Walls Between Us

The bookshelf broke on a Tuesday, which felt about right for my life that month. I was twenty-nine years old, I was a book critic who read other people's sentences all day for a living, and I was standing in my half-packed studio apartment watching two years of paperbacks sag through a collapsed middle shelf and spill across the carpet like they were trying to escape me too.

"Okay," I said, to the shelf, to the books, to nobody. "Okay. Fine. Great."

The apartment was a losing situation. Every box I sealed seemed to produce two more, the tape ran out, my hair was in a clip that had given up around noon, and I had been living on cold coffee and the crackers I kept finding in my coat pockets. The move was supposed to be a fresh start. Instead it was mostly me, alone, negotiating with cardboard.

My phone buzzed on the counter. Sam, of course. Sam had a sixth sense for when I was at my lowest.

heard the shelf died. Rip. Also heard you cancelled date #3 this month. That's a streak, Driscoll. Even for you

I typed back with my thumb, standing over a pile of Toni Morrison.

It wasn't a date. It was a coffee that I left after forty minutes because he explained my own job to me

you cancelled on the guy BEFORE that too. And the one before HIM. When's the last time you even got laid? asking as a friend. Mostly as entertainment

I did not answer that one. That was the problem with Sam. She was funny until she was accurate, and then she was just accurate.

I sat down on an overturned moving box, which groaned under me in a way I chose not to take personally, and I thought about it. Honestly thought about it. It had been a long time. Long enough that I'd stopped saying the number even to myself. And I knew why. I knew exactly why. Dating meant letting someone in past the wit and the routine, meant explaining myself, meant small talk about childhoods and five-year plans, and I had exactly no energy left for any of it. Especially not this month, with my whole life in boxes around me.

But the physical part? The physical part I missed. I missed it a lot, actually, and admitting that while sitting on a box in a wrecked apartment made something feel sort of loose and possible.

So I did the impulsive thing. I did the thing I would normally talk myself out of within four minutes.

I opened the anonymous ads site, and I wrote a post. I kept it vague on purpose, no name, no photo, nothing identifying, just enough to find one specific kind of person. One adult, thirty or older, clean, discreet, staying that way. I read it over twice, then deleted it and wrote it again, because I have never in my life posted anything without at least two revisions.

Here is the part Sam would find hilarious. I had a requirement, and I put it in caps, and I called it non-negotiable right there in the ad, because I am who I am. Condoms, every single time, no discussion, no "just this once," no debating it. If that was a problem, keep scrolling.

I also added a line about there being no romance expected and none offered, no sleeping over, no follow-up texts about how it was. I typed it fast, hit post before I could reread it a third time, then put the phone face-down on the counter and went back to wrapping dishes like I hadn't just done something completely out of character.

I thought about it the whole time I wrapped the dishes. Every single dish.

The replies started coming within the hour, which was its own little horror show. I got a guy who sent a paragraph about himself that was clearly copy-pasted, a guy who opened with "hey beautiful," and a guy who apparently had not read the condom line at all, because his second message was a joke about how he "preferred skin to skin." Blocked, blocked, blocked. I was about to delete the whole post and write this night off as a weird experiment when one more reply came in.

Short one. No photo. No opening line about my non-existent profile picture. It just said:

Read the whole ad twice. Caps and all. All terms accepted, including the non-negotiable one. No romance, no sleepover, no follow-up. I'm thirty, I'm clean, I'm quiet, and I'm discreet by trade, which is a weird thing to say about yourself but happens to be true. If you're still reading replies, tell me a day.

No name. No flattery. No paragraph about what he wanted to do to me. I sat there on my box, surrounded by books that had tried to flee, and I read it four times. It was the politest thing anyone had sent me all week, and it was an answer to a sex ad.

We messaged back and forth through the site's relay, which kept both of us anonymous. He asked almost nothing, which should have been a red flag and was instead weirdly relaxing. I told him the ground rules again anyway, because I am incapable of not restating terms. He agreed again, in fewer words than I'd used. I asked him one question, mostly as a test.

why do you want to do this, no offense

None taken. Honest answer? Same reason as you, I'd guess. Simple transaction, no performance, nobody pretending this is a first date. I fix things for a living. I like it when something is stated plainly and then just works.

I stared at that reply for a while. A handyman, maybe. Or a liar. That was the part I kept circling back to, the part that should have shut the whole thing down. I had no idea who this man was. None. The anonymity was the safety feature and also, if I was honest with myself, kind of the thrill. A stranger with no face, no name, no history with me, walking in with nothing to explain and nothing to want from me except the one thing I'd offered. It was risky and I knew it was risky and I wanted it anyway, in a breathless, what-is-wrong-with-me way that I hadn't felt since I was, well, since a long time ago.

So I picked the risk down to something I could live with. Not my apartment. Not his place, wherever that was. Neutral ground.

There's an unused common room in my building. Second floor, next to the stairwell. It's got a couch, a table, bad lighting, and in two years I have never once seen another human being in it. Nobody goes in there. Ever. Thursday, eight at night. I'll book it with the building manager so it reads on the calendar as a tenants' meeting.

That made him laugh, I could tell, even through text. His reply came quick.

A tenants' meeting. That's genuinely funny. Thursday at eight works. Last thing, and then I'll leave you alone until then: you can cancel any time, for any reason, up to and including the moment I walk in. I mean that. Say the word and it never happened.

Well. That was unfair. That was deeply, disgustingly unfair, because now I trusted him, and he hadn't even shown me his face.

Thursday, I typed back. Eight. If you're a serial killer I have a bottle of sriracha by the door that I will absolutely use, just so we're clear on the risks on your end too.

He sent back a single thumbs up, which should not have been charming, and then nothing, and I put the phone down and looked around at my ruined apartment and my dead bookshelf and thought, well, either this is the dumbest thing I've ever done or it's the only honest thing I've done all year.

Wednesday I told the building manager, a sweet retired guy named Gus who asks no questions, that I needed the common room Thursday evening for a "small tenants' meeting," and he wrote it on the calendar in pencil and said, "Two chairs in there are wobbly, hon," and I said that was fine, wobbly was fine, I wasn't planning on sitting.

Thursday I cleaned the common room at seven, which took ten minutes because nobody had touched it since the Bush years, judging by the magazines on the shelf. I wiped the table. I straightened the couch. I checked my hair in the bathroom mirror down the hall twice, then told myself out loud that I was not going to be nervous for a business meeting, even this kind of business meeting.

At eight exactly, there was a knock. Two knocks, actually, polite ones, nothing dramatic.

I opened the door.

He was tall, with sawdust still somehow on the sleeve of a clean flannel shirt, dark hair going a little gray at the temples, and hands that looked like they'd done forty years of work by age thirty. He held a six-pack of ginger beer in one hand as if offering a truce.

"Hi," he said. "I'm Jonah. I brought soda, because I read your whole file on being no-strings and figured alcohol was a gray area."

I looked at him. I looked at the ginger beer. I stepped back from the door.

I let him in and he did a slow turn around the room, taking in the wobbly chairs, the bad fluorescent light, the couch that sagged in the middle like it had given up years ago.

"This is perfect," he said.

"Perfect?"

"Yeah. Nothing in here belongs to either of us. Feels like neutral territory." He set the ginger beer on the table, opened one, and handed it to me first. "Gus down in the lobby gave me a look. I think he thinks we're arguing about the heating bill."

"We are now. I'm pro-heat!"

He laughed at that, a real one, low and easy, and I hated how much it worked on me. He was charming in a way his messages had only hinted at. Confident but quiet about it. He sat on the arm of the couch as someone who'd never once felt awkward in a room, and I stood by the table with my soda trying to remember that I was the one who set the terms here.

"So," he said. "Terms. Say them to me out loud. I want to hear them from you, not from a text."

"Okay. Condoms, obviously, every time, no exceptions."

"Agreed."

"No romance. No sleepover. No follow-up. No texting me cute things next week. No showing up at my door with more ginger beer."

"Agreed. All of it." He took a sip. "One addition from me, and you can veto it. I like talking. Not pillow talk, I know that's off the table. I mean during. Checking in. Asking what you want. Is that okay?"

I blinked. "That's not an addition, that's just good manners."

"You'd be surprised how many people think good manners kill the mood."

"Those people are why I started reviewing books