The drawer is the second one down in the bathroom, under the towels. It’s been the second one down for a year. Lilac cotton in tissue paper, a black set I’ve never worn, stockings in a paper bag because the packaging split. Two things in there still have tags on them and I know exactly which two.
For a year that drawer has been the whole of it. Marnie works late on Thursdays, so Thursdays were the night. I would get home first, shower, put something on, and be sitting on the couch reading when her key went in the door, and she would look at me and her face would do the thing it does, and that was the entire arrangement and I was grateful for it and I didn’t examine the gratitude too closely.
Then on a Tuesday she put the calendar on the counter and her finger on a Friday two weeks out.
“Booked it,” she said.
“Booked what?”
“Table for two. Eight o’clock. The place on High with the terrible chairs.”
I looked at the square. In her terrible handwriting, in pencil: dinner. both of us.
“What am I wearing.”
“That’s the question, isn’t it.”
We worked it out like a logistics problem over two weeks, which is the least romantic and most reassuring way it could have gone.
The problem was the coat. Everything I own that goes over the top is a work coat, and a work coat is a coat you wear to work, and the coat is the first thing anybody sees. Marnie solved it on the second Saturday with a bag from the charity shop on Fifth. Navy wool, belted, long. Too big in the shoulders in a way she said read as deliberate.
“Nobody looks at the coat anyway,” she said. “They look at the shoes. That’s where people decide.”
“Then I’m finished.”
“You’re not finished. You’re going to wear the boots.”
The boots were the pair I bought in February and wore twice, both times in our own hallway, both times for her.
The two weeks were the worst part. I was fine in daylight. At night I lay there running the arithmetic — how many people between our door and the car, four, maybe six, the neighbour with the dog if the timing went badly, the woman on three who has never once looked at me and who I became certain would choose that particular Friday to start. Marnie let me run it. She didn’t tell me it would be fine, which I wouldn’t have believed, and she didn’t tell me to stop, which would have made it worse. She put her hand flat on my chest in the dark and left it there until the arithmetic ran out.
Friday, I showered and shaved and put the soft set on and then stood in the bedroom for eleven minutes by the clock doing nothing at all.
Marnie came in with the boots, sat on the end of the bed, and waited.
“I can’t,” I said.
“You can. But you don’t have to. Say the word and I cancel it, we eat the deposit, I take you to bed, and nobody ever knows.”
That was the sentence that did it. The encouragement wasn’t it. The offer to stop was, out loud, at the last minute, when it would have been easy not to make it.
I put the boots on.
The stairwell was the worst of it. Three flights with everyone’s door on the way down and the light on the second landing still broken since March. My boots made a sound on the tile I had never heard before, because I had never walked anywhere in them except the length of our own hallway.
Then the front door. Then outside, and the cold, and the street.
Nobody was on it. All that arithmetic for nothing. A car went past. A man on the other side of the road was having an argument with his dog. The world was running an ordinary Friday night and had no opinion about me at all.
The restaurant was warm and too loud. The host was twenty-two and bored and said “two?” without looking up, and I said “yes,” and it came out normal.
That was the first surprise. My voice was normal.
He sat us by the window with the bad chairs and handed us menus and left. Marnie ordered wine. I read the menu four times and could not have told you a single thing on it.
“You’re doing it,” she said.
“I’m doing it.”
“You’re going to eat something, and then we’re going to go home, and I’m going to take a very long time about it.”
Halfway through the main, the woman at the next table looked at me. Sixty, maybe, in a good coat, a glass of white wine and a friend she wasn’t listening to. She looked the way you look at a thing you are deciding about. Then she did something I wasn’t braced for, which was that she smiled. It wasn’t a smirk. It was a small private ordinary smile, the kind you give a stranger whose shoes you like, and then she turned back to her friend.
I put my fork down because my hands had gone unsteady.
“What,” Marnie said.
“Nothing. That woman. She smiled.”
“Of course she did.”
I went to the bathroom before we left, mostly to have somewhere to put my face for a minute. The mirror in there was a different mirror from the one at home, with different light, and I looked at myself in it for longer than I’ve ever managed in my own bathroom. The coat was right. The boots were right. My jaw was doing the thing it does when I’m nervous, and in that light it read as a jaw.
I put my hand flat on the counter, breathed, and said out loud, quietly, “okay.”
Marnie drove. She has always driven. Her hand stayed on my knee the whole way home and she didn’t say anything clever, which was exactly right, and then she didn’t park.
“Keep going,” I said.
“I’m going to.”
She parked four streets over, in the dark, under the trees, and turned the engine off, and the silence afterward was enormous. Then she got her hand behind my neck and kissed me the way you kiss somebody you’ve been thinking about across a table for two hours.
“We are four streets from home,” I said.
“We are four streets from home.”
Her hand went up under the coat, over the dress, over the soft lilac cotton, and stopped. She kissed my throat. She said my name in the voice she only uses when she has already decided.
“Say it,” she said.
“Here.”
“Say the whole thing.”
“Take it off me here.”
She got the coat off my shoulders and the dress up over my hips and her fingers found the wet through the cotton and pressed, and my back came off the seat. The window was cracked an inch and the cold came in on the side of my neck. I got her jeans open with my hands going badly and she caught my wrist.
“Not that. Not yet. Your turn first.”
She put two fingers in my mouth, and I got them wet, and then she reached back between my legs and pushed one in slow and then two, and my hips came up off the seat again. Her thumb found me and stayed there. She fucked me with her fingers at the speed she wanted and not the speed I asked for, and I put my mouth against her shoulder and made a noise that wasn’t a word.
“You have been good all night,” she said. “Say thank you.”
“Thank you.”
“Again.”
“Thank you. Thank you.”
I was close. Closer than I wanted to be, in a car, four streets from home. She felt it and stopped, and pulled her fingers out, and put them in her own mouth, and I made a sound like something being taken away.
“Not here,” she said. “Inside.”
I don’t remember the four streets. I remember the boots on the pavement. I remember her key, and the stairwell light that is still broken, and the second flight, and then the door, and then the hall floor.
She pressed me down onto the runner with her hand flat between my shoulder blades. The boots were still on. The lilac was gone somewhere in the hall and the dress was round my waist and she got the lube out of her coat pocket, which she had put there before we left, which meant she had known, which I thought about later and still do.
She got two fingers back inside me and worked me open with her thumb and then replaced her fingers with her mouth, and I lay on the floor of my own hallway with my cheek against the runner and one boot braced against the skirting board and came so hard my heels drummed on the floorboards.
She didn’t stop. She got a hand under my hip and held me where she wanted me and kept her mouth on me through it, and I said her name and then I said a word that wasn’t her name, and she laughed against me, which nearly finished me a second time.
Then she came up, wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist, and said, “Now you can.”
I got her jeans down and got my mouth on her, on the floor, with my knees complaining about the boards and my jaw already tired from the restaurant and the nerves. She had one hand in my hair and the other flat on the wall and she came with her head back and her heel slipping, and I stayed until she pulled me up.
Afterward we lay on the runner in the dark with the front door not quite shut and the stairwell light doing nothing.
My knees were sore in a way that was going to be worse in the morning. There was a mark on my hip in the shape of her hand that would be purple by Sunday. The boots were still on and one of them had scuffed the skirting board and I couldn’t bring myself to care about the skirting board.
“The chairs really were terrible,” I said.
“They really were.”
“I want to do it again.”
Marnie turned her head. “The restaurant?”
“All of it. The stairwell. The part where I stood in the bedroom for eleven minutes.”
She laughed and put her hand back on my chest, flat, warm, the way she does.
“Good,” she said. “Because I’ve been thinking about the coat.”
“What about the coat?”
“Nothing about the coat,” she said. “I just like saying it. The coat.”
I lay there on my own hallway floor with my boots on and my knees aching and the whole ordinary street outside not caring, and I let it be exactly as good as it was.
