The Previous Tenant

The bed is too big for the room, and I love it anyway!

I'm Alma, I'm twenty-eight, and I work dispatch for a courier company, which means I spend ten hours a day telling grown men where to drive. When I get home I want a bed you could land a small plane on. So I bought this platform thing secondhand, and then discovered the fun part: getting it up three flights of stairs in a building from 1962.

That's where Jacques comes in. He's the guy next door, twenty-nine, drafts buildings for a living, and he saw me wrestling a bed slat on the landing like it owed me money and just said, "Do you want help or do you want dignity?"

"Help," I said. "Dignity's overrated."

He was right there for an hour, carrying the heavy end, saying almost nothing but noticing everything. He noticed the mattress tag was upside down. He noticed my ceiling light swings when trucks pass. He noticed, I swear, when my shirt rode up half an inch, and he looked away so fast and so politely that it was somehow more obvious than if he'd stared. We got the bed assembled, he drank one glass of my terrible box wine standing up like a man at an open house, and then he left and I lay on my new platform bed thinking about his forearms. Which is a fine thing to think about! No complaints!

Here's the catch, though. The walls in this building are made of paper and regret. I know my downstairs neighbor watches cooking shows at seven. I know the guy on the other side of Jacques sneezes in threes. And some nights I hear Jacques's place too, not in any scandalous way, just living sounds, chair scrapes, his radio, him humming while he cooks. He hums really well, which is unfair.

So the next evening I'm sitting on this enormous bed in my tiny room, eating cold pad thai out of the box, when somebody knocks. And it's Jacques, holding a bottle of wine with an actual label on it, the fancy kind with a picture of a hill.

"I heard you had a bedwarming and nobody brought anything," he says. "That felt wrong."

"I had a bed assembly," I say. "And you were the party. Get in here before the hallway hears all this."

He comes in and does the thing where a tall guy folds himself into a small apartment, ducking under my one shelf, stepping over my shoe pile. I pour the wine into my two mismatched glasses, one says WORLD'S OKAYEST SISTER, the other is just chipped. He takes the chipped one, naturally.

"So which unit do you live in again?" I ask, patting the bed next to me. "I only know you by humming."

"Three B. And I do not hum."

"You absolutely hum. You hum when you cook. It's usually something that sounds like a funeral dirge but you're very committed to it."

"That's Nik Getz," he says, sitting down next to me, and the bed is so new and so solid that we both bounce a little and laugh. "Okay, maybe I hum."

We drink and talk about the street noise, which is a whole topic in this building. There's a bus stop right outside and a bar two doors down and a man who, every single night around eleven, announces to nobody that he is walking home.

"Somebody should check on that guy," I say.

"Someone does," Jacques says. "You shout 'get home safe, Gary' out your window. I've heard you."

I have indeed done that! Twice! "Okay, so the walls work both ways. Noted." And then I take a sip of wine and think, well, walls work both ways, and here's a man sitting on my bed, and we're both adults, and last night I thought about his forearms until I fell asleep.

So I say it out loud, because why do all that internal negotiating if you're not going to use it. "Can I kiss you? Because I've been thinking about it since the headboard went on."

He turns his head, and he has this slow way of looking at you, like he's drafting you, measuring everything. "Yes," he says. "I was wondering how many more glasses of wine it would take you."

"Rude! It would've taken one more."

"Good to know."

So I kiss him, and it's a good kiss, unhurried, which apparently is his whole personality, and I find I like it more than I expected to. My hand goes to his chest and his heartbeat is there, ordinary and fast, which makes me feel better about mine. When we come up for air he says, "Your room is very small."

"The bed is very big. It balances out."

We take our time, and I mean that literally, because he's the kind of person who unbuttons a shirt like each button gets its own moment. I get his shirt off and, wow, okay, the forearms were only the trailer. I run my hands over his shoulders and down his back and he does that little exhale people do when someone finds a spot they didn't know they were protecting.

"Your turn?" I ask, and he nods, and I pull my shirt over my head and I feel his eyes go everywhere at once and then come back to my face, which, again, the politeness thing, it shouldn't be charming, but it is.

"You're staring," I say.

"Yes," he says. "Deliberately. You can stare back, it's allowed."

So I do, while he unhooks my bra with an efficiency that suggests either practice or drafting-school training, and I decide not to ask which. His mouth is warm and he takes his time there too, and I lie back on this ridiculous bed that barely fits the room and let him. My fingers find his belt but he catches my hand.

"Slow," he says. "You're a dispatcher. You boss people around all day. Let somebody else run the schedule tonight."

"Excuse me, are you micromanaging me in my own apartment?"

"Yes!"

"Fine. Fine! But I'm keeping notes."

"Take notes," he says, and goes back to what he was doing, which was driving me quietly crazy with his mouth at my collarbone, moving down at a pace I would describe to a driver as leisurely with stops.

At some point we end up both properly undressed, and it's the first time I've seen him entirely, and he's built leaner than his shirts suggest, all long lines, like something he'd draw himself. He looks at me the same way, unhurried, and I should feel self-conscious lying there on white sheets with the street humming below, but I don't, mostly because he keeps touching me like he's confirming a measurement.

"You're studying me," I say.

"I'm an observant person," he says. "I told you. I noticed the mattress tag was upside down."

"You noticed a lot of things, apparently."

"A few."

His hand travels down my stomach and I stop having clever dialogue for a while. His fingers are patient and exact and he watches my face the whole time like my reactions are blueprints, adjusting, adjusting. I have to put my wine glass somewhere and there is nowhere to put it, this is a one-bedroom apartment with a bed as vast as a tennis court, so I just set it on the floor and hope the chipped one survives the night.

"Jacques," I manage, at one point.

"Yes?"

"Nothing. Just saying your name. It seemed like the moment."

"It is a good moment," he agrees, and keeps going.

The thing about thin walls, I think hazily, is that tomorrow the building will know something happened in here tonight, they just won't know who won. Because that's the part I haven't told him yet, the part that's been rattling around my competitive little head since he carried the footboard up the stairs. This man moves like everything is easy for him. And I have decided, in the way you decide things on a secondhand platform bed eating cold noodles, that I want to find out if I can keep up with him. Or beat him. Same thing.

For now, though, I'm flat on my back on the biggest bed in Oakwood, with a man I met yesterday, and my downstairs neighbor's cooking show is going faintly through the floor, and Gary is out there somewhere announcing his walk home, and I am having a genuinely excellent Tuesday.

"You okay?" he asks, lifting his head.

"I'm fantastic," I say. "Why'd you stop?"

"I didn't stop. I paused. There's a difference, ask any draftsman."

"What's the difference?"

"A pause is deliberate," he says, and moves back down, and I decide the man can run the schedule tonight after all.

He settles between my legs like he's got all night, which, checking the clock on my microwave, he actually does. Tuesday nights, man. Nothing on TV anyway.

"Can I?" he asks, hands on my knees, and the asking shouldn't be hot, he's already been everywhere else, but it is. Hot, I mean. Very.

"Yes. Please. Obviously."

"Obviously," he agrees, and then he takes his sweet time.

I want to describe what he does but the honest version is: he licks me slow, one long stripe, and then he stops. Just stops. Like a truck idling at a light.

"Jacques."

"Hm?"

"Are you serious right now?"

"Very." And he does it again, slow, and stops again, and I swear to god this man has found the exact pace that keeps me right at the edge of nothing and I'm making sounds I did not plan on making in an apartment with paper walls. Sorry, downstairs neighbor. Sorry, cooking show.

"You're doing this on purpose," I say, breathless, gripping the sheet.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because you're competitive and I want to see what happens." He goes back down before I can answer, and this time he adds his fingers, two of them, curling, and my back comes off the bed like it's spring-loaded. "There it is," he says against me, smug, and I would be mad about the smugness if my brain weren't currently a dispatch radio with all channels open.

"More," I hear myself say. "Jacques, more, please, I'm asking, I'm asking nicely, this is me asking nicely."

"Beautiful when you beg," he says, "noted officially," and then he actually gives it to me, mouth and fingers working together, steady now, no more pauses, and I come with my hand over my own mouth because Gary does not need to know about this. Or maybe he'd be happy for me. Gary seems supportive.

I come down slowly. The ceiling light is swinging a little, which might be a truck outside or might be the bed hitting the wall, and honestly either way.