Chapter 14
I texted Dani before I did anything else, because rules meant nothing if I only followed the ones that were convenient.
Home for the night. Doors locked. Going to test something with Caleb. Will check in by ten.
Test something is doing a lot of work in that sentence, she wrote back within thirty seconds, because Dani’s thumbs moved faster than most people’s mouths.
It’s the window thing, I typed. I want to.
There was a pause long enough that I pictured her actual face, the one she made when she was deciding whether to be my friend or my safety officer, and then: Ok. Ten o’clock. If I don’t hear from you I’m coming over and I’m bringing Rosa and we are both going to be extremely nosy about it.
I love you, I sent back.
I know, she sent back, which was the most Dani response available in the English language.
I checked the front door twice, set my phone on the nightstand, and sat on the edge of my bed long enough to ask myself the only question that mattered. Did I want to hand him the choice he had been stealing and see what changed when it was mine to give? I did.
I wrote the note on a plain index card, because the legal pad felt too official for what I was about to say.
You may watch tonight. No recording. No coming inside. I’ll close the curtain when I’m done, and that means done, not a negotiation. Josie.
I taped it to the inside of the glass at eye level, the way I’d left him things before, notes and assignments in the window, except this one wasn’t a game and both of us would know it.
I stood back and looked at it for a second, my own handwriting facing out at the street, and then I turned off the overhead light and switched on the lamp on my dresser instead, because overhead light made everyone look like they were being interrogated and I had very specific plans that did not include looking like a suspect.
The lamp threw warm gold across the room, caught the edge of the mirror, left enough shadow near the corners that I wouldn’t be fully readable even to someone who’d apparently made a study of reading me.
I liked that. I wanted him working a little for this.
I stood at the window before I did anything else, hands loose at my sides, and looked out at the street as if facing an audience before a show rehearsed only in my head.
The sedan was there at its usual angle. I couldn’t tell if he’d seen the card yet, whether he was still parsing the shape of my handwriting through the glass or already sitting with what it meant, and for once I didn’t mind not knowing.
He was waiting. That was the whole point of putting it there instead of texting it to him.
He didn’t get to answer this one. He only got to receive it.
I gave it a slow count of ten, long enough for the card to do its work, and then I pulled my shirt over my head, not because slow was some practiced seduction but because slow was honest, because my hands wanted to feel every second of doing this on purpose instead of having it taken.
I dropped the shirt on the chair. The lamplight sat warm against my skin, and I let myself enjoy that, the temperature of it, the way it made me look like something worth the wait he’d apparently been so willing to put in.
I unhooked my bra without ceremony and let it join the shirt. The window stayed open, curtain pulled all the way to the frame, nothing between us but glass and forty feet of empty street and whatever discipline he was currently spending to stay in that seat instead of crossing all of it.
I climbed onto my bed, propped against the pillows at an angle that kept me in the lamp’s light and, not incidentally, in the window’s frame.
My hand drifted down over my stomach with no more urgency than I’d have used tracing a floor plan, unhurried, because I wanted him to sit with it the way I’d sat with the want in the first place.
I thought about his hands on the coffee cup that morning, the careful quarter turns, the stillness he’d built like a wall around whatever he actually felt watching that server laugh with me, and something about the memory of his control, the cost of it, the fact that I’d watched him pay that cost in real time and not flinch, made my own hand move with more purpose than I’d planned.
My breath caught low and I let it. I kept my eyes open when I could stand to because I wanted him to see my face without the joke I usually put between myself and anyone looking.
My hips rolled into my hand, and the small sound I made surprised me.
I let the heat build until my back arched off the pillows and I said his name into the room.
He probably could not hear a word through the glass and distance. It did not matter.
When it was over I lay there a minute longer than necessary, chest still working, staring at my own ceiling instead of the window, because I wanted to feel the last of it fade on its own terms instead of rushing to close the door on myself.
I got up. I found my shirt on the chair and didn’t put it back on yet, just held it, standing at the window one more time to look out at the sedan, at the shape of him behind glass I couldn’t see through any better than he could see through mine now that the lamp had gone half dim with my moving around the room.
I peeled the index card off the glass, folded it once, and set it on the sill facing in, done, and then I reached up and pulled the curtain closed, slow, deliberate, no drama in it, the fabric falling into place like a door shutting on a room where the conversation had genuinely ended.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and texted Dani first. Ten o’clock, on time, alive, no notes.
Then I set the phone on the nightstand and started pulling my shirt back on, and I was still working my arm through the sleeve when the phone buzzed once against the wood.
Curtain closed. Permission ended. Good night, Josie.
It was the first thing he’d ever sent me. I read it twice. No plea for another minute, no attempt to make the ending smaller. He had taken the boundary at face value the second I gave it to him.
I set the phone down, and I lay back against the pillows in the near dark, and I thought that I had wanted, more than almost anything else in the last two weeks, to find one clean piece of proof that the rules were real to him and not just words he was patient enough to survive until I stopped watching.
I had it now. It was such a small thing.
Seven words and a period. It felt like more than that.
I fell asleep before I could talk myself out of believing it.