The Mirror Liked My Date More Than I Did

The mirror in Celia's hallway was taller than either of us and considerably more pleased to see me.

I noticed that later. At first, it was simply a lovely old mirror with a dark wooden frame, standing opposite the lift doors inside her converted warehouse apartment. Celia said it had come with the place. I said the previous owner had good taste.

'People tend to leave things they don't want to move,' she said.

We had met for dinner in Collingwood. She was forty-seven, I was forty-four, and we'd enjoyed the sort of conversation that made three hours feel shorter without persuading me that we needed to spend the rest of our lives together. I liked her. I was still deciding how much.

She invited me up for a drink. I said I'd stay for one. It was a useful, uncomplicated limit, and she accepted it without trying to bargain the number into a different evening.

Her apartment was beautiful in a lived-in way. Books actually open. A cardigan over a chair. A bowl of mandarins beside a stack of letters. After the restaurant's careful lighting, the room felt private and ordinary.

The hallway mirror reflected all of it through the open doorway. As Celia went to the kitchen, I checked my hair without much interest. The woman in the glass did the same.

Then I turned away.

In the edge of my vision, she didn't.

I looked back immediately. There I was, looking back. Same dark shirt. Same silver earrings. Same expression of having caught myself imagining something.

I blamed the wine, though I'd only had a glass. I blamed the angle, though the angle was straightforward. The mind keeps a useful cupboard of explanations for things it doesn't want to inspect.

Celia returned with sparkling water and asked whether I wanted ice. I said yes. She passed me the glass. In the mirror, our hands met for a moment longer than they did in the room.

Not much longer. Just enough to suggest affection I hadn't offered.

I moved towards the lounge.

'It's a striking mirror,' I said.

'It does dominate the hall.'

'How long have you lived here?'

'Four years.'

'And it's always been there?'

She smiled. 'Unless it's moving about while I'm at work.'

I laughed because that was the expected response. I wished she hadn't chosen those words.

We sat on the couch. The mirror was visible beyond her shoulder, catching us at an angle. I could see the back of my own head, then part of my face when I turned towards her.

Celia asked about my work restoring old photographs. I told her about a portrait I'd been cleaning that week, a woman from the 1930s whose expression became more amused as the damage disappeared. Celia listened, interested. She asked whether I ever felt I knew the people in the pictures.

'Sometimes I think I do,' I said. 'Then I remember I'm mostly looking at one fraction of a second.'

In the mirror, I smiled at her.

In the room, I had not smiled yet.

I stopped speaking. Celia tilted her head.

'Everything okay?'

'Yes. Sorry. Lost my thought.'

The reflected smile faded into my actual expression. I felt cold in a way the room did not explain.

There was a small scratch near the bottom of the frame. I fixed my eyes on it, needing something in the mirror that wasn't a person. The scratch remained a scratch. The wood remained wood. I had spent years looking closely at surfaces and distrusting the first thing I thought I saw. Usually that habit made the world more understandable. Tonight, looking carefully was removing the comfortable explanations one by one.

I took a drink. The reflection drank too. I put the glass down slowly. It followed. I raised my left hand slightly, pretending to adjust my sleeve. Perfect agreement.

This was ridiculous. I was a grown woman in another grown woman's lounge, testing my reflection while she politely waited for me to finish a sentence about photographic emulsion.

I picked up my glass again as Celia leaned closer. Not too close. A question in the movement rather than an assumption. I liked that about her. I also knew, suddenly, that I didn't want to stay much longer. There was no single reason I could articulate. The evening had been pleasant, and pleasant could be enough without becoming more.

Before I could say anything, my reflection reached for her hand.

My actual hand remained around the glass.

I saw it clearly. Dark sleeve moving. Silver ring catching the light. Reflected fingers settling over Celia's reflected wrist with confident, familiar affection.

I stood so quickly the cushion shifted.

Celia looked up. 'What happened?'

I pointed towards the hallway, then lowered my hand because pointing at a mirror did not improve how any explanation would sound.

'There's something wrong with that.'

She followed my gaze. In the glass, I stood beside the couch exactly where I was supposed to be.

'What do you mean?'

I told her. Briefly, badly, with the awareness that every sentence made me sound less like the person who'd been discussing restoration techniques five minutes earlier.

Celia didn't laugh. That helped. She stood and walked to the hallway, stopping beside me where we could both see the glass.

We lifted our hands. The reflections lifted theirs.

We turned our heads. They turned.

Celia lowered her hand. I kept mine raised for a second longer. Both images behaved.

'It might be the light,' she said, but she didn't sound certain.

'Maybe.'

We stood quietly. I could hear the fridge motor and a tram outside. Then Celia said, very softly, 'Don't move.'

I didn't.

In the mirror, her reflection had turned to look at mine. My reflection smiled back.

Neither of us in the hallway was smiling.

Celia's breath caught. She stepped backwards. The reflected Celia did not step with her immediately. Instead she stayed close to the other woman, as though reluctant to interrupt a private conversation.

Then both figures snapped into the correct positions. There was no flash, no sound. Just a sudden, neat obedience that made the previous movement harder to trust and impossible to forget.

'Okay,' Celia said.

It was a small word asked to carry a great deal.

'You've never seen that?'

'No.'

I believed her. Whatever was happening, she looked as unsettled as I felt.

She went to a cupboard and took out a sheet. Together we covered the mirror. The fabric fell over the frame and settled against the glass. For a moment the hallway looked merely untidy. I preferred it.

We returned to the lounge, but neither sat. Celia said she could call the building manager in the morning, then laughed once at herself.

'What am I going to say? The mirror's got plans?'

'You can start with wanting it removed.'

'Yes. That sounds like a sentence a building manager can survive.'

I picked up my bag. My hands were steady enough until I tried to fasten the clasp. Celia noticed and offered to walk me down. I thanked her.

'I did have a nice dinner,' I said, because it felt important to separate the ordinary evening from whatever had joined it.

'So did I.'

'I'm not staying.'

'I know. I wouldn't ask you to.'

Her kindness made me feel briefly guilty about leaving, then sensible about the fact that leaving did not require permission from guilt. Celia was already reaching for her phone to call her sister. She did not want to spend the rest of the night there alone either.

As we passed the covered mirror, the sheet moved.

Not a billow from the open door. A small pressure from behind, roughly where a hand might rest. Five faint shapes pushed the fabric outwards, then relaxed.

We stopped. Celia's face went pale.

'Let's go,' I said.

She took her keys and shoes without another word. At the lift, she called her sister and asked to stay the night. Her voice was calm in the careful way people sound when they have decided panic can wait until transport is arranged.

The lift arrived. Its doors were polished steel, reflective enough to show us as blurred figures. I looked at the floor instead.

Downstairs, we waited in the foyer while Celia booked a ride. I said I'd walk to the main road for a taxi. It was well lit and busy, and I wanted movement more than another enclosed space.

She touched my arm briefly.

'I'm sorry.'

'You didn't make it happen.'

We hugged. Not romantically. Two people confirming the presence of an actual person with an actual body that moved when it chose to move. Her car arrived, and I watched her get in before turning towards the street.

Then I realised I'd left my jacket upstairs.

I stood for a moment considering the value of the jacket. It was a good jacket. It was also a jacket. I sent Celia a message saying not to worry about it until the mirror was gone.

She replied immediately: Agreed. Nothing in there is worth another trip tonight.

I felt relieved by the shared decision. Then the concierge, who'd been away from the desk when we came down, asked whether I was waiting for the lift.

'No,' I said. 'I'm leaving.'

He nodded and returned to his paperwork. Behind him, the lift doors began to close after another passenger stepped out.

I saw my reflection in the steel.

I was standing alone by the foyer entrance. In the reflection, another woman stood beside me. Same dark shirt. Same silver earrings. Her head tilted towards my shoulder as though we were close enough to share a secret.

She smiled.

I did not turn around. I knew, with an unpleasant certainty, that nobody stood there in the ordinary room. Looking would only confirm the part I already understood.

The lift doors met, separating the two blurred faces before carrying them out of sight.

Outside, the street was bright with windows. Shopfronts, car doors, dark phone screens. I walked carefully, keeping my eyes on the pavement and the people moving through it.

At home I covered the bathroom mirror before switching on the light. I didn't check whether I needed to.

Celia messaged the next morning. Her sister had gone with her to arrange removal. The mirror was still beneath the sheet. The jacket was on the couch. Everything looked normal, which was no longer a phrase either of us trusted.

At the bottom of her message she wrote: Did you get home alone?

I stared at the words, then at my phone's dark border, where a thin strip of glass caught the side of my face.

I moved my thumb over it before replying.

I came home by myself, I wrote.

It was the only answer I could give without pretending to know more than I did.