Neighborly Indiscretions

The key turned in the lock with a soft click, and I knew I hadn't left the deadbolt undone. I never did. Not after the break-in two blocks over last spring, the one that had every homeowner on Juniper Court installing cameras and comparing doorbell footage like trading cards.

But the door swung open before I could turn the knob, and there she was.

Nadia. From 4B. Standing in my kitchen with her hip against the counter and a wine glass in her hand. My wine glass. My wine.

"You're home early," she said.

I stood in the doorway with my keys still in my fist, the November cold bleeding through my jacket. The hallway behind me smelled like someone's dinner, onions and cumin, and the overhead light buzzed the way it always did when the building's old wiring got temperamental.

"Late, actually," I said. "It's almost eight."

She smiled and took a sip. Red lipstick printed the rim. She was wearing a silk blouse the color of oatmeal and nothing underneath it, which I knew because the fabric clung in a way that made the knowledge unavoidable. Her hair was down, dark and heavy, and she'd done something to her eyes that made them look larger than they were.

"The lock," I said.

"Was easy." She set the glass down and crossed her arms, which pushed things up and forward in a way that felt deliberate. "You should get a better one. I could show you which."

I should have asked her to leave. That's what a normal person does when they find their neighbor in their apartment uninvited. But I didn't. I closed the door behind me and dropped my bag on the floor, and the sound it made was loud in the quiet.

"How long have you been here?"

"An hour. Maybe two." She shrugged. "I watched you leave this morning. You always leave at seven-forty. You always come back between six and eight. You're consistent. I like that."

She said it like a compliment. Like she'd been studying me the way you study a language you plan to speak.

I thought about the last three weeks. The way she'd started appearing in the hallway when I got my mail. The way she'd asked to borrow sugar and stayed for forty minutes, sitting on my couch with her legs tucked under her, asking questions about my job, my ex, my sleeping habits. The way she'd touched my forearm when she laughed at something I said, and left her hand there a beat too long.

I'd told myself I was imagining it.

"You need to go," I said.

"Do I?"

She walked toward me. Not fast. She had the kind of walk that made you notice the mechanics of it, the roll of hip and shift of weight. She stopped close enough that I could smell her perfume, something with vanilla in it, and underneath that the faint mineral scent of skin.

"Your girlfriend works nights," she said. "Tuesdays through Saturdays. You told me that. You also told me she's been staying at her sister's since October. Something about the sister's divorce."

"Heather," I said.

"Right. Heather." Nadia tilted her head. "So you're alone. And I'm alone. And I've been thinking about you for a while now."

She reached up and straightened my collar. Her fingers were cold from holding the wine glass, and they brushed my neck, and I felt it in my spine.

"I don't know what you think this is," I started.

"I think you're lonely. I think you're frustrated. I think you lie in bed at night and listen to me through the wall, and I think you like it."

My face went hot. Because she wasn't wrong. I'd heard her. The headboard knocking. The muffled sounds. Once, a man's voice, low and rhythmic, and then nothing for weeks after. I'd lain there in the dark with my hand on my chest, telling myself I needed to fix the drywall, that the sound transfer was a structural issue.

"I don't," I said.

"You do." She stepped back and picked up the wine again, drank, and watched me over the rim. "It's okay. I listen to you too. You talk in your sleep. Did you know that? Not words, mostly. Just sounds. I like the sounds."

I should have been angry. I should have told her to get out and called the landlord and filed a complaint. But I was standing in my own kitchen with my coat still on, and all I could think about was the fact that she'd been in my apartment for two hours, touching my things, breathing my air, and I hadn't known.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I'm tired of waiting." She set the glass down again, harder this time, and the wine jumped. "Because you're not going to make the first move. You're too polite. Too careful. So I did."

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a key. My spare. The one I kept in the false bottom of my sock drawer, the one I'd forgotten I even had.

"You went through my drawers."

"I went through everything." She said it without shame. "I know you keep condoms in the nightstand. I know you haven't used them in a while. I know you have a box of letters from your ex under the bed, and I know you cried reading them last Tuesday."

My throat closed. That was private. That was mine.

"You watched me?"

"I have a key," she said, like that explained everything. "And a window that faces yours. You never close your blinds."

I thought about Tuesday. I'd come home drunk and sad and pulled out the box and sat on the floor with my back against the bed frame, and I'd read three letters and put them back and cried for maybe ten minutes. Then I'd taken a shower and gone to bed. I hadn't told anyone. I hadn't even remembered it clearly until now.

"You're insane," I said.

"Maybe." She smiled again, and this time it was different. Softer. Almost kind. "Or maybe I just know what I want and I'm not afraid to take it. Which is more than you can say."

She walked past me toward the door, and I thought she was leaving. I thought, Thank God, and I started to unzip my jacket.

But she stopped with her hand on the knob and turned back.

"I'm going to go home now," she said. "And you're going to think about this. You're going to think about me in your kitchen, drinking your wine, touching your things. You're going to wonder what else I've done in here that you don't know about."

She opened the door and stepped into the hallway. The light from the corridor cut across my floor, yellow and harsh.

"And then," she said, "when you're ready, you're going to come to 4B. And I'm going to be waiting. And we're going to stop pretending."

She pulled the door shut behind her. The lock clicked. I stood there for a long time, listening to her footsteps fade down the hall, and then I walked to the kitchen and picked up the wine glass she'd left on the counter. Her lipstick was still on the rim. I held it under the light and looked at the print of her mouth, and I thought about the fact that she'd been in my apartment for two hours, and I hadn't noticed, and she'd left the glass behind on purpose.

A message. A promise. A dare.

I poured the rest of the wine down the sink and washed the glass and put it back in the cabinet, and then I went to the bedroom and opened the nightstand drawer. The condoms were there, exactly where I'd left them. But the box was turned around, the label facing the back wall instead of the front.

She'd touched them. She'd counted them.

I closed the drawer and sat on the edge of the bed with my hands on my knees, and I listened to the wall between our apartments. The faint hum of her TV. The creak of her floorboards. The sound of her moving around in a space that was, I realized now, only a few feet from mine.

I didn't sleep that night. I lay awake and stared at the ceiling and thought about her mouth on the glass and her fingers on my collar and the fact that she had a key, and I knew, with a certainty that settled into my chest like a stone, that this wasn't over.

It hadn't even started.