Bitter View

The client call runs long because the client is an idiot. Not an idiot in a mean way, just the kind of man who asks for a data pull and then argues with the data. I'm Stephanie Bennet, I'm 44, and I have been explaining the same chart to him for twenty minutes. My apartment on 45th Street is dark except for my laptop screen. The 7 train rumbles past every few minutes like a heartbeat nobody asked for.

My phone buzzes face-down on the desk. I ignore it the first time. Then it buzzes again, and again, and the client is still talking, so I flip it over under the desk like I'm seventeen and cheating on a test.

It's Earl.

Your curtain is open, I can see your silhouette. Blinds down in 3 minutes or the show is off.

I almost laugh out loud during a client call. I actually have to bite my lip. Earl Bostwick, 46, building super for a complex six blocks from mine, the man I have been trading messages with for three weeks and never met in person. He found my profile because I listed spite as a hobby, more or less, and he wrote back and said spite was the best motivator he knew. We've been playing this game by text ever since. Fantasies. Dare-adjacent suggestions. Nothing done yet. Everything planned.

The client says something about Q3. I say yes, I'll circle back. I hang up before he finishes his sentence, which is rude, but he's had twenty minutes of my life and I want them back.

Here is the part I should probably admit. Three years ago, when I was 41, I had an affair with a married colleague named Doug. It lasted four months and ended when his wife found his second phone. Fine, whatever, these things happen. What I have never gotten over is what Doug said to me on his way out the door. He said I was boring, Stephanie. Not the affair. Me. He said sex with me was like watching a very competent spreadsheet.

So yeah. Spite as a hobby.

I get up from the desk and cross the one room of my apartment to the window. The airshaft here is maybe twenty feet wide. The building across from me is the same prewar brick, same fire escapes, same aging everything. My blinds are half-down the way they always are, because the walls in this place are thin and I have a natural suspicion of being perceived.

Earl's text sits there. Three minutes or the show is off. The nerve of this man. He knows I've been in a work call. He timed it anyway.

I text back one-handed while I look at the gap between my blinds and the glass.

Show's on. You first.

The reply comes fast. A photo. It's his torso, no face, a gray crop top pushed up over his chest, and behind him there's a stretch of hallway with a fire door. The door has a yellow 3 stenciled on it at eye level. I know that door. It's the fire door at the end of my own hallway, the one that connects through to the building next door, and I have walked past that yellow 3 maybe a thousand times without thinking about it.

He's not six blocks away. He's one airshaft away. He has been one airshaft away for three weeks of messages about what he'd like to do to me.

I sit down on the arm of my couch and stare at the photo for a good thirty seconds. Then I type: You're in the Delmore. The building next door. You could have said.

He replies: Where's the fun in said. Window. Three minutes was two minutes ago.

Okay. Okay. My hands are actually not steady, which annoys me, because I'm a grown woman with a 401k and a system for organizing my spices, and here I am with shaking hands because a man in a crop top sent me a fire door. But there it is.

I stand in front of the window. The blinds are half-open, bottom half showing the lower pane, top half open to the dark airshaft, the curtain rod exposed above them. Beyond the glass, the dark windows across the shaft. I can see his window. Third floor, directly across, one lamp on. There's a shape in the lamp light that could be a man standing just back from the glass.

I take a breath and start on the top button of my blouse.

Here's what I want to get across, and I'm aware how it sounds. It's not really about Earl. Earl is great in the chat, funny, dirty in a specific and creative way, and the photo suggests he takes care of himself. But the engine underneath this whole thing is Doug and that word, boring. Every move I make at this window is a move I'm making at a man who isn't watching and doesn't deserve the show. That's messed up. I know it's messed up. It also works on me like nothing has worked in three years.

Second button. I face the glass for that one, so if he's watching, he gets the full front view. Then I turn my back to the window for the third button, slow, and I let the blouse hang open while I do the fourth like I'm in no hurry at all.

Across the airshaft, the silhouette moves. Steps to the window, stops. I can't see details, just a man shape backlit by a lamp, one hand raised like he's holding a phone. Filming or photographing or just leaning. I don't know which and I find I don't care, which is new information about myself.

The 7 train goes by and the whole window hums in the frame. I roll my shoulders.

I text him without turning around, thumbs working by feel.

I can see you watching. That's cheating, you're supposed to be performing too.

His reply buzzes my pocket: I'm pacing. You're ahead of schedule. Take the blouse all the way off and hang it on the curtain rod. Left side.

Hang it on the curtain rod. Like it's laundry. Like this is a domestic arrangement we've had for years. Something about the bossiness of it goes straight through me. I take the blouse off, and the air from the window gap is cool on my stomach, and I reach up and drape the blouse over the rod on the left side exactly where he told me to. My black bra against the window glass, my reflection ghosting over the dark airshaft, and across the way his silhouette has gone completely still.

I turn sideways so I'm half profile to the glass. I unhook my bra in front, one hand, a trick I learned at 25 and haven't needed since. I don't take it off yet. I let it hang open and stand there feeling my own heartbeat in weird places, throat, wrists, somewhere lower.

The phone buzzes.

Now the bra on the rod. And Stephanie. The lamp is going off next. Fair warning.

I hang the bra next to the blouse. Two pieces of clothing on a curtain rod so far facing an airshaft in Sunnyside, and me standing in the window in nothing but my work slacks, bare from the waist up, watching a dark rectangle across the way.

The lamp goes out. His window goes black.

I stand there, half lit by my own apartment behind me, and I realize I have no idea what happens next and every intention of finding out.

The phone buzzes again. Good. Now the slacks.

I read it twice. Something about the period at the end of it, the flat little command, makes my stomach tighten. Doug never gave orders. Doug asked questions and made charts, emotionally speaking. He'd say, do you want to maybe, and then fill in the blank like he was offering me a timeslot.

Earl does not offer a timeslot. Earl says now the slacks.

So I do it. I reach back and find the zipper at my hip and pull it down slow, not for him, I tell myself, but because the metal is cold and my fingers want to drag it out. The slacks loosen. I push them over my hips and let them fall to my ankles, and I step out of them and stand there in my plain black underwear, and I pick them up and hang them on the rod with the others. Three pieces of clothing. Like laundry. The curtain rod creaks a little, which I have never noticed before in eight years of living here, and the fact that I'm noticing it now, naked in my own window, is absurd.

I press my palm flat against the pane. The glass is cold. It's October and this building has radiator heat you can't control, so the window has been cracked since September, but the pane itself is