The Studio's Secret

Chloe left on a Tuesday for a gallery thing in Chicago, and by Wednesday evening I was standing in her studio with a bag of groceries and the whole place to myself for four more days.

I'm Eden, by the way. I'm twenty-four, I teach yoga, and I've been dating Chloe for two years now. We met through mutual friends the semester after I graduated, and somehow the most put-together woman in the city decided she liked the flaky one who could fold herself in half. She lives in a converted industrial loft that she never lets anyone into, not even me, not usually. Her studio and gallery are on the ground floor and the bedroom sits up on a mezzanine above it, all iron railing and warm wood.

So when she handed me the spare key at the airport and said "water the ferns, don't judge my paintings," it felt a little like being handed the keys to a church.

"Water the ferns," she'd said, holding my face with both hands outside the security line. "And be good."

She said it lightly. Sort of. Her eyes did a thing.

"I'm not going to snoop," I told her, which was true when I said it.

To be honest in this story about how that went, I lasted about three hours.

* * *

The studio in daylight is a different animal than the studio at night. I'd been over for dinner a handful of times, always with Chloe narrating, always with the big wall of windows open to the street noise. Alone, with the lights low and the fridge humming, it felt like reading someone's diary in the room where the diary was written.

Her canvases were everywhere. Half-finished ones stacked against the wall, finished ones hung crooked because she can hang a show for a client perfectly but refuses to do it for herself. There was a sculpture on the long table that I recognized from a show last spring, the one with the twisted brass ribs, and I ran my fingers along the edge of it the way I never would have with her watching.

The thing about being alone in her space was that I got to be curious instead of polite.

I made dinner in her kitchen, which is barely a kitchen, more a hot plate and good taste. I watered the ferns. I went up the spiral stairs and lay on her bed reading for an hour, on her sheets, smelling her pillow. It was nice. It was a little lonely. I texted her a photo of the ferns looking appropriately watered and she sent back a thumbs up and a picture of hotel room carpet, and I thought, well, the carpet and the ferns, the whole relationship right there.

It was when I went downstairs to pour myself some wine that I really started looking. There's a drafting table in the corner with flat file drawers under it, the kind of thing that slides out smooth and deep. Most of them held paper, sketches, tracing vellum. The bottom one on the right didn't.

It didn't slide.

I pulled it again, gently, like it might be stuck on a pencil. It moved a quarter inch and stopped dead. Locked. Which was interesting, because nothing else in the studio locked. I checked, actually walked around and checked, and every drawer in the place opened for me except that one.

Chloe keeps her tax documents in a fireproof box. Chloe keeps her spare keys in a labeled drawer. Chloe does not lock things, generally. So a locked drawer in an unlocked studio wasn't a storage decision, it was a statement.

I stood there with my wine and thought about the way her eyes had done the thing at the airport. She hadn't said don't. She'd said don't judge. Which, if you squint at it, is practically an invitation with a bow on it. I'm aware that's a generous interpretation. I was also two glasses of wine into a lonely Wednesday.

I spent a stupid amount of time looking for the key. Under the ferns (fern number two, nothing). In the kitchen jars. In the coat pocket of the one jacket she leaves here. Then I did the thing you do in every movie and every book, which is look in the nearest potted plant, and sure enough, tucked into the soil at the base of the big monstera by the window, under a layer of bark chips, there was a small brass key that had clearly been placed there by a person and not dropped there by the universe.

I held it for a long time. (My heart was doing fine, actually, I was weirdly calm, which should have been a warning.)

I opened the drawer.

It was lined with dark felt, like a jeweler's case, and it was full of sex toys. Not the sad plastic kind from a drugstore aisle. These looked like objects. Smooth steel, carved wood, glass in two colors, a pale green and a smoke gray. There was a leather harness folded neatly at one end, a little metal clamp thing I didn't examine too closely, and a worn wooden box that I didn't open because even I have limits on a first pass.

I recognized exactly none of them, which surprised me. Two years. We have a perfectly respectable box in my nightstand. Apparently my girlfriend had a whole separate museum two feet below her sketches.

And here's where I felt the first real twist of guilt. Not because she had them. Because she'd hidden them from me, specifically, in the place she'd hidden everything else from me, and I'd just gone ahead and found it. I sat down on the drafting stool and finished my wine and thought about closing the drawer and going back upstairs to my book.

Then I saw the card, a small cream one tucked flat against the felt under the harness. Her handwriting, the tidy slanted gallery hand. If you found the key, you were always allowed. Wash what you use, put it back, tell me about it or don't. Your call. C. I read it three times.

Then I thought about being twenty-four and alone in a beautiful room, and how long it had been since I felt reckless about anything, and how Chloe had said don't judge, and how she'd hidden the key in the plant, a woman who wanted it found by exactly one