Heat Rising on Novak Street

We got married a year ago, when I was twenty-three and Lori was twenty-four, and then we spent almost the whole first year of it living in different cities. Different time zones, some of it. She was running a project in Denver and I was stuck here finishing a hospital addition, and our marriage lived on video calls and texts and a shared calendar that got more attention than either of us got.

So when she finally moved her stuff into my loft on Novak Street for the summer, I figured the heat would come back on its own. Like flipping a breaker. Click, and the lights work again!

That is not what happened.

Here is what did happen, and I am telling it straight because I still can't fully believe it myself.

***

June in this city is a joke. We're in the warehouse district, third floor of an old textile building, and the loft holds heat like a cast iron pan. Across the alley there's another converted building, five feet away, and the windows face each other dead on. You can practically shake hands across the gap. Our fire escape works as a balcony, kind of, if you don't mind rust and pigeon mess, and in the summer we keep the big sash window open all day and most of the night because the wall AC wheezes and gives up around ten.

Lori came home that first Friday at seven, dropped her bag, and sat on the floor with her back against the couch. Not on the couch. On the floor.

"Rough day?" I asked.

"Rough month," she said. "Rough year, honestly. I don't want to talk about it."

I tried anyway. I came up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders and started working them, and I leaned down and kissed the top of her head.

"You smell like sunscreen and concrete," I said. "Which is weirdly my thing."

She laughed a little, I'll give her that. But then she said, "Kai, I love you, but I need twenty minutes where nobody touches me. Twenty whole minutes. Can you give me that?"

I said sure, of course, whatever you need. And I went and got dinner going. But standing there cutting an onion I felt something in my chest I didn't like. It wasn't hurt exactly. It was more like being a roommate. Like we were two grad students sharing a lease and being polite about whose turn it was to buy milk.

That was three weeks ago. She moved in the first of June. We've slept in the same bed every night since and it's been mostly sleeping. I want to be fair to her, she works brutal hours, and I'm not innocent either, I've been glued to my own deadlines. But three weeks! In the same apartment! Married people!

I kept running the math. We met at twenty-one in a studio section, stayed up three nights straight building a physical model, and by the end of it I was toast for her. Married by twenty-three. So the heat exists. I have receipts. It's just that somewhere between Denver and here, somebody switched the breaker off.

***

Okay. Here's where it gets interesting, and where I have to admit something slightly embarrassing.

Last Tuesday it was ninety-eight degrees at ten at night. The loft was a sauna. I was standing at the open window in nothing but boxers, drinking a beer, letting whatever air existed move across me. And I looked across the alley, because you do, the windows over there are right there, and a guy was watching me.

Not staring in a creepy frozen way. Watching the way you watch a movie. He was maybe thirty-two, sitting at a desk with a fan pointed at him, shirt off, and his eyes were on our window. When I looked over, he didn't even dart away. He just kept looking, kind of neutral, like, yes, I'm here, this is my window, I live here.

Now, a normal person closes the blinds. I know that. But something about the heat and the beer and two weeks of feeling like a roommate made me do the opposite. I stepped closer to the window. Deliberately. Leaned on the sill. Took a long drink of the beer.

He raised his bottle a little, like a toast.

I raised mine back and stayed there a full minute, feeling absolutely ridiculous and absolutely lit up at the same time. Then I did close the blinds, because I'm not an animal, but I went to bed grinning.

His name turned out to be Dave, but I didn't know that yet. At that point he was just the guy across the alley.

***

I told Lori the next morning while she was drinking coffee at the counter.

"So, funny thing," I said. "Guy across the alley was watching me at the window last night."

She looked up over her mug. "Watching you how?"

"Just watching. Window's open, his window's open, five feet of alley, it happens."

"Did it bother you?" She asked it like a site inspection. Level tone, looking for cracks.

"Here's the weird part. No. It kind of woke me up?" I laughed. "I stood there like an idiot posing with my beer."

Lori set the mug down. She got that look she gets when a detail doesn't fit the drawing. "You posed."

"I didn't pose pose. I leaned. There was leaning."

"Kai." She was trying not to smile and failing a little. "Some stranger watched you in your underwear and your takeaway is that it turned you on?"

"My takeaway is that it was the most alive I've felt in two weeks, which, yeah, okay, is a depressing sentence when I say it out loud."

She was quiet for a second. Then she said, "He's been there all spring. I've seen him. Dark hair, paints buildings for a living or something."

"You've seen him and you didn't mention it?"

"I didn't think it mattered!" She shrugged. "Windows face each other. You see people."

"So it didn't bother you either," I said, and I watched her face while I did it.

"It didn't not bother me," she said slowly. "It's more like... I don't know. It's data."

"It's data," I repeated. "God, I married you."

"You did. A year ago. You cried at the reception, don't think I forgot."

"I did not cry, there was dust."

We both laughed and something loosened, just a little, for the first time since she'd carried her suitcase up the stairs.

And then, because I'm apparently the kind of husband who pokes a bruise to see what happens, I said, "Want to make it a game?"

"What kind of game?"

"A who's-brazen game. Who can be bolder at the window. Nothing crude. No touching. Just... letting him see that we exist. That we're not two polite roommates sharing a milk budget."

Lori stared at me. I braced for the brush-off, the "I need twenty minutes" voice.

Instead she said, "You're proposing we flirt with a stranger across an alley as marriage therapy."

"Basically, yes!"

"That is the dumbest idea you've ever had." She picked her mug back up. "And also I've been losing to you in every competition we've had since studio, so. Fine. I'm in. But I'm going to win."

"Oh, you're in?"

"I'm in."

She drank her coffee and looked out the window toward Dave's building, and I watched her do it, and I swear the temperature in that kitchen went up five degrees on its own.

The heat on Novak Street was already ninety-four outside. It was about to get worse indoors, and neither of us knew it yet.

The game started slow, the way these things do.

For a few days it was nothing dumb. Lori drank her coffee at the window in the morning with the sash all the way up. I read on the fire escape in the evenings with my shirt off. Dave sat at his desk with his fan and his bottle and watched us the way you watch a neighbor's TV through a wall. Present, not invasive. It was almost boring, and then it wasn't, because last Sunday the heat broke some kind of seal in my wife.

I was at the sink when I heard her bare feet on the boards behind me. I turned around and there she was in nothing but a towel, twenty-five years old and walking to the window like she was going out for mail.

"Uh," I said. "Hi?"

"Shh." She looked over her shoulder at me. "You had your turn. This is mine."

She stood at the open window with the towel tucked under her arms, and I watched Dave's head come up across the alley. He went very still. She let the towel hang there for a count of maybe five seconds, and then she pulled the tuck loose and let it drop, slow, first one side and then the other, and stepped back from the window before it even hit the floor.

"Ha!" She spun around with her arms out, totally naked, grinning