Six A.M., Steam Still Rising

The steam valve hissed and stopped. Hissed and stopped. She had been listening to it for four minutes, which was long enough to know no one was coming. She had not planned this.

That was the part she kept returning to, sitting on the lower bench with the towel across her thighs and the tile cold against the backs of her calves. She had not planned it. She had come in at 5:48 because the weight floor was already occupied by men who watched themselves in mirrors, and the steam room was the one place in this building where no one watched anything. The sign on the door said maximum occupancy six.

At 6 a.m. in January in Portland, the occupancy was one, and she had known that before she pushed the door open, and she had brought nothing with her except the towel. The heat pressed against her collarbones. The towel was thin — gym-issue, the cotton worn to something between fabric and suggestion — and where it lay across her thighs it had already gone damp, not from her, just from the air, which held everything here.

She could feel that. The specific weight of the damp cotton across both thighs, the hem sitting two inches above her knee, the way the towel did not move when she was still but would if she shifted even slightly toward the wall. She was not shifting yet. The valve hissed.

Stopped. She had a category for this kind of wanting — she had several, organized the way she organized other inconvenient things, efficiently and without sentiment. But she had decided sometime in the last four minutes that she was not going to use any of them this morning. The steam room was empty.

The tile was cold. The towel was damp and thin and she was under it alone, and there was something about doing this here, in a place that had not been built for it, that she wanted more than she wanted the alternative, which was to go back to the weight floor and watch men watch themselves. Her right hand was in her lap. She was aware of it the way you become aware of your own pulse — not suddenly, but completely, once you notice.

The other hand pressed flat against the tile beside her hip, and the tile was cold enough that she registered it in her wrist, a line of cold running up to the inside of her elbow. She looked at the door. The frosted glass panel, the handle, the small bolt she had turned without deciding to turn it. She kept looking at it.

Her right hand moved to the edge of the towel's hem. The exhale that came out was not the one she had been holding. It was shorter, cut off before she had decided to cut it off, and it disappeared into the steam immediately, taken. She pressed the heel of her hand against the hem.

Through the damp cotton. Just that — the pressure, the thin fabric, the heat that was already there waiting for her, her own, held in the weave. The valve hissed.