But tonight, in her studio, with the ozone and her mouth on mine and the new sculpture watching from the shadows—tonight the window is open.
I pull her onto my lap. She comes, her legs on either side of mine, her weight settling against me. I wrap my arms around her and hold her and she puts her head on my shoulder and we sit like that in the studio with the space heater humming and the metal cooling and the cargo door cracked to let in the night air.
Two people in a room. Present. Quiet. Together.
The window is open.
I'm going to hold it open as long as I can, even though I know—the way I know all operational realities—that what's behind it is a countdown. And countdowns, by their nature, only go in one direction.
Chapter 19 - Jess
He comes to my apartment on a Thursday.
I almost didn't invite him. The idea of Damien Cross in my space—this man who lives on East 62nd with floor-to-ceiling windows and Italian espresso machines—standing in my apartment with the mattress on the floor and the cracked ceiling and the hot plate that only works on one setting. The contrast would be comic if it weren't so exposing. His apartment told me he's empty. Mine will tell him I'm broke. Both truths, both uncomfortable, neither one the whole story.
But he's been coming to the studio all week—sitting on the crate, watching me work, filling the space with his quiet, impossible presence—and the studio is neutral ground. My territory but public-facing. What's not there is the mattress on the floor and the nearly empty tea box and the postcard from Tess and the pillow that holds the shape of my head.
The private things. The things that would let him know me completely.
I text him the address on Thursday morning. No explanation. No caveat. Just the address, the way he sent me his.
He arrives at seven. I buzz him in, and I hear him climb the stairs—four flights, the stairwell amplifying footsteps that are quieter than they should be for a man his size. I notice this the way I notice everything about him now—with an alertness that borders on obsession.
I open the door before he knocks. He's standing in the dark hallway—the bulb on the fourth floor has been out for months—and for a moment he's just a shape, tall and broad and still. Then he steps forward into the light and his face resolves and he's looking at me with an expression I can't name.
"Come in," I say.
He steps inside and I watch him take in the room. My entire life, contained in a space smaller than his bathroom. The mattress against the wall under the window. The worn quilt. The lavender on the windowsill. Tess's postcard on the shelf. The clothes rail with the work clothes and the green dress on the good hanger. The kitchen along one wall—the hot plate, the kettle, the mugs that don't match.
I wait for the reaction. Pity, maybe. The careful blankness of a wealthy man confronted with poverty he has no framework for.
He doesn't do any of those things. He looks at the room the way he looked at my sculpture—with attention, with interest, with something close to hunger. His eyes move slowly, touching everything, and I can see him reading the space the way I read metal. Not judging. Understanding.
"It's small," I say. Defensive. I hate that I'm defensive.
"It's yours." Simply. Without inflection. A statement of fact that contains more respect than any compliment could.
He walks to the windowsill. Looks at the lavender. Looks at Tess's postcard but doesn't touch it. Looks out the window at the street below—the fire escape across the way, the bodega on the corner, the streetlamp that works intermittently.
"I can see Hector's from here," he says.
"That's the main selling point. Proximity to mediocre coffee."
He turns from the window and there's something on his face—a tightness around his eyes, a tension that looks almost like pain. Gone before I can examine it, replaced by the steadier expression I've come to think of as his resting state. But I saw it.Something about being in my apartment unsettled him in a way I didn't expect.
"Tea?" I ask. "The coffee situation here is dire. I have a kettle and chamomile."
"Chamomile is fine."
I fill the kettle and put it on the hot plate. He stands in the middle of the room—there's nowhere to sit except the mattress and the floor—and I'm aware of how absurd this is. This man, in his dark clothes that cost more than my rent, standing in my apartment that doesn't have a chair.
"You can sit," I say, nodding toward the mattress.
He sits. The mattress dips under his weight. He looks at the quilt, the pillow, the book on the floor beside the bed—face-down, spine cracked at the halfway mark. He doesn't touch anything.
I bring the tea. Two mugs—the blue one for me, the one with the chipped handle for him. I sit beside him on the mattress and we drink chamomile in my cold apartment and the intimacy of this—having him here, in the space where I sleep—is more exposing than the night I spent naked in his bed.
We talk. Not about anything heavy—about the sculpture, about Nish and the collectors, about the studio and the work. Easy conversation, the kind that happens when two people are becoming comfortable in each other's presence. He asks about the neighborhood, about how long I've lived here, about whether the building has always been this cold.
