I thank him. He kisses me.
“You want me to hang out for a while? I don’t have anything to do. I was supposed to bring the beer to those guys”—he motions his head toward my front door—“but fuck ’em. I can take a night off.”
I didn’t respond. I let my nerve endings unfurl from their tensed state. Calm down, children.
“I like your place,” he says.
“Thanks,” I say.
His hand picks up steam on my breast. “It’s so clean.” He moves his hand down my stomach, and I reach mine out and hold it there, intertwine my fingers with his. I am too tired to start anything else, but I cannot seem to say no just yet. “It’s a real hole where I’m at,” he says. “You could probably guess that, though.”
“I could, yes.”
He kisses me on the neck.
“Man, I’m getting hard again,” he says. “I could get used to this.”
I am flattered, I can’t help it. I had turned him on twice. Maybe this is no fluke.
“You know I could come over again sometime. Spend the night. I could make you dinner. We could do this some more.” He squeezes my hand.
“Maybe.”
“Because honestly, I’d much rather crash in a place like this than with those guys. They’re just a bunch of slobs. It’s gross.”
He shifts his arm up, and happily puts it around me. I picture a stack of garbage bags outside my front door, facing their twins across the hall.
We lie there for a while, our breaths catching in our throats, and listen to the distinct noises of the night turn into the roar of the day: an individual car hurtling through yellow lights, unchallenged; dogs greeting each other on their morning walks before their owners prepare for work; and the sound of a lone bus running the regular route, its breaks moaning for oil and tenderness at the stop below my window. Suddenly there is sunlight through the window, not a lot, because it’s winter and nature is sparing with her love these months. Finally the streets grow anxious and full, the rest of traffic mixing with the sound of doors opening and closing, footsteps made by overpriced high heels and running shoes and scuffed dress shoes; everyone is shifting and moving at once, and the blend of the sounds and the piercing pure light through my window signal that while what happened between me and my neighbor was different from the usual, it is now over. I cannot go back, so now I must move on. I didn’t know how this would happen, this progression, this growth, what form it would take, or how much work I would have to do to get there, but at the very least, I knew I was going to have to find a new apartment.
“So maybe I could stay here for a while,” he says.
I look at him, try to picture him here in the morning and the evening, with the sunrise and the sunset, every single day. I can see someone, but it’s not him, it’s not his face. I see Alan’s smile, and I see the legs of a man I invited to my house once, strong and lean, and I see a man with my father’s mind, and I see a man who works two floors down from me at work who makes me laugh all the time in the elevator, and I see someone with my sister’s generosity who can give until he bleeds—I like that sometimes, the bleeding—and I see the satisfied faces who look at me for that instant as they groan like I’m the woman they love. I see bits and pieces, parts, fractions, hundreds of people comprising the one perfect man, and I know suddenly that he’s out there, even if this one, he’s not the one.
1.
IT IS morning now, and Sarah Lee sits and waits for the bus.
2.