Blonde Static

The first thing I ever noticed about her was the way she held a cigarette. Not the smoking of it, that part was ordinary, the casual drag and exhale, but the holding. She cradled it between her index and middle finger like it was something fragile, a small bird she was afraid to crush. She'd sit on the fire escape outside my apartment, three floors up, and the smoke would curl around her face and disappear into the Brooklyn night like it had never existed.

I watched her for a week before I said anything. Not in a creepy way. Or maybe in a creepy way. I was twenty-four and recently unemployed and living on peanut butter sandwiches and the last of my savings, so my options for entertainment were limited. The fire escape was my living room. The window was my television. And she was the only channel worth watching.

She had this hair. Blonde, but not the kind of blonde that came from a bottle. It was the kind that looked like it had been sun-bleached over years, the kind that made you think of California and ocean salt and things I'd never actually experienced. She wore it long, past her shoulders, and sometimes when the wind picked up she'd tuck it behind her ears with a quick, impatient gesture, like it was always getting in her way and she couldn't be bothered to deal with it properly.

I didn't know her name. I didn't know anything about her except that she lived in the building next door and she liked to sit on the fire escape at night and smoke and stare at the city like it owed her something.

On the eighth night, she caught me looking.

I was at my window, a glass of cheap whiskey in my hand, and I'd been watching her the way I always did, not really thinking about anything, just letting the image of her settle into my brain like sediment. Then she turned her head. Just like that. Like she'd known I was there the whole time and had finally decided to acknowledge it.

She didn't wave. She didn't smile. She just looked at me with these eyes that were somewhere between gray and green, and I felt my face go hot, and I raised my glass in a stupid little salute, like that would somehow make it less weird that I'd been staring at her for over a week.

She raised her cigarette back at me. A salute of her own.

That was it. That was the whole conversation. But something shifted after that. The next night, she was there again, and this time when she looked over, I was already looking back, and neither of us turned away. We just sat there, two strangers on two different fire escapes, watching each other watch the city.

Her name was Wren. I found that out on the twelfth night, when she leaned over the railing and asked me if I had a light. I didn't. I didn't smoke. But I told her I'd check, and I spent five minutes rummaging through drawers and coat pockets before I found a matchbook from a bar I didn't remember visiting. I held it up like a trophy.

She laughed. It was a good laugh, low and rough, like she didn't use it often.

"You could just come over," she said. "I've got a lighter."

I should have said no. I should have stayed on my side of the alley, kept my distance, maintained the safe fiction that we were just two people who happened to share a view. But I was twenty-four and lonely and she had the kind of face that made you want to do reckless things.

So I climbed out my window and onto the fire escape, and I walked the narrow metal bridge that connected our buildings, and I knocked on her window like it was a door.

She let me in.

Her apartment was smaller than mine. A studio with a mattress on the floor and clothes piled in corners and dishes stacked in the sink like she'd been meaning to wash them for weeks and just hadn't gotten around to it. The walls were bare except for one poster, a movie I'd never seen, and a string of fairy lights that were half burned out. It smelled like cigarettes and vanilla and something else, something sweet that I couldn't place.

"I'm Wren," she said, and she held out her hand like we were at a business meeting.

I shook it. Her palm was warm and dry. "James."

"James," she repeated, like she was testing how it felt in her mouth. "You've been watching me."

It wasn't a question. I felt my face go hot again, and I started to stammer something, some excuse about how the window faced hers and I couldn't help it, but she cut me off with a wave of her hand.

"I know," she said. "I've been watching you too."

That was the beginning. Or maybe it was the middle. It's hard to tell with these things. All I know is that after that night, we were inseparable. Not in the way that couples are inseparable, not in the way that involves labels and expectations and meeting each other's parents. We were inseparable in the way that two people are when they've found something they didn't know they were looking for.

She was a night person. She worked at a bar in Williamsburg, tended to the kind of crowd that wore leather jackets and talked about bands I'd never heard of. She'd come home at four in the morning and climb through my window instead of hers, and she'd crawl into my bed and press her cold feet against my legs and laugh when I flinched.

I was a morning person. I'd wake up with the sun and make coffee and sit at my window and watch the city wake up. She'd sleep until noon, tangled in my sheets, her blonde hair spread across my pillow like a claim.

We didn't talk about what we were. We didn't need to. We were two people who'd found each other in the dark, and that was enough.

But there were things I didn't know about her. Things she kept hidden, tucked away in the corners of her life like those dishes in her sink. She'd disappear for days sometimes, no warning, no explanation. I'd knock on her window and get nothing. I'd call her phone and it would ring and ring and ring. And then she'd show up again, like nothing had happened, and she'd climb into my bed and press her cold feet against my legs and laugh, and I'd forget that I'd ever been worried.

The first time I asked her where she'd been, she looked at me with those gray-green eyes and said, "Does it matter?"

And I said no.

And it didn't. Not then.

But I should have asked. I should have pushed. I should have done a lot of things differently.

The thing about Wren was that she was always leaving. Even when she was there, even when she was in my bed with her hair spread across my pillow, she was already halfway gone. You could see it in her eyes, that distant look, like she was already planning her escape. I told myself it was part of her charm. I told myself I liked the mystery.

I was lying.

But I didn't know that yet. I was too busy falling.