The window thing started as an accident, and by the second week of september i’d started timing my evenings around which patch of the kitchen my body lines up with at which hour. The outfits started as an accident too. i’d come home, shower, and put on whatever was clean, and what was clean was increasingly the set i’d bought for myself in august: black lace, a garter belt, stockings with the seam. First time i walked past the window in it i stopped and stood there like a girl waiting for a train. Nobody in the courtyard. Second time, same. By the fourth night i wasn’t waiting for the train at all. i was asking a question at the window and the courtyard kept its mouth shut.
Then, on the fifth night, the courtyard finally answered.
He’s the neighbor across the way — third floor, diagonal, windows aligned with mine. I’d known him for two years the way you know a neighbor: the nod at the mailboxes, twice a year at the building meeting, once in April a package of mine had been left at his door and he’d handed it back over the rail without ceremony. Big. Boringly well-groomed. Never seen a woman come or go. Never heard much of anything through his wall, while mine apparently broadcasts everything i do in heels.
The knock came at 9:40. I opened the door in the black lace under a robe i hadn’t bothered to tie because the knock had been expected so exactly that there was no reason to pretend otherwise.
He looked at the robe, then at what the robe was failing to cover, for exactly as long as it took to be sure.
“I knew you were in there in your little things,” he said. The way he said it was not a question, not a discovery. A decision. “Come here.”
I went. of course i went. Two years of mailboxes and door-holding and i crossed his apartment like it had been on the tour all along. He shut the door behind me with his foot. The place was dark, blinds down, one lamp. no shame in any of it.
He turned me around by the shoulders and looked at the whole thing — garter, seams, the straps riding where i’d left them — and i felt the way you feel walking into an exam you actually studied for.
“Where’d you get this,” he said, meaning the set.
“bought it for myself.”
“for yourself,” he repeated, like he was weighing the story. Then, flat, but with something moving underneath it: “prettiest thing that window’s ever shown me. and i’ve had that view for two years.”
My face did something i couldn’t control. i said thank you. He said, “you’re welcome,” which is a thing i’ll be thinking about later.
He didn’t kiss me. He took his coffee mug off the counter — the mug, i’d never noticed which mug — and set it on the table, and sat down on the edge of it like a man who’d done the math on the height, and nodded at the floor.
I got on my knees on his kitchen tile. My knees still had the tile pattern pressed into them an hour later. I want that noted somewhere official.
He undid his own belt. He didn’t rush, he didn’t perform, he didn’t say anything cute. He pulled himself out — thick, heavy, already hard — and his hand went into my hair like it had a hook there, not pushing yet, just claiming the general zone. I took him in my hand. He let me have a few strokes, let me get my tongue on the underside, let me look up at him once while i did it, which he watched the way a man watches a fire he built.
“look at you,” he said. “all that, for the window.”
“for you,” i said, before i’d decided to.
“say it again.”
“for you.”
He held my eyes for a second, then eased my head down. Just pressure, steady, until i was taking him deeper than i’ve ever gone casually, and he found the pace he wanted and kept it, no deviation. one hand in my hair, the other flat on the table beside the mug. He was fully dressed. i was not, except for the lace, and the seeing of that — his golf shirt, my garter belt — put something in me that i’m never getting out. my own cock was dripping onto the tile and neither of us acknowledged it. reading his face, he wasn’t going to. the arrangement was happening above my waist and everything below it was my business, and honestly? knowing he could ignore it and still use me was its own kind of being wanted. It’s like being taken seriously as a body that does one thing well.
The “for you” sat in the room for a long time.
When he pushed all the way in i gagged, hard, pulled back fast, and went down again before he could decide anything about it — first rule, and i learned it from him in the four seconds it took him to not react. He moaned at the second try. Not a big sound. Deep. Private. Like the sound came from somewhere past the golf shirt, and the lace got the credit.
“my dark hand in your pale hair,” he said, quiet, almost to himself, watching it happen. “look at you. in your little things. on my floor.” His thumb moved against my scalp, gentle, and his hips did not move gently at all. “You dressed up for this. i might have seen. you didn’t close the blind once all week.” A pause, and the roughest thing he said all night, delivered flat: “So this is for me. Say it.”
his phone chimed once from the counter. he didn’t look. “it’s for you.”
“this is you, every night, waiting for me to knock.”
“yes.”
He didn’t say good. He didn’t have to. He pulled me down another half inch and held me there and watched my throat work, and my eyes watered and my jaw ached and i stayed exactly where i’d been put, and if i could have swallowed the whole world i would have.
He came in three pulses, not counting down, not warning. i stayed for all three, throat working around him, swallowing everything, which earned me nothing but his hand loosening and his eyes coming back into focus. He didn’t pet me. He didn’t say thank you. Both of those would have been worse.
I sat back on my heels and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. He stood up, tucked himself away, and picked his mug up off the table like nothing in the room had ever happened. Then he looked at me again, kneeling on his kitchen floor in busted lace, and his expression did the thing that is the entire reason i go back to bed every night alone with a window: me, being catalogued, and filed, and kept.
“Same time tomorrow,” he said. It wasn’t a question. He’s never had a question in that voice.
I said okay. i said okay to a man who’d never actually asked.
He opened the door for me. I walked down one flight of stairs with my knees clicking and my heart going, and let myself back into my own apartment, and stood in the dark kitchen looking at the courtyard burning in my window. i didn’t pull the blind. i didn’t fix the lace. i stood exactly where the view could find me and laughed once, out loud, at nothing.
his mug is on my counter. i haven’t washed it. the blinds stay up.
