Twelve Floors, No Apology

The walls in this building are thin. She has always known it — heard the couple on eleven argue about money in April, heard the man on thirteen laugh at something on television every Tuesday. The walls absorb everything and give nothing back, and she has known this since the first week she lived here, and tonight she does not care.

She is sitting on the edge of the bed with her coat still half-shrugged from her shoulders, the plaid skirt fanned across her thighs from where she dropped onto the mattress without taking it off. The fabric is light but it holds its shape — the hem stiff at the border of her knees, the plaid spread wide, red and green and the particular grey of a pattern that does not apologize for itself. She has not turned on the overhead light. The lamp on the nightstand throws everything amber, and in that amber she can see him watching her from the doorway, and she lets him watch.

The cold from outside is still in the fabric. She can feel it against the backs of her thighs — the specific chill of wool that has been in October air — and underneath it, contradicting it, her own heat. She has been warm since the subway. Since before the subway, if she is honest, which she is not required to be.

He says her name from the doorway. Not a question.

She doesn't answer. She is watching him the way she watches things she has already decided about, and her hands are in her lap, resting on the plaid, and she is aware of the weight of them — the particular stillness of hands that have not yet done what they are going to do.

The apartment on eleven is quiet tonight. The television on thirteen is off. Twelve floors below, a car passes on the side street and is gone, and what remains is the ambient murmur of a city that is not listening, and the walls, which are.

Her right hand shifts. Not much. Enough that the plaid moves with it, the hem lifting a centimeter at her knee, the fabric pulling slightly across both thighs at once. She feels the resistance of it — light but present, the skirt's insistence on staying arranged even as she rearranges herself.

She exhales. The sound arrives before she decides to make it — shorter than a sigh, not quite a breath, something that opens in her chest and gets out before she can evaluate it.

Her left hand stays flat on the mattress behind her. Braced. The duvet is cool under her palm.

She is not thinking about the walls.

She is thinking about the skirt staying on. About his hair. About the sound she is going to make when she stops deciding not to make it — the sound that will go into the plaster and stay there, the way all sounds do in buildings like this one, in rooms like this one, on nights when someone has finally stopped caring what gets absorbed.