The Organ Loft

Rafe got to the flat on a Thursday evening, the keys still warm from Eliza's pocket. She was standing on the landing with her suitcase already by the door, thirty-eight years old and appearing like someone who had been rehearsing her goodbye speech for a week.

"So the monstera gets water twice, not three times," she said, handing him a piece of paper folded into quarters. "Two, Rafe. It'll rot if you do three. The fern gets a splash every day. Cat food is in the blue tin, the little scoop is inside it."

"Blue tin, little scoop," Rafe said. "I've got it."

"You've got it," she said, and then she didn't move. She stood there holding the strap of her bag and looking at the door like it might say something back. "The boiler in the basement makes a noise around eleven at night. It's just Lloyd. He runs it late because the pipes used to freeze back in, I don't know, before my time. Don't call anybody."

"Before my time," Rafe repeated, and she laughed, short and quick, and then she was gone down the stairs and out into the parking lot, and that constituted the entire goodbye. Three years of knowing each other from the same community hall, and the goodbye was shorter than the plant speech.

He wrote that off as nerves about the conference. She'd never directed the choir at anything bigger than the county fair, and now it was a whole week in another state with actual conductors and actual clinicians. People got weird before things like that.

The flat itself was the old Sunday-school room, converted sometime in the nineties, with sloped ceilings and a clawfoot tub that took up half the bathroom. Rafe had house-sat for people before. He'd stayed in stranger places. But the stillness in there after her car pulled out of the lot was a different animal. It wasn't quiet like an empty apartment. It was quiet, as if a breath were being held.

He was forty-four, single, and coming up on three years of nobody. The last relationship had ended when he was forty-one, messy and nobody's fault, and after that he just hadn't bothered. He told people he was busy with the tattoo shop. He told himself the same thing. Some nights the lie held and some nights it didn't.

Anyway. Plants, cat, boiler. One week. He could manage one week.

The first night went fine. The cat, whose name was Moose, judged him from the top of the bookshelf and refused to come down. He nearly watered the monstera that night out of sheer nerves, and put the can down around midnight, because the first of its two waters wasn't due until the weekend.

The second night was when the drawer happened.

He'd picked up a six-pack on the way home from the hall, wanting one beer before bed the way he usually did, and discovered that Eliza owned no bottle opener. None. He checked the kitchen drawers, the junk drawer, the cabinet above the fridge where everyone hides a bottle opener. Nothing. So he went looking in the living room, and that's when he saw the writing desk.

The desk sat under the window, an old oak thing with brass handles. He'd sat at it earlier that evening to write down Lloyd's boiler number. One of the small drawers on the left side was open. Not wide open. Just enough, maybe a finger's width, to catch the lamplight and show something brass inside that wasn't a handle.

Rafe stood there with the warm beer in his hand and told himself it was none of his business.

Then he set the beer down and opened it anyway.

The drawer stuck, because there was a lock. A small brass lock set into the frame, turned only halfway, so that the bolt had caught on its own lip and left the gap. He should have stopped there. He knew he should have stopped there, and he would admit it freely.

Instead he went to the kitchen, got a paperclip out of the junk drawer, bent it into an L, and worked the half-turned bolt free in about ninety seconds. Old lock, cheap tumbler. It gave with a click that sounded enormous in that quiet flat.

Inside the drawer was a flat wooden box, and inside the box, beside a little box of condoms, was a collection of silicone plugs in graduated sizes, arranged smallest to largest, and beneath them a sheet of lined notebook paper. The paper had columns. Sizes on the left, written in her tidy hand. Dates in the middle, going back years. Little initials and notes on the right, things like good and too much, wait and, once, simply, wow.

And under the columns, a short letter. He read it three times.

"Use whatever you find. I'll know. Leave a note if you want to."

That was all. No signature needed. Her handwriting was on every page of the schedule book at the hall.

Rafe sat down on the edge of her couch with the letter in his hand and his heart doing something he hadn't felt in three years. Because here was the thing, the thing he couldn't say to anyone: he hadn't touched himself with any real attention in months. Longer. The want had just dried up, the way a tap dries up, and he'd assumed that was it, that was the rest of his life now, forty-four and done.

And here was Eliza, choir director, plant-obsessed, cat owner, leaving a drawer of toys and an open invitation in a flat she'd asked him to water.

I'll know. He turned that over. Was it a trap? He thought about her at the landing, not meeting his eye, the goodbye shorter than the plant speech. No. It wasn't a trap. It was a shy woman leaving a door open a finger's width, the same way she'd left the drawer.

He got up and poured the beer out, actually. All of it, down the kitchen sink. If he was going to do this, he wanted to do it clear-headed, and he wanted no argument with himself later about whether the beer decided anything. It didn't, one beer wouldn't have, but he poured it out anyway and felt better.

Then he knelt on her rug.

He'd done this before, years ago, with a partner, back when he was a man who did such things. His hands remembered even if the rest of him felt new at it. He took the mid-size plug, the third one, a nice plum-purple thing with a flared base, and the bottle of lube that lived in the drawer beside the box. He washed the plug at the bathroom sink first, because it was hers and he was a guest, then rolled one of her condoms over it, the way anyone sensible shares a toy, and slicked it up slow and thorough, warming it between his palms.

He reached back and pressed the tip against himself, just resting it there, breathing. His body held its own views, and for once they were favorable. He let it in by degrees, a little, back out, a little more, taking his time, the stretch burning in that good