Boxed In With Marilyn

I don't remember the drive to Fort Knox Storage, not really. I remember the radio, and I remember thinking that the seat of my Corolla still smelled like Lauren, which is a stupid thing to notice, but I noticed it. Then I was in the parking lot with the trunk open and my whole life in about thirty boxes.

The unit itself was ground floor, which the guy on the phone had called a perk. What that meant in practice was that anybody walking past could see straight in, and the fluorescent tube over the door buzzed and threw everything in a flat, mean light. No shadows to hide in. I carried in the first box, the one labeled KITCHEN MISC in Lauren's handwriting, and set it down, and stood there sweating.

Thirty-four years old. Separated as of eight months ago. Sweating over a box of colanders in a fluorescent box at four in the afternoon. I felt dignified about the whole thing. I did not.

When I came back out for the second box, there was a woman standing in the doorway.

She was maybe forty-one, wearing gray coveralls with a company name I couldn't read, hair tied back, arms crossed. She wasn't pretending to be passing by. She was just standing there, watching me lift a box of bathroom stuff out of a Corolla.

"Hi," she said, like she'd been waiting for me to look up. "Marilyn. I run the moving crew here."

"Sean," I said. "Sean Boone."

"You look like you could use help."

I laughed, which came out wrong. "It's that obvious?"

"Gene!" she called, without answering, and a kid in his late twenties came around the corner of the unit block. Big shoulders, quiet face, already looking at the boxes in my car like he was doing math. "This is Sean. Sean, Gene. He's going to save your back."

I had meant to save money, actually, and I said so. Marilyn waved that off with one hand and stepped into the unit to look around, which was generous of her, since there wasn't much to look at. A few boxes I'd brought the night before. An air mattress. A lamp with no shade.

"Half-taped everything," she said, tapping a box with her toe. "You were in a hurry."

"Something like that."

She didn't ask, which I appreciated. Instead she stood next to me while Gene carried in the first load, and she was close. Closer than she needed to be. I could smell something like paint on her, thin and clean. She watched Gene work for a minute, then she watched me.

I want to be careful here, because I didn't understand what was happening yet. She looked at my hands, then my chest, then down, and then back up like nothing had happened, and I told myself I'd imagined it. I had a wedding ring tan line and a beer gut that had snuck up on me over the last few years. Nobody was looking at that.

Except she was. I caught her doing it again when I bent to move a box out of Gene's path, and when I straightened up she didn't look away fast enough. She gave me a small smile. Not embarrassed. That was the part that got to me. She looked like a woman who had seen what she wanted to see.

Gene said, "Need the dolly for the dresser," and left for the truck, and then it was just the two of us, and the buzzing light, and my half-taped life.

Marilyn leaned against the door frame. She reached up and pulled the zipper of her coveralls down about an inch, casual, the way you'd loosen a collar on a hot day. Except it was not a hot day, and there was a line of skin showing at her throat, and she did it slow enough that I understood it wasn't about temperature.

"Do you like being watched, Sean?"

The question landed in the middle of the unit like a dropped box. I opened my mouth. Before anything came out, she pulled the zipper all the way down to her waist and let the coveralls hang open, and there was nothing underneath. Nothing at all. Just Marilyn, forty-one years old, standing in a doorway with her coveralls pooled around her hips and looking at me like I was the one on display.

I should describe this properly. She was fuller through the hips than through the waist, strong forearms, small breasts with wide dark nipples that were already hard in the cold fluorescent air. She had a little silver ring through one nipple that I did not expect and could not stop looking at.

"You went quiet," she said.

"I'm... yeah. I'm quiet."

"Take your time." She didn't cover up. She didn't shift. She just leaned there, in the doorway, where anyone walking past could have seen her if she'd been a foot to the left, and waited.

"I don't know," I finally said. "Maybe. I think I hate being watched, actually."

"Hate it."

"I'm nervous about my body. There it is. Eight months of takeout and a separation, so." I gestured at myself, which was the least attractive gesture I've ever made.

Marilyn nodded like I'd told her something useful. "Take your clothes off."

"What?"

"Take them off. I'm watching. Nobody else can see, the way I'm standing. Gene takes ten minutes with a dolly, easy." Her voice stayed flat, matter-of-fact, like she was telling me where the bathroom was. "You're nervous about your body. Fine. So show it to somebody who already likes it."

"Already likes it? You've seen me carry boxes."

"I've seen you carry boxes badly," she said, and smiled. "Sean. You're the one sweating over it. I'm just a woman with a broken zipper standing in a doorway."

"That zipper didn't break on its own."

"No," she agreed. "It didn't."

I stood there. The light buzzed. Somewhere across the lot a gate rattled, and I felt the whole world narrow down to this: a woman watching, a door blocked by her shoulders, and a choice I was apparently going to make in front of a stranger.

I pulled my shirt off over my head. Then, because stopping there felt worse than going on, I toed off my shoes and pushed my jeans down and stepped out of them, and then it was just underwear, and her eyes on me, and my heart going like I'd run here instead of driven.

"All of it," she said, quieter now. Not flat anymore. Hungry. That's the only word I've got. She looked at me the way I look at the last piece of pie.

I hooked my thumbs in the waistband and hesitated, and she waited, and then I pulled them down, and I was naked in a storage unit in front of a woman whose last name I didn't even know.

I'm not going to lie and say I felt powerful. I felt pathetic for about four seconds. Then I watched her face, and there was nothing pathetic in it. She looked at my chest, my stomach, my cock, my legs, up and down, unhurried, like she was pricing the lot, and what I felt after the four seconds was something I hadn't felt since before Lauren stopped looking at me in the shower.

Wanted.

"Turn around," Marilyn said. "Slow."

I did.

"Good," she said. "God. Okay!" She laughed a little, at herself maybe. "You just made my whole week, and Gene isn't even back yet."

"You're not going to tell him...?"

"Why would I tell Gene anything?" She let the coveralls slide off one shoulder. "He stacks boxes. This is between us."

Between us. Standing naked under a buzzing light in Fort Knox Storage, listening to a woman I'd met twenty minutes ago say that, I noticed I was getting hard, and I noticed her notice it, and neither of us said a word about it for a long, long moment.

* * *

She stepped into the unit then, and the doorway stood empty behind her for the first time since the whole thing started, and that somehow felt more dangerous than anything else. Like the escape hatch had closed.

"Kneel there," she said, pointing at a flattened box near the back wall. "On that."

"Kneel?"

"You're catching on fast." She walked past me, close enough that I could smell her, some plain soap and something warmer underneath, and she dragged a second flattened box over with her foot. She sat down on it with her back against a stack of wardrobe cartons, coveralls hanging off one shoulder, and looked at me. "Sit on your heels. Face me."

I knelt on the cardboard. It was cold and it bowed a little under my weight and I was suddenly aware of how stupid I must have looked, a naked thirty-four-year-old man kneeling on packing material in a storage unit. Except she didn't look at me like I was stupid. She looked at me like I was the only thing on earth she wanted to look at, and that made all the difference in the world.

"You know what I want," she said.

"I... think I do."

"Then do it. Slow. I want to see all of it."

So I did. I wrapped my hand around myself and started, slow, the way you'd pace yourself if you had all night, and Marilyn watched. She didn't touch herself at first. She just watched, elbows on her knees, head tilted, and the buzzing light overhead was the loudest thing in the world. Every sound outside was a threat. The gate rattling. A truck pulling in somewhere across the lot, or maybe I imagined it. Gene's dolly wheels, somewhere far off, or maybe I imagined that too.

"You're listening for him," she said. It wasn't a question.

"Obviously."

"Good. Keep doing that. It's better when you're listening." She shifted, and finally her hand moved down her own stomach, disappeared