Window-Girl

Poppy is thirty tomorrow, and she knows this because Herman has already said "last year of your twenties" twice, and she's known him fourteen days, all of them on an app where he listed his hobbies as "craft beer and keeping it real." He is thirty-one, he works in insurance, and he is currently explaining the difference between two kinds of IPA in a level of detail that could put an insomniac to sleep.

The Oxcart is loud on a Friday, sticky underfoot, red lights glowing over the dartboards, and Poppy checks her phone under the table for the third time in ten minutes. Nothing. Lauren texts her a single eye emoji from behind the bar, because Lauren has been watching this date from forty feet away with the enjoyment of a woman at a demolition derby.

"So anyway the hops, they're like the backbone," Herman says, gesturing with his glass, and Poppy nods and thinks about her birthday cake order and whether she remembered to pay the water bill.

"That's great," she says. "The backbone. Yep."

"And a lot of guys get that wrong, they think it's the malt, but it's not, it's the hops."

She is going to give him the rest of this beer and then the check, she decides, because he has been polite, he hasn't said anything awful, and he does have a nice smile even if he uses it mostly when he's talking. That's the bar now, apparently, at thirty. He didn't say anything awful.

When he goes to the restroom she flags Lauren over, and Lauren leans on the table with her forearms, thirty-four years old and grinning like Christmas came early.

"That bad, huh?" Lauren says.

"He explained hops to me. For forty minutes."

"Oh no. Oh honey!" Lauren takes Poppy's half-finished drink and drains it herself. "Okay, new plan. He comes back, you do the thing, and then you're coming with me, because I get off at eleven and I have an idea."

"Lauren, no. Your ideas are all bad. Your ideas involve karaoke."

"This one doesn't. Well. It involves one other person, but no microphones. Trust me, birthday's tomorrow, this is your present, this is me being generous with my only night off."

Lauren disappears back to the taps before Poppy can argue, and when Herman comes back Poppy does the thing, the soft apology and the honest no-second-date speech, and he takes it fine, shakes her hand like a job interview, and she watches him walk out into the Friday night feeling mostly nothing, which is somehow worse than feeling bad.

* * *

At eleven Lauren hangs up her apron, punches out, and physically takes Poppy by the elbow, steering her through the door and two blocks up Mulberry Street while Poppy protests the whole way.

"I'm tired, Lauren. I've been awake since seven and I had a man explain beer to me for the length of a Ken Burns documentary."

"You'll want to be awake for this. Actually, no, you won't need to be, you'll wake right up, I promise." Lauren has her keys out at the building, and of course she has a copy of Poppy's key on her own ring, has had one since they roomed together in grad housing at twenty-two, and she marches up the stairs to the second floor and lets them both into the dark apartment.

"It's almost midnight, it's basically my birthday, I want my present," Poppy says, dropping her bag on the couch.

"You're standing in it. Okay, come here, leave the lights off, come to the bedroom window."

Lauren pulls her by the wrist, and the bedroom is dark except for the streetlamp glow coming up from the alley, and Lauren points across the narrow gap between buildings, across to the Kinsey Behavioral Sciences Building, fourth floor, where one office window is lit, warm yellow, the only lit window in the whole face of the building at a quarter past eleven on a Friday night.

"Whose office is that," Poppy says, and her stomach does something.

"You know whose office that is. You told me about him. Cooper, the trivia guy, the guy who kissed you in a hallway and then moved to another state about it. I looked him up when you told me the story, I was being nosy, he's a postdoc there now, cognitive science, he came back last spring. You never noticed?"

"I never look out my bedroom window at an office building, Lauren, I look at the alley and the dumpsters."

"Well, look now!"

Poppy looks. The blinds in the office are half open, and there's a desk lamp on, and a shape moving behind the glass, a man's silhouette, sitting at a desk. She has not thought about Cooper in a couple of years, not properly, not since the story got worn smooth from telling, the campus bar four years ago, age twenty-six, the two of them going toe to toe over a trivia question about Antarctic expeditions like it was a boxing match, and then the hallway outside her advisor's office a month later, one kiss, both of them drunk on one drink each and on winning, and then he took the postdoc in another state and that was that.

"He can't see in anyway," Poppy says. "I'm in the dark, he's got a light on, it's basic physics."

"He can see a light turn on, though," Lauren says, and she's grinning, Poppy can hear it. "Happy birthday, babe. I'm getting a cab. Do not text me anything I have to respond to tonight."

The door closes, and Poppy is alone in her dark apartment with a lit window across the alley and her heart pounding like a drum line, and she tells herself it's stupid, it's a quarter past eleven, the man is probably grading, probably doesn't know which apartment building faces his, probably doesn't even remember the hallway. And then she thinks, but what if he does. What if he's sitting there four stories up working late the way he always worked late, and the one window across from him goes dark tonight, and tomorrow she turns thirty, and she has spent the last hour being explained beer to by a man who kept it real.

She walks to the bedside table and turns the lamp on. Just the small one, warm, low. The light spills across the floor and the window becomes a dim mirror to her and, she assumes, a lit square to anyone looking.

Across the alley, the silhouette stops moving.

She stands there in her work blouse and her slacks, thirty years old in forty minutes, and the silhouette rises out of the desk chair, slow, like a man checking, and comes closer to the glass, and stops, and she cannot see his face, only that he is now facing her, facing the alley, facing the one lit lamp in a dark apartment window.

Poppy's hands go to the top button of her blouse before she has decided anything, which she will think about later, a lot, and she pops it open, one button, nothing more than a collar gone loose, nothing a lawyer could call anything.

The silhouette does not move.

She opens the second button, and the third, slow, watching him the way he used to watch her across a trivia table, like it was a contest and she intended to win it, and her skin is warm and the night is thirty years old and ending, and across the alley Cooper stands very still at his window, watching.

She stands there with her fingers on the fourth button and thinks about how she got here, how an hour ago she was giving the no second date speech to a man who insured things for a living, and how now she is performing for a lit window like the alley is a stage and she is the only act on the bill. She opens the fourth button, and the fifth, and the blouse comes out of her slacks, and she shrugs it off her shoulders and lets it slide down her arms and onto the floor behind her, a soft heap she steps out of without looking down. The lamp lights her from the side, and she knows what that does, she has taken enough selfies in enough bathrooms to know exactly what a low warm lamp does to a body at midnight.

The silhouette in the fourth floor window has not moved, and she decides to take that as attention rather than shock, because the alternative makes her feel foolish and she refuses to feel foolish on the last minutes of her twenties. She reaches behind her back and unhooks the bra in one motion, the way she has done ten thousand times in ten thousand bathrooms, and she slides the straps down her arms slowly, one and then the other, holding the cups against herself for a second longer than necessary just to be a brat about it. Then she pulls the bra away, holds it up high over her head in one hand like a trophy, and presses it flat against the glass of her window, and across the alley Cooper's hand comes up and touches his own window, and she laughs out loud in her empty apartment, a real laugh, surprised out of her.

"You are so full of it," she says to him, to the glass, to nobody, and she lets