The Projector

I woke up in a bed that was not mine, under a sloped ceiling, with morning light coming through an arched window as large as a garage door. For a few seconds I had no idea where I was, and then the smell of the place sorted itself out for me. Machine oil and dust and, underneath that, someone's lavender shampoo. Tammy's shampoo. Tammy's bed. Tammy's loft, which sat on a mezzanine above what used to be the floor of a steam engine depot, back when steam engines needed depots.

I am thirty-four years old and I had met this woman in person for the first time less than twelve hours ago. She is thirty-one. We matched on an app three weeks back, traded a truly stupid number of messages, and last night she invited me here and I said yes and one thing led to another, as the saying goes, except with us nothing led anywhere sneaky. We both just walked straight into it. And now I was alone in her bed while she was somewhere below me doing something that clinked.

I sat up and looked around. The loft was one big room, half of it bed and couch and clothes, the other half a kind of workshop with a drafting table. The window light came down in long pale bars and lit up the dust in the air. From up here you could see over the railing to the main floor of the depot, all iron columns and old crane rails bolted along the ceiling, the bones of the place left exactly as they were. There were mats laid out in a square down there, which seemed like an odd thing for someone's living room floor to have under it.

On the table near the couch sat a slide projector. An actual old slide projector, the kind with the round tray, heavy and cream colored and scuffed. It was still warm when I put my hand on it, which gave me a small jolt, because it meant last night had not been that long ago. Beside it was a scattered pile of slides in little paper frames, some face up, some face down, and I remembered enough of the night to feel my face go hot.

Because here is the thing about me, the thing this whole story is actually about. I like being watched. Not doing anything for anybody, just being looked at, fully, by someone who wants to look. It took me thirty-four years to say that out loud to another person, and I said it to Tammy last night, in her bed, in the dark, and instead of laughing she had gotten up and turned on a slide projector.

She had put slides in it. Old ones. Photographs of people, from some other decade, posed and lit in ways that were plainly meant to be private. And while the images cycled on the whitewashed wall she had told me things, and I had told her things, and somewhere in there we had stopped talking altogether.

I was still sitting there trying to reconstruct the exact order of events when she came up the metal stairs with two mugs. She had short hair, work boots, paint-stained overalls over a tank top, forearms that came from operating a crane for a living. She looked at me sitting there in her sheet and grinned like the night had gone exactly the way she hoped.

"You sleep like a rock," she said. "Coffee. It's not good coffee, but it's hot."

"It's perfect," I said, which was mostly true.

She dropped onto the couch and put her boots up on the table next to the projector, which told you everything about how she felt about that projector. It was furniture to her, an everyday object, the way my laptop is furniture to me.

"That was my grandfather's," she said, tapping it with one boot. "The projector. He was a projectionist at a picture house, then he bought this when the place closed. Forty years of family holidays and, well. Other things."

"Other things being the slides I am not going to ask about," I said.

"You can ask. You just can't look through them without me in the room." She said it lightly but I understood there was a real line under it. "I don't show this thing to people, Leigh. I mean that. I've had people up here before and the projector stays in the cabinet. Last night was the first time I set it up for, you know. A guest."

A guest. I liked that she chose the word guest and not the other words she could have chosen. It made what happened sound polite.

"Why me?" I asked, and then immediately wished I had not, because it sounded needy. But she did not seem to mind.

"Because you told me the thing about being watched," she said, "like it was a confession, and I thought, this idiot, he thinks that's the big one. Wait till he hears what I like." She drank her coffee and looked at me over the rim. "I like watching. That's it, that's the entire fetish, nothing fancier. I like a person under a light, letting me look. Last night I watched you with the slides on the wall behind you and I have not stopped thinking about it since."

I did not have a response that was not just yes, so I drank my coffee instead.

She let the quiet sit for a bit, then said she had to be at work by two but there was something before that. Her self-defense class was downstairs at nine. Nigel, the instructor, was a coworker of hers from the depot and a friend of two years, and the class ran on Sunday mornings on the main floor, and would I come. I said yes before I even thought about it, partly because I wanted more time and partly because I was still trying to decode everything about her and a class full of her people seemed like a good place to gather evidence.

The class was eight adults of various builds, most of them regulars who greeted Tammy by name and looked at me with the frank curiosity you expect in a small community. Nigel was twenty-nine, compact, cheerful, with a voice built for carrying across a gym. He shook my hand, asked if I had done any training, and when I said none he gave me the look of a man filing that away for safety purposes and nothing else.

The first hour was conditioning and falls, which I survived badly. Then Nigel started partner drills, hip throws and pins and escapes, and Tammy, who clearly had two years of this in her body, ended up paired with me because nobody else wanted to explain to the newcomer why they had just flattened him.

She did not flatten me. She was careful and patient and corrected my base and showed me how to bridge. But at one point we drilled a pin, her weight settled across me, my shoulders on the mat, and she leaned down close to my ear so nobody else could hear, and her hair brushed my cheek, and she said, very quietly, "After breakfast. The projector. Just watching, that's all, nothing else unless you say, and you can say no right now. I want to put you in the light and look at you for as long as I want."