House Tour Games

I'm Rebecca Vickers, I'm twenty-two, and I've been working at a flower shop in the city for about a year now. Two months ago my boss asked if I wanted to pick up weekend hours helping her friend, who does staging and open houses for high end listings. I said yes mostly because rent is rent. What I didn't count on was Samson Underwood.

The first time I saw him was at a showing in the hills back in early October. I was alone at the front desk with a sign-in sheet and a plate of cookies nobody ate, and he walked in around four, late, the way rich people are late on purpose. He was maybe thirty-eight, silver coming in at his temples, wearing a suit that probably cost more than my car. He signed the sheet and then just watched me.

I was supposed to give him the pitch. The house was mid-century, all glass and warm wood, and I had rehearsed the details in the car. I got through maybe half of it. I remember pointing at the ceiling and saying something like, "The, um, the crown molding is original, which is, well, it's moldy in the sense of molding, not moldy moldy, it's, um." I actually said moldy moldy. To a man in a five thousand dollar suit. I felt my face go red all the way down to my collar.

He didn't laugh. He just smiled a little, kind of slow, and kept his eyes on me while I fumbled. There was this heat in the way he looked, patient and amused, like he was watching a kitten try to climb out of a box. When I finally ran out of words he said the house was well kept and then he left. I stood there at the desk with my heart thumping and this weird warm feeling I couldn't name for two days.

Here's what I'll admit to you, reader: I thought about him more than I thought about the house. I had dated two guys before this, both short, both sweet, both boring in bed in a way I didn't even have the vocabulary for yet. Nobody had ever looked at me like that. I kept replaying it while I trimmed stems at the shop, this little fizz in my stomach every time I remembered his eyes.

***

So when I found out the agency had a new listing, another mid-century in the same hills, and that I'd be minding the open house alone on a Saturday, I told myself the odds of him showing up were small. Houses like that sell to whoever walks in. There are hundreds of buyers in this city.

He came in at quarter to five. The sign-in sheet said four was closing time and the light was already going gold through the floor to ceiling windows, so technically I should have been locking up. He walked in anyway, no apology, and I watched him trail his fingers along the edge of the kitchen island as if he were checking the temperature of it. The staging in this one was minimalist, a lot of bare counters and one big bowl of green apples, and my boss had let me add plants because that's my thing. There was a big monstera by the stairs and a shelf of orchids in the living room, and I'd spent an hour arranging them so the whole place smelled like wet soil and cedar.

"Back again," he said, and looked at my name tag even though he already knew my name. I could tell he did. "Miss Vickers."

"Mr. Underwood." I'm proud of how steady that came out.

He walked the island one more time, fingertips on the marble, and stopped across the counter from me. "Tell me," he said, "are you more comfortable with the greenery now?"

I want you to understand that question. On the surface it's a nice comment about the plants, about how I'd found my footing, flowers being my actual job instead of somebody else's house. Underneath it was the molding, and my stammering, and the fact that he remembered all of it and was poking at me with it, gently, like pressing a bruise to see if I'd flinch.

"A little," I said. "The plants don't make me nervous."

"No?" He tilted his head.

"Only houses." I heard myself smile and it surprised me. "And ceilings. Ceilings are still a work in progress."

That got a real laugh out of him, short and low, and something in my chest did a flip I didn't authorize. He walked the rest of the house while I pretended to tidy the cookie plate. I listened to his footsteps on the stairs, counted them without meaning to, tracked him through the rooms the way you track a storm on radar. The sun was sliding down the far windows and the whole place went amber, and I thought, he's going to leave, and then he came back down and stood at the desk again.

"This one could work," he said, half to himself, looking out at the yard. "Good bones. Needs someone decisive."

"Are you buying it?" I asked, and then winced, because buyers don't answer that.

"Maybe." He picked up the pen from the sign-in sheet, clicked it once, and set it down again without signing. "You've improved since October. I noticed."

"Thank you," I said, and my voice went small on the second word.

He gave me one last look, that same slow patient one, and walked out. I watched his car pull down the drive and I stood there in the quiet house feeling like I'd failed a test I hadn't studied for, except in the best possible way. I don't know how else to describe it. Like he'd opened a door and waited to see if I'd walk through it, and I'd just stood there blinking.

I started locking up. That's when I saw it. The monstera by the stairs had a folded slip of paper sticking out of the soil, cream colored, tucked down next to the stem where only someone actually touching the plant would find it. I looked around the empty house like a fool before I picked it out and unfolded it.

Handwritten. Nice pen. It said: Master bedroom. Sunset. You choose the safeword.

I actually sat down on the bottom stair for a second. My heart was pounding hard enough that I could feel it in my ears. Safeword. I knew what the word meant, in the abstract, from the internet, from late night reading I'd never told anyone about. I knew he wasn't talking about the house. He was telling me the property he actually wanted to inspect was me, and that the inspection would happen upstairs, and that the whole thing had rules I would get to help set.

There was a part of me, the sensible part, that said this is a strange man, this is a buyer at an open house, call your boss, go home, forget him. But the other part of me, the bigger part by a mile, was already thinking about how his fingers had moved along that marble, and how nobody in twenty-two years had ever regarded me as something worth being careful with. The two short boyfriends never made me feel this in three years combined.

I folded the note back up and slipped it into my pocket instead of the trash. Then I walked through the house turning off lights, saving the master bedroom for last, because I wanted to see it with the sunset still in it. Big room, low bed, wide glass. I stood in the doorway and decided.

I turned the lock on the front door and left the porch light on.

The sun is almost gone when I see headlights come up the drive. My stomach does a slow roll. I check the lock, unlock it, check my reflection in the hall mirror, hate myself for checking, and stand there with my hand on the doorknob trying to look like a person who does this sort of thing regularly. I do not do this sort of thing regularly. I have done this sort of thing exactly zero times, unless you count the internet reading, which I do not, because reading about a thing and standing barefoot-adjacent in a stranger's multimillion dollar house at dusk are different categories entirely.

I open the door before he can knock. He's in a dark shirt this time, sleeves rolled, no jacket, and somehow that's worse than the suit because it looks deliberate. Like he dressed down on purpose to meet me halfway.

"Miss Vickers," he says.

"Mr. Underwood." I step back. "You found the place."

"I've had my eye on it for a while." He walks in past me, close enough that his arm brushes mine, and waits while I lock up behind him. My hands are not steady. I fumble the deadbolt once and he doesn't comment, which somehow makes it worse, because I can feel him noticing everything anyway.

He doesn't tour the downstairs. He goes straight for the stairs, and I follow, and my brain is doing this absurd thing where it counts the steps again, eleven, same as before, while my body is busy being aware of how quiet the house is now. No other prospects. No boss in the kitchen. Just us and the last orange strip of sky.

The master bedroom is mostly dark by the time we reach it. The low bed sits in the middle of the room like a piece of furniture that has no idea what's about to