listening to a house that had gone completely quiet, and tried to remember the last time a closed door between them had meant something as simple as bad lighting and a Hot Topic date.