Second Showing

I was thirty-five years old and I still thought about that dorm window, which is a stupid thing to admit but here we are. It was fourteen years ago and I was twenty-one, a junior with a sixth-floor room that faced the parking lot, and Marcus was twenty-two and had been coming around all semester the way guys do when they like you but neither of you will say it. One night I told him, half joking, that I was going to undress with the curtains open and let the whole parking lot see me, and he said okay, do it, and I chickened out. I pulled the curtains and we watched a movie instead and never spoke of it again, and now here I am, still carrying it around like loose change in a pocket.

The thing about me, and I have to put this out there early or none of the rest makes sense, is that I have always wanted to be seen. Not just looked at, I get looked at fine, I mean actually seen, put on display, caught in the act of being a woman with a body. It has been in me since I was a young adult and it never went anywhere because I was too chicken to feed it. Gene knows this about me. We have been dating two years and he knows everything, including the window story, which I told him drunk on wine about a year in and he never let me live it down, in the good way.

So Friday afternoon he is riding shotgun in my Camry while I drive out to this showing, a big Craftsman house on a corner lot, empty, no furniture, the listing expiring Tuesday. I am a real estate agent, that is my job, and this is the last showing of the day with no other appointments until Monday. Gene invited himself along, which he does sometimes, and about ten minutes out he says, casual as anything, "Tell me about the window again."

I laughed and kept my eyes on the road. "You know about the window."

"I know you told it drunk. I want the sober version."

"Well, the sober version is the same story, I just remember more of the embarrassment." I signaled a turn I did not need to signal. "I stood there with my shirt half off and the curtain open and the whole parking lot right there, and I froze. Six floors up, nobody could see a thing, and I still froze. Then I made some joke about the blinds being broken and we watched TV."

"And you've thought about it ever since."

"Practically every time I undress near a window, yes. Happy now?"

"Very." He did that little smile he does, the one where he is already three steps ahead of me and enjoying it. "So here's a question. This house you're showing. Does it have big windows?"

I should have seen where he was going and I did see it and my stomach did the flip anyway. "Craftsman style. Big windows, low sills, lots of glass. The listing photos, the light just pours in."

"No curtains?"

"It's empty, Gene. No curtains, no blinds, nothing. It's a glass box with a fireplace."

"Huh," he said, and looked out the window like he was thinking about weather, and I gripped the wheel and drove us both toward whatever he was building in that head of his.

We pulled up at five-something, the sun getting low and orange, and the house sat there all wide porch and dark beams with every window glowing. No cars on the street. I got my keys out and my hands were not steady and I pretended that was normal for a Friday. Gene walked up the porch steps behind me and I could feel him there, close, not touching, just present, and that alone was doing things to me.

I got the lock open and pushed the door in, and the smell of an empty house came out, dust and old wood and a little lemon cleaner from the cleaning crew. Honey light was everywhere, sliding across the bare floors. Gene stepped in close behind me while I stood in the entryway, close enough that his chest nearly touched my back, and he murmured right against my ear.

"Big windows and no curtains. Just like that dorm."

"That's not funny."

"I'm not laughing." His breath hit my neck. "Look at these windows, Court. Low sills. Street's right there. Anybody walking that sidewalk sees everything."

"Nobody's walking the sidewalk, it's a residential corner and it's dinner time."

"So we'd be safe," he said, and I heard the dare in it, the same dare from the dorm, still warm, still waiting. I turned around and he was right there and I had to step back or bump into him, and he just watched me with that face he makes when he is not going to push, he is only going to leave the door open and see if I walk through.

"I'm working," I said, weak as coffee.

"You are. Show me the house." He spread his hands, all innocence. "Fireplace first. I want to hear about the fireplace."

So I did my job, or I wore my job like a costume anyway, and walked him through the front rooms doing my agent patter about original oak floors and the built-in window seats. The whole time the light kept getting lower and more gold and the windows got more and more like open invitations. In the living room I knelt by the big brick fireplace and pointed out the damper and the mantel, talking about wood-burning inserts, and Gene came around behind me and trailed two fingers along the back of my neck, slow, while I was mid-sentence about the chimney having been inspected in March.

My voice just stopped. That was it, I could not finish the word insulation, I could barely remember what a chimney was for. His fingers kept going, slow, from the base of my neck up into my hairline and back down, and I knelt there on the bare floor of a stranger's living room feeling like the whole street could see me through the glass, and the old dare woke all the way up for the first time in fourteen years.

"You were saying," he said.

"I was saying you're a menace." I turned my head and he was looking down at me and his eyes were not innocent at all.

"I'm a man who remembers a story you've told me twice." He crouched down next to me, close, his knee touching mine. "The one where you wanted to be watched and talked yourself out of it, and you've been mad about it ever since. That one."

"The curtains were right there, Gene."

"And these windows are right here." He nodded at the glass, the street beyond it going purple with dusk. "Six floors up you couldn't be seen. Here you could. That's the part that's got you breathing funny, isn't it."

It was. It absolutely was, and my face went hot and I did not deny it, because he already knew, he had known for a year, and denying it would just be the twenty-one-year-old version of me pulling the curtain shut one more time. I looked at the window instead, the low sill, the sidewalk, and something in my chest went loud.

"If I did anything in this house," I said slowly, "the seller could sue me."

"So we settle that first, separately, like adults. You lock the door, nothing gets damaged, nobody films anything, and nobody's job gets touched because this is off the clock and you invited me." He said it plain, no pressure in it, just logistics, which is one of the thousand reasons I love him. "Then what happens is up to you. You, not me. You've got fourteen years of wanting and I've got a front-row seat if you want an audience."

The sun hit the window glass dead on and for a second the whole room lit up like it was on fire, and I thought, fourteen years, that is long enough.

I locked the front door first, and that mattered to me more than almost anything else, that little click of the deadbolt, because it meant everything after was ours and private and nobody was ever going to walk in on it. Then I took off my heels and walked up the stairs in my stockinged feet with Gene following quiet behind me, and the whole house creaked in that way empty houses do, like it was clearing its throat.

The master bedroom was at the back corner, and it was the best room in the place, all that honey oak trim and a wall of windows facing the empty street, three big panels of glass with sills low enough to sit on. The sun was halfway down the sky by then, orange going to rose, and the light came through sideways and hit the bare floor in long warm stripes. There was nothing in the room at all, no bed, no dresser, no curtains, nothing but us and the glass and the neighborhood beyond it going quiet.

I set my purse down on the floor by the window seat and stood there a minute, hands on my hips, looking at all that glass. My heart was pounding in my throat and my face