Burning Walls

The window across the alley went dark at eleven forty-two, same as it had every night for the three weeks I'd been counting. I knew because I was on my back porch with a cigarette I didn't want and a beer I'd stopped drinking, and because I'd started to build my evenings around that window the way you build a fire, one small piece at a time, telling yourself you're not cold.

Her name was Mara. I'd learned that from the mailbox, the one with the loose hinge, two down from mine. I'd learned other things too. She ran in the mornings before the heat came. She left dishes in the sink overnight, visible through the kitchen window if the angle was right. She lived with a man who drove a silver truck and came home late and never once, in three weeks, touched her in a way I could see from my side of the alley.

Not that I was watching for that. Not exactly.

I was forty-one, divorced eight months, and living in a rented duplex with a lawn I paid a kid to mow because I couldn't stand the smell of cut grass anymore. My ex-wife had taken the house, the dog, and most of the friends. What I had left was a job that paid the bills, a porch with a bad railing, and this window.

The light came on again at eleven forty-six. A shape moved past the curtain, soft and quick, and my chest did something I didn't authorize. I stubbed out the cigarette and went inside.

The next morning I saw her at the mailbox.

She was in running shorts and a tank top, her hair pulled back, sweat still drying on her collarbone. Up close she was smaller than I'd built her in my head. Sharper, too. Dark eyes that didn't smile when her mouth did.

"You're the one who sits on his porch all night," she said.

"Guilty."

"I'm Mara." She held out her hand. I took it. Her palm was warm and slightly damp, and she didn't let go as fast as she could have.

"Daniel."

"I know." She tilted her head toward my mailbox, the one with the numbers peeling off. "I see you leave for work at seven fifteen. You never take an umbrella even when it's going to rain."

"You keep track of my umbrella habits."

"I keep track of everything." She said it flat, like a fact, and then she smiled, and the smile didn't reach her eyes either. "It's a small alley."

She walked back toward her door and I watched her go, and I told myself it was nothing. A conversation. Two people who lived twenty feet apart. That's all.

But that night the light in her window stayed on until two in the morning, and I stayed on the porch until it went off, and when I finally went to bed I couldn't sleep. I lay there thinking about the way she'd said *I keep track of everything*, and the way her hand had felt in mine, and the fact that her boyfriend's truck wasn't in the driveway.

The next week it rained.

I was standing on my porch watching it come down, the kind of hard summer rain that turns the alley into a river, when her back door opened and she stepped out in bare feet. No coat. No umbrella. She just stood there in the downpour with her face turned up, and the water ran over her, and her shirt went transparent against her skin.

She looked over at me. The rain was loud enough that she had to shout.

"Come out."

I didn't move.

"Come *out*," she said again, and this time it wasn't a request.

I stepped off the porch. The rain hit me like a wall. Within ten seconds I was soaked through, my shirt sticking to my back, water running into my eyes. She was laughing, or something like laughing, her head back, her throat exposed. I got close enough to see the water beading on her eyelashes.

"This is insane," I said.

"Yes."

She reached out and put her hand flat on my chest, over my heart, and held it there. I could feel my pulse hammering against her palm. She looked at me like she was reading a number off a gauge.

"You feel that," she said. Not a question.

"Mara."

"I know." She pulled her hand back. "I know."

She went inside. I stood in the rain for another minute, maybe two, until the cold got into my bones, and then I went in too. I didn't sleep. I lay in bed with the rain on the roof and my hand on my own chest, where hers had been, and I thought about how long it had been since anyone had touched me on purpose.

Three days later her boyfriend's truck was gone and didn't come back.

I didn't ask. She didn't tell. But she started leaving her kitchen window open in the evenings, and I started hearing music through it, low and slow, something with a saxophone. And on Thursday she knocked on my door at nine o'clock with a bottle of wine and a look on her face that I recognized because I'd been wearing it for weeks.

"I don't want to be alone tonight," she said.

I let her in.

We sat on my couch and drank the wine and didn't talk about anything that mattered. She asked about my job. I asked about hers. She worked at a gallery downtown, the kind of place that sold paintings to people who never looked at them. She told me she'd wanted to be a painter once, and then she stopped talking and looked at the wall for a while, and I didn't push.

The bottle went down. The room got warm. She was sitting close enough that I could smell her, soap and wine and something underneath that was just her, and when she turned to set her glass on the floor her knee pressed against mine and neither of us moved.

"You've been watching me," she said.

"Yes."

"For how long?"

"Since you moved in."

She nodded slowly, like that was the right answer. Then she leaned over and kissed me.

It wasn't tentative. It wasn't the kiss of someone testing the water. It was the kiss of someone who'd already decided and was just waiting for the right moment to act, and I kissed her back with eight months of loneliness and three weeks of watching and every cold night on that porch behind it. Her mouth was soft and she tasted like red wine, and when her hand came up to the back of my neck and her fingers twisted in my hair I made a sound I hadn't made in a long time.

She pulled back just far enough to look at me. Her lips were wet. Her eyes were dark and steady.

"I'm not going to apologize for this," she said.

"I didn't ask you to."

"Good."

She stood up and held out her hand, and I took it, and she led me down the hall to my own bedroom like she'd been there before. Like she knew the way. And maybe she did, in the way you know a thing before it happens, in the way you can feel a storm coming hours before the first drop falls.

At the door she stopped and turned and put both hands on my face.

"Tell me you want this," she said.

"I want this."

"Tell me you know what it is."

"It's a bad idea."

"Yes." She smiled, and this time it reached her eyes. "Tell me you don't care."

"I don't care."

She kissed me again, harder this time, and we didn't talk anymore after that.

Later, when the room was dark and her head was on my chest and her breathing had gone slow and even, I lay awake and stared at the ceiling and listened to the house settle. Somewhere out in the alley a cat knocked over a trash can. The clock on my nightstand said one fifteen.

She stirred against me and murmured something I couldn't make out, and I tightened my arm around her without meaning to. It was a reflex. A stupid, automatic thing, the kind of thing you do when your body forgets for a second that this isn't yours to hold.

Her phone lit up on the floor. A message. I didn't read it. I didn't have to. I just watched the screen glow against the carpet and then fade, and I knew, the way you know these things, that whatever was on the other side of that screen was going to come looking for her eventually.

She'd left the window open in her kitchen. I could hear the saxophone still playing, faint and far away, winding through the dark.

I closed my eyes and didn't sleep.