“Leave your shoes here,” June said when we reached her door.
“Didn’t think any differently,” I replied with a lopsided grin. She was still June. Not so much a prune anymore, but still June.
“It’s just that the floor is …”
“Oak over plywood,” I cut in.
“I forgot you know wood.”
I left my wet shoes and socks outside and entered barefoot.
June was putting away the jacket, sunglasses, and hat.
“I need a shower. You wanna go first?” I asked.
“No, you go. Your jeans are wet.”
I grabbed clean clothes from the diminishing pile on my shelf in her closet. If staying here was going to take a while, I’d need to do some washing soon.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When I came out, wearing my gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt, the sofa bed was open, the bedding done, and the accordion divider stood erect in the middle of the room, like I had been in the bathroom before I’d taken a cold shower. I didn’t want her to overhear me taking care of it another way.
I got to know things with my body—cities through my feet, wood through the palms of my hands, and women through every part of me.
But not this woman. And I wanted to.
I wanted her.
I didn’t know what I wantedfromher, except that I wanted her.
She was uncharted waters.
Something primal in me needed to see her melt, succumb under my touch like the butter she hated, hear her groan not just when she unfolded the sofa, feel her again skin on skin, entirely. I wanted to see those eyes of her look at me the way she had stared at the ocean.
Obviously, that wasn’t going to happen. And seeing the partition all set up, I doubted this woman was capable of melting.
I picked up my phone that June had left on the sheets for me. There were a few new emails I had to answer—customers wanting appointments, price quotes or advice, Jerry commenting on technical specifications I had sent.
I heard June on the other side of the divider. It was still early, and I didn’t feel like going for one of my long walks tonight. I couldn’t decide if it was better to live on both sides of this thing now that I felt closer to June, or before, when she’d just been an annoying stranger.
“When did we start going out?” I asked loudly, although the divider didn’t do much to muffle sound, and we were still basically in the same space.
Instead of an answer, I heard shuffling, and then her bare feet padding on the wooden floor.
“What?” She glared, turning up from behind the divider. Good thing I had taken that mental picture of soft June to get me through this June.
“When did we start going out? When did we first spend the night?”
“We already aligned on this in San Francisco, remember? It began right after Christmas, around New Year’s, so that’s six months ago. Our first date was dinner atItalianoin San Francisco, and … you stayed over on our third date.”
“That fast, huh?”
She pulled in her upper lip and bit on it. We looked at each other.
“In that case, I need to write you a Valentine’s Day card,” I said matter-of-factly. “I asked because I wanted to align the metadata, spread out the pictures’ dates, and come up with more proof for our relationship.”
Her face went blank. She was standing next to the divider and the sofa bed, and I couldn’t decide if she was as pale as the sheet or the canvas panels.
