Nick
The key sticks in the lobby door.
She has to turn it twice, shoulder pressed against the metal, and the small struggle of it does something to me. I watch the back of her neck, the place where my thumb was thirty seconds ago, and I put my hands in my pockets to stop them from doing anything I haven't been invited to do.
The door gives. She holds it open for me with one hand and doesn't look at me as I pass.
The lobby is warm. There's a plant on a table that has seen better days and a row of brass mailboxes. On the floor is a hallway runner that used to be red. The elevator hums in its shaft, the one I paid to have fixed, but she walks past it without a glance and heads for the stairs.
I follow her.
Her shoes are quiet on the threadbare carpet. Mine are quieter. We pass a door on the second floor where a television is playing something with laughter on it, and a door on the third with the smell of garlic coming under the crack, and then we're on four, and she's at her apartment door fishing for the right key on her ring.
I wait the way I have learned to wait in the last couple of weeks. Like a man who has not been given permission for anything he wants, and knows it.
She gets the door open and steps inside, leaving it open behind her. I take that for what it is, and I follow her in, closing the door behind me and turning the deadbolt.
Her apartment is small. One room with a kitchenette along one wall, a bed in the corner with a pile of blankets on it, a dresser made of plastic drawers stacked into a tower, a window with no curtain and a view of the fire escape. There's a lamp on the floor beside the bed and a book open face-down beside that. A cardigan is folded on top of the blankets. There’s no television or couch, but there is a kettle on the stove and one mug on the drying rack by the sink.
A door beside the makeshift dresser must lead to a small bathroom.
She came here with two thousand eight hundred and forty-seven dollars and she built this. I stand in her doorway for one second and I take in the whole shape of it, and I understand something I should have understood before. She needs to prove to herself that she can survive.
Now I’m inside a place she built with her own hands after a man she trusted abused her. Whether he knew what he was doing could kill her or not seems irrelevant now, because she could have died whether he knew it or not.
I watch as she shrugs out of her coat and hangs it on a hook by the door, then slips off her flats and leaves them next to a box she hasn’t yet unpacked. I slip my loafers off and place them next to hers. Her movements look so small, even in the tiny space of this apartment. When she turns to me, her hands by her sides, she looks at me like she doesn't know what to do next.
I walk to her carefully, holding back every urge to touch her the way my hands are desperate to. All I can think of is how this wonderful woman has allowed me into her space. The space she wanted to keep safe from men like her ex.
From men like me.
"Tell me what you want," I say, barely recognizing my own voice as it scrapes through my throat. I touch the tips of her hair, needing even the slightest bit of contact with her.
Her throat works. She looks at the floor between us, at the window where the fire escape is dark against a sky that's gone black while we walked. She looks at everything in the room except me.
"I don't know," she says.
"Then we're not doing anything." I keep my voice low. "I'm not in a hurry, Sadie. I'm going to be very clear about this. If you want me to leave right now, I'll leave. If you want me to sit on your floor and not touch you, I'll sit on your floor. Nothing happens between us that you don’t want."
She lifts her eyes, her long lashes framing those bright blue irises.
“Tell me how you got that scar,” I say, dragging the pad of my thumb over it lightly.
For a moment, she looks confused and then she relaxes. “It was just an accident. When I was eight. I tripped over my skipping rope and landed on the porch steps.” She shakes her head lightly at the memory. “Knocked out a baby tooth, blood everywhere. Dad scooped me up and carried me to the kitchen. Mom cleaned it and put skin closure strips on it while soothing me with her rendition of ‘Can’t help falling in love.’ Dad threatened to rip up the steps and put a ramp in.” She smiles, the memory shaking something loose for her. Her shoulders relax and when she comes back to me, she shrugs lightly, biting her bottom lip.
"I want you to kiss me again," she says.
I lift her chin with two fingers and I put my mouth on hers, slow, the way I did under the streetlight. She makes a small sound against my lips. It's not a word. It's the sound of a woman letting out a breath she's been holding for longer than tonight, and I feel it in my chest where I have no business feeling anything.
Yet it’s the only place I feel everything about her.
Her hands come up and find my sweater. They fist in it the way they did on the sidewalk, and this time she's the one who pulls me closer.
My hand slides from her jaw into her hair. I gather it in my fist at the back of her neck and tip her head the fraction of an inch I need to kiss her deeper.
She gasps against my mouth.
I pull back.
