Watched and Wanting

The night I got locked out of my building was the second Tuesday of October, which mattered because Pelican Shores basically shuts down after Labor Day and there was nowhere else to go. I was twenty-three that fall, working as a curation assistant at the maritime museum, restoring bits of old ship stuff with tweezers and a headlamp, and I'd stayed late because a crate of brass fittings had come in and I couldn't leave them half sorted. Kirk was twenty-six that year, still is actually, and he worked supply chain at the distribution center out by the highway, so he got home way before me and usually had the door open before I finished climbing the steps.

Not that night. I came up the walk at quarter past seven and the front door, which normally sticks and needs a hip check, was shut tight and the deadbolt was thrown. I tried my key and it just bumped against nothing. Then I heard footsteps behind me and it was Kirk, coming up from the direction of the taco place with a bag of food, and he had that face on already.

"Please tell me you have your key," I said.

"I have my key." He pulled it out, held it up, and pushed it into the lock, where it stopped about halfway with a little clunk. "Okay, so that's new."

"What do you mean that's new, Kirk, that's the door."

"I mean the lock is jammed or something got in there, I don't know, look." He wiggled it, and it clunked again, and then he tried turning it with his whole wrist the way guys do, like more force fixes things, and nothing happened. "Sandra's gonna have to come out. Or the locksmith. Or both."

Sandra is the property manager and she lives over in Cypress Point, forty minutes away if there's no traffic, and it was Tuesday, so there was no traffic, but she also doesn't answer after six. We tried anyway. Kirk called twice, left a message both times, and then we both just stood there on the stoop like a couple of idiots holding a bag of tacos.

"It's cold," I said, which wasn't really true, it was maybe sixty-five, but the wind off the Gulf had a bite in it and I'd worn a thin blouse to work.

"So we go somewhere," he said. "Everything's closed."

"Not everything." He pointed across the street, and I looked, and there was the tailor shop, Howell's, the one that used to be a surfboard rental place back when this town had a summer. Mr. Howell keeps weird hours because he mostly does alterations for the country club ladies and he comes and goes whenever he feels like it, and he had a light on in the window and a hand-lettered sign that said CLOSED, RING BELL IF URGENT, which we had both privately laughed at more than once.

"We're not urgent," I said.

"We're locked out of our apartment and it's getting cold. That's urgent-ish." He was already crossing the street, so I followed, because what else was I going to do, stand there with the tacos?

Here's the part where I have to admit something about myself, and this is as good a place as any. I'm a normal person. I pay my bills, I water my one plant, I call my mother on Sundays. But I have this thing, this thing I've never said out loud to anybody, and the fact that I'm even writing this down is because of what happened that night. I'll get to it. Kirk will tell you his side too if you ask him, and he's worse than me, honestly, way worse.

So we rang the bell and Mr. Howell came to the door with pins in his mouth, this little wiry guy, maybe seventy, glasses pushed up on his forehead, and Kirk explained the situation, the lock, Sandra, the forty minutes, and Mr. Howell took the pins out and said, "You two can wait in the back, there's a couch, mind the pressing machine, it's hot." Just like that. Then he said he had to finish a hem for the Ferris woman by morning and went back to his machine, and Kirk and I looked at each other and followed the little hallway past the racks of waiting clothes into the back room.

The back room was bigger than the front, which surprised me, and it had that smell of fabric and steam and something old, and in the corner, I swear to you, there was a jukebox. A real one, tall and rounded, with bubbles in the plastic, and it was dark and dusty and had a sign taped to it that said OUT OF ORDER, DO NOT ASK, which is a very Howell sign. Kirk went straight to it the way he goes to everything.

"Ten years, minimum," he said, reading a faded service sticker on the side. "This thing's been dead since before we moved here."

"Everything in this town has been dead since before we moved here."

"Speak for yourself, I'm alive." He said it deadpan and I laughed even though it was a terrible joke, because that's the arrangement we have, terrible jokes get laughs.

And then there was the mirror. Three panels of it, big as doors, on wheels, the kind a tailor uses so a customer can see their back and their sides at the same time, angled toward each other with a little gap, and it caught the lamp light and threw it around the room. I sat down on the couch and Kirk sat next to me and opened the taco bag and we ate in silence for a minute, and the silence was fine, it always is with him.

I don't know why I said it. Maybe the room, maybe the mirror, maybe because I'd been carrying it around for so long it was starting to creak.

"You ever notice," I said, "that you can see everything in those three-panel mirrors? Every angle at once?"

"Sure. That's the point of them."

"Yeah. I know." I folded my taco wrapper into a little square. "Can I tell you something dumb?"

"Jeni, you tell me dumb things constantly."

"This is different." I looked at him. He looked back. Kirk and I had been roommates for just over a year by then, just roommates, we'd been clear about that from the start and it was easy, and maybe that's why it was safe to say. "Sometimes, in fitting rooms, at the mall, whatever. When the curtain's a little open, or the mirror's angled where somebody walking by might catch a glimpse. I get a thrill out of it. Like, a real one. I've been changing with the curtain cracked since I was old enough to pick my own clothes and I've never told a single person that."

Kirk didn't say anything for a second and my stomach did the thing it does, and then he put down his taco and wiped his hands on a napkin very carefully, like he was buying time.

"Okay," he said. "Then I'll tell you mine, and it's worse, so you'll feel better."

"Nothing's worse than that."

"Oh, it's worse!" He laughed, but a low laugh, nervous. "You remember the duplex on Shell Road, before this place? Second floor window across the alley? There was a woman, she was maybe thirty, used to change with her light on and her blinds up, every night around ten. And I watched. Not once. Every night for like three weeks until she moved out. And I never felt bad about it, Jeni, that's the part that scared me. It was the hottest thing I've ever done and I felt zero guilt and that's when I figured out there was something going on with me."

I smiled at him. I couldn't help it, and he saw me do it, and that changed everything.

Kirk set the taco bag down on the floor and turned so he was facing me all the way, knees angled, the lamp behind him, and I watched him do the thing he does when he's actually serious, which is he stops joking mid-sentence and just looks at you until you say something.

"So we could do it," he said. "Here. Tonight. The game, I mean."

"What game? We haven't made a game, we just traded felonies."

"No, hear me out!" He pointed at the mirror, then at the curtain that hung across the little alcove where Howell kept his pressing machine and a rack of the Ferris woman's clothes, probably. "One of us does the thing. The thing they do. Strips, whatever, right here in front of the mirror, all three panels, everything at once. And the other one watches from behind that curtain. Through the gap. And then we switch."

I looked at the curtain. It was a heavy blue curtain on a rod, the kind that actually slides, and it had about a two inch gap at the edge where it didn't quite meet the wall, like it had been made for exactly this, which of course it hadn't, but still.

"You're proposing that we take off our clothes in Mr. Howell's back room while he's ten feet away running a sewing machine," I said, "and watch each other through a curtain."

"I'm proposing it, yeah. We can say no. Either of us, any time, and that's it, we go back to eating tacos and waiting for Sandra to call." He said it fast, like he'd been building the sentence in his mouth. "But if I don't ask right now, in this room, with you having just said that, then I'm an idiot, and I already told you my worst thing, so."

I'm twenty-three, and he's twenty-six, and we'd been roommates a year, and nobody had ever put a hand on anybody, that was the deal, and here he