Tight Black Dress in a Manhattan Hotel Bedroom

The chair is angled just slightly toward the bed — not enough to seem deliberate, which is exactly why I placed it there before he arrived. It's a wingback, dark walnut, the kind of furniture that makes a man look like he's presiding over something. I want him presiding. I want to be the thing he's watching.

The city is forty floors below us and barely audible: a siren, gone; the low friction of traffic that never fully stops. The lamp on the nightstand throws a warm oval across the coverlet and not much else. I'm still in the dress. That's deliberate too.

I sit on the edge of the bed and face him. The crepe fabric is warm from the cab ride up, dense against my thighs, and when I shift my weight it doesn't give — it holds, and I have to make it move. That resistance is the first thing I want him to notice. The way I have to work for even this.

I take a breath — slow, through my nose — and let the hem ride.

He hasn't spoken since we came through the door. I haven't either. There is a quality to his silence that I've learned to read: it isn't passive. He's the kind of man who goes very still when he's paying close attention, and right now he's paying close attention, forearms on his knees, glass set aside on the side table. Watching my hands.

I am aware of my own face in a way I'm not always aware of it. I know what I look like right now — jaw set, chin lifted a degree, the particular steadiness I hold when I want to seem more composed than I am. I let him see that too. The performance includes the effort of performing.

My left hand smooths down the outside of my thigh, not for him, or not only. To feel what he's seeing. The fabric is taut enough that I can feel my own pulse through it.

"Don't look away," I say. Not a question.

He doesn't.

I lean back on my right palm and let my thighs part — slowly, against the dress's resistance — and watch his face change. Just slightly. Just enough. That shift is what I came here for, that two-second rearrangement in his expression that tells me the distance between the chair and the bed has become the most charged distance in Manhattan.

I hold that distance open. Let him sit in it. Let the chair hold him there, where he can see everything and touch nothing yet.

My breath goes shallow — not from nerves, but from the particular weight of being looked at by someone who knows how to look. The lamp catches the edge of the dress's hem, the pale strip of skin above my knee, and I think: not yet. The night is long. The chair is still across the room.

But I'm already thinking about crossing it.