July, Before We Breathed

The window is open. It has been open since morning, when the apartment was still bearable, and now the heat from the street comes in the same way it always does in July — not a breeze, not relief, just the city's warmth arriving and staying, settling against my bare arms, against the thin cotton at my back. I can hear a cab somewhere below. A voice.

The ordinary sound of a Tuesday evening in a city that does not care what is about to happen inside this room. I have been thinking about this since noon. Not abstractly. Specifically.

The particular weight of his hands, the way he moves like he already knows where everything is, which he does, which is the point. I spent the subway ride home with my knees pressed together and the cotton dress doing nothing — it is so thin I can feel the plastic of the seat through it, can feel the air when someone walks past, can feel my own warmth accumulating in the fabric and going nowhere. By the time I reached our block I was not walking toward the door. I was walking toward him.

He is not here yet. The apartment holds the specific stillness of a room waiting for something to change. I stand near the window because the sound of the street is the only company I have right now, and I watch the light go amber over the rooftops across the way. Golden hour in New York looks like something is on fire several blocks east.

My dress is yellow — pale, almost white in this light — and the straps are narrow and the hem falls just above my knee and there is nothing underneath it that would slow anything down. I chose it this morning knowing this. That is the kind of person I have become, or maybe always was. I press my palm flat against my sternum.

Not a gesture. A check. The want is there the way hunger is there — not located in one place, distributed, a whole-body fact. My stomach has been slightly contracted for the last hour.

The crease where my thigh meets my hip is warm in a way that has nothing to do with July. I hear his key. The sound of it — metal, then the tumbler, then the particular give of this door that always sticks in summer — moves through me before I have decided to let it. My right hand, which has been resting against the windowsill, lifts slightly.

The left presses harder against my sternum. The door opens. He sees me. I see him see me.

That is its own thing, the two or three seconds before either of us moves, the heat still pouring in through the open window behind me, the city still going about its Tuesday below, and his eyes on my face and then not on my face. He crosses the room before the door has finished closing.