The power went out at nine forty on a Thursday, and the first thing I did was say “no” out loud to an empty stairwell, like the building might hear me and reconsider.
I was on the landing between the second and third floor with a bag of groceries and a bad attitude. The emergency light over the door gave one sad blink and quit. Then it was just dark, that thick rental-building dark, with the radiator ticking somewhere below me and somebody’s dog going off on the first floor.
“Fuck,” I said, more quietly.
“Yeah,” said a voice above me. “Same.”
I knew the voice. Third floor, the apartment across from mine, the woman who leaves her bike in the hall and a mug on the radiator cover and has never once learned that I exist. Her name is Priya. I know because it’s on the mailbox and because I have, a few times, practiced saying it in my head in the elevator that doesn’t exist. We’ve said maybe forty words to each other in a year. Thirty of them were about the recycling.
“Is that you, Wren?” she said.
She knew my name. I stood there holding a bag of frozen dumplings in the dark with my whole face going hot.
“It’s me. I’m on the landing. I can’t see my own hand.”
“Don’t move. I’ve got candles. Hold on.”
I heard her feet on the stairs, careful, a hand sliding on the rail. Then a scrape and a little flare, and her face came up out of the dark above the flame like something in a painting. Dark hair piled on her head with a pencil stuck through it. A big gray cardigan with the sleeves pushed up. She had one of those squat jar candles, the kind that smell like a cabin, and she cupped her other hand around it the way you do with a baby bird.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“You’re going to melt your dumplings.”
“They’re already melting. They’re in mourning.”
She laughed, one short surprised breath through her nose, and I felt it in my chest like I’d swallowed something warm. “Come sit. It’s going to be a while. There was a text. A transformer thing. Two hours, maybe three.”
“You got a text?”
“I’m on the building list.” She said it like it was nothing. “You aren’t?”
I was not on the building list. I’d lived there thirteen months and I was not on the building list.
We sat on the top step of my flight with the candle between us on the concrete. The groceries went on the step below, where it was cooler. She sat with her knees pulled up and her cardigan over them, and I sat with my back against the wall because if I sat any closer to her I was going to do something stupid with my hands.
“So how come we never talk,” Priya said.
I looked at her. She was looking at the candle, not me, which I think was a kindness.
“I figured you didn’t want to.”
“I figured you didn’t want to.” She turned her head. The light did something to her eyes, made them very dark and very steady. “You always have your headphones in. And you do that thing where you speed up when you hear my door.”
“I do not.”
“You do. It’s a little hop. Like you’re dodging a puddle.”
“Oh my god.” I put my face in my hands. “I’m dodging a puddle.”
“Is the puddle me?”
“The puddle is how nice your voice is,” I said, into my palms, and then I heard what I’d said and wanted to be a dumpling.
It was quiet. The dog downstairs gave up. Somewhere above us a door opened and a man’s voice said “anybody got a lighter” and someone else said “no” and the door shut again, and then it was only the two of us and the candle and the slow tick of the cooling radiator.
“Say that again,” Priya said, softly.
I lowered my hands. “I think I’d rather die.”
“Say it with your hands off your face.”
So I did. I said, “Your voice is really nice. I get embarrassed. So I speed up.” And she smiled, not the polite hallway smile, a slow crooked one that took its time.
“Okay,” she said. “Good. That’s a lot better than the other things I thought.”
“What other things?”
“That you hated me. That I’d done something with the recycling.”
“You did do something with the recycling.”
“I put cardboard in the glass.”
“You put cardboard in the glass,” I agreed, and we were both laughing, the stupid wheezing kind, our shoulders knocking. Somewhere in there she’d shifted closer, or I had. Her knee was against mine. Her cardigan smelled like cedar and, under it, something sweeter, like warm skin and tea.
The candle guttered. She leaned over to shield it, and her hair fell out of its pencil, a whole dark rope of it sliding down her shoulder, and she said “oh, shoot” and I reached out and caught it before I’d decided to. It was heavy. Warm from her neck. I held it, and she went very still.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be.” Her voice was lower. “Keep going. If you want.”
I wound it around my fingers, once, slowly. I was shaking a little. I could feel it in my wrist. She looked at my hand in her hair, and then up at my mouth, and I watched her do it, watched her decide.
“Wren,” she said. “Can I kiss you? I’ve thought about it for about a year, and the candle’s making me brave.”
“Please,” I said. “God. Yes.”
She kissed me like she’d been rehearsing, and then like she’d thrown the rehearsal out. The first touch was barely anything, a brush, her lips dry and a little chapped, and I made a sound I’d never admit to. Then she tilted her head and it deepened and her hand came up and cupped my jaw, the palm warm, and I opened for her. She tasted like the tea. She kissed slow, so slow, like we had the whole blackout and meant to spend it, and I grabbed a fistful of that gray cardigan to keep from sliding off the step.
When we broke she was breathing hard and so was I. The candle threw our two shadows huge on the wall, tangled together.
“Come up to mine,” she said. “It’s warmer. My place has a gas stove, I can make tea, I have like nine more candles. I’m not trying to, I mean. I am trying to. But also I do have tea.”
“I’d love tea,” I said. “And also the other thing.”
“Both is good.”
She carried the jar candle and I carried the dumplings, which I refused to abandon, and she laughed at me the whole way up, her hand finding the small of my back on the dark landing. Her door stuck the way mine does. She hip-checked it open.
Her apartment was a mirror of mine and nothing like it. Plants everywhere, trailing off shelves. A couch covered in a blanket the color of mustard. A wall of records. She lit candles in a row along the windowsill, one, two, five, till the room was gold and swimming, and I stood in the middle of it holding frozen dumplings and thought, I’m going to remember this room for the rest of my life.
“Put those in the freezer,” she said. “Sorry. They’re sweating on your shirt.”
“They are.” I put them in. The freezer was dead too, of course. I laughed, and when I turned she was right there, close, her hands coming up to my waist.
“Hi,” she said again.
“Hi.”
This kiss was different. No hesitation in it. She walked me backward until my spine met the fridge door, cool through my shirt, and she pressed all along me, soft and solid, thigh between mine, and I gasped into her mouth. Her hands slid under the hem of my shirt and spread on my ribs, warm, and she stopped, lips against my ear.
“Tell me if I go too fast.”
“You won’t.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. I will.”
She pulled my shirt up over my head, slowly, and the cold air hit my skin and then her mouth did, at my collarbone, the hollow of my throat, the slope of my breast above the edge of my bra. I tipped my head back against the fridge. My hands found her cardigan and pushed it off her shoulders and underneath she was wearing just a thin tank, no bra, and I could see her nipples through the cotton, dark and hard, and I said “oh” like a stupid girl who’s never seen a body.
“You can touch,” she said.
I did. I cupped her through the cotton and she shivered, her forehead dropping to my shoulder, and I rubbed my thumb across and felt her whole body answer. She made a small broken noise against my skin. I’d been wanting to hear that noise for a year and I hadn’t even known its name.
We got to the couch somehow. The mustard blanket scratched my back. She knelt over me in the candlelight and peeled my jeans down and I lifted my hips to help, and she kissed down my stomach, slowly, and stopped with her mouth just above the waistband of my underwear. Looked up at me. Her hair was everywhere. Her eyes were so dark.
“Can I?”
“Yes. God, please.”
She hooked her fingers in and drew them down. Cool air, then the heat of her breath, and then her mouth, and I swear the whole room went white at the edges. She was good. She was patient, she was relentless, she licked slow flat strokes and then circled with the tip of her tongue and I fisted both hands in the mustard blanket and said her name, her actual name, the one I’d been practicing in the elevator that doesn’t exist. “Priya. Priya, oh my god.”
She hummed against me and I felt it everywhere. Two of her fingers slid inside, slow, curling, finding exactly the right place on the first try like she’d had a map. I was already close. I was so close that it was embarrassing. My thighs were shaking on either side of her head and she put one steadying hand on my hip and didn’t let up, didn’t change anything, just kept going, kept going, and I came hard with my back arched off the couch and a noise coming out of me I’m pretty sure the whole third floor heard.
She stayed with me through it. Gentled her mouth. Kissed the inside of my thigh and rested her cheek there, breathing.
“Okay,” she said, hoarse. “Good. That’s a lot better than the other things I imagined.”
“The other things?”
“They didn’t have the sound.” She crawled up my body, flushed and wrecked, lips shining, and I pulled her down by the tank and kissed her, tasting myself, tasting tea, and rolled us so she was under me on the cushions.
“My turn,” I said.
“You don’t have to.”
“I’ve been dodging a puddle for thirteen months. I would very much like to get wet.”
She laughed so hard she had to cover her face, and then I got the tank off her and her shorts down and she wasn’t laughing, she was arching, her bare skin gold all over in the candlelight. I kissed everything. The scar on her knee. The tender place under her ribs where she was ticklish, which I found by accident and used on purpose. The soft inside of her thighs, which I took my time with, her fingers tightening in my hair, her breath going ragged and high. When I finally put my mouth on her she said “oh, thank god” and I almost lost it laughing and then I didn’t, because she tasted so good, salt and heat, and she moved under my tongue like she’d been waiting a long time too.
I learned her in pieces. A slow circle made her whimper. Pressure, flat and steady, made her thighs clamp my head. I slid a finger in and she said “yes, that, there,” and I stayed there, I stayed exactly there while she pulled my hair and climbed and climbed, her heel digging into my back, and she came with a long shuddering “Wren,” her whole body folding up around my head.
After, I lay with my cheek on her stomach and she stroked my hair, and the candles burned low in the window, and nobody said anything for a long while.
The power came back at twelve fifteen. Every light in the apartment blazed on at once, and the fridge shuddered back to life, and the record player she’d left plugged in started a record from the exact middle of a song. We both flinched like we’d been caught. She was naked under a mustard blanket. I was wearing one sock.
“Oh no,” she said, squinting. “Reality.”
“It’s very bright.”
“Do you want to go?” She asked it carefully, pulling the blanket tighter. “It’s okay if you want to. I can find you a flashlight for the stairs.”
“The stairs have lights again.”
“Okay, then I can find you nothing. I just.” She stopped. “I really didn’t want to be the person who made it weird by the lights coming on.”
I got up on my elbow and looked at her, the whole shy awkward magnificent mess of her, hair in a rat’s nest, a pencil somehow still stuck in the couch cushion. “Priya. My dumplings are defrosted. I’m going to need your help eating twenty of them.”
Her whole face lit up. Brighter than the overheads.
“I can make a dipping sauce.”
“Then I’m not going anywhere.”
We ate dumplings at one in the morning on her kitchen floor, naked under blankets, passing a bowl, and she told me she’d been on the building list because she’d gone and asked the super how to get on it for both of us last spring, and then never knew how to bring it up. I told her I’d been walking my groceries past her door slower for months. We kissed with soy sauce on our mouths. We went to bed, her bed, wide and soft, and did it all again slower, in the light this time, with the lamp left on so I could see her face.
In the morning she made tea and I took the cardboard out of the glass bin on my way to work, quietly, so I wouldn’t have to talk about it.
She texted me before I’d even gotten down the stairs. you’re on the list now. also you hopped.
I did not hop, I wrote back. And then, on the landing between the second and third floor, in the plain gray morning light, I stopped, and looked up the stairs at her open door, and hopped.
