Too Much: The Loft

All characters engaging in sexual activity are over 18.

Author's note: This is Part 3 of Too Much, Betty's New York story. In Part 1, The Park, after heartbreak, Betty meets a guy at a park. In Part 2, The Winchester, she wears a borrowed dress to a secret bar.

Each story can be read on its own, but they are better when read in order. Hope you like Part 3 as much as I enjoyed writing it.

I hadn't stopped smiling all week.

Work was busy, but I had started to find the rhythm of my days, and every one of them began the same way: a BEC on a hero roll, hold the salt, from the bodega on the corner of Mulberry and Grand.

It was only Wednesday, and my mind was already on the weekend.

On my way out that morning I ran into Mandy. She was in the bay window as usual, headphones on, eyes on her laptop, bare feet crossed at the ankle. She slid one earcup back without looking up.

'Well. Someone looks happy.'

'I'm not anything.'

'I told you that dress would turn heads.'

'I wasn't trying to turn heads.'

Then, because it was true and because she had earned it, I said, 'Thank you for the dress. It was nice.'

She looked at me properly for the first time, for about a second and a half.

'Nice,' she said, and put her headphones back on.

* * *

I wrote the text in the line at the bodega.

There were four people ahead of me and a cat asleep on the potato chips, and I had my phone out before the door had swung shut behind me.

The first version was three sentences long and had the word 'lovely' in it, so I deleted it.

The second said 'Hey, what are you up to this weekend?' That's how you text a man you've slept with. I hadn't, so I deleted it.

The third said 'Are you free on Sunday?' which read like a dental appointment.

'BEC, hero, no salt,' said the man behind the counter, without my having said anything at all, and started on it. It was the first time anyone in New York had known what I wanted before I asked, and I stood there with my thumb over the keyboard feeling more pleased about it than an egg sandwich deserved.

Then I typed the fourth version. I didn't write it so much as remember it. They were the words I'd said to him on the edge of his desk, with my hand against his face.

Sunday. Morning. Sober.

I read it twice and then didn't let myself read it a third time. I pressed send and put the phone face down on the counter next to the lottery tickets, like that would make it less true.

'Four seventy-five,' the man said.

I paid. I took my sandwich. I did not look at my phone.

It buzzed before I reached the door.

Marcy Avenue. 9. I'll bring the coffee.

Then, a few seconds later:

Sunday-morning, as requested.

I stood on the corner of Mulberry and Grand with my breakfast going cold in its foil and read it far more times than I'm going to admit. It had been five days, and he had remembered the exact words I used, hyphen and all.

I wasn't about to show my hand, though.

Marchetti, WYD?

That was terrible. It made us sound like best buddies in a bad sitcom, so I deleted it.

I decided to keep things simple.

See you, Marchetti.

Then, after a moment's thought, a single small sun.

He didn't reply. He didn't need to. He didn't say where we were going, either, and I didn't ask.

* * *

I walked to work with the foil package in my hand, unable to stop thinking about the puzzle that was Leo. Don't get too excited. Don't jinx this, whatever this is.

I have always been intense. My competitive streak had got me through college and into the work world. I tried to tamp it down a little. I had ambition in spades, but a woman soon learns to keep some of it out of sight, particularly in a new workplace.

I ate the sandwich at my desk, out of the foil, before anyone else had come in.

Abe would have had something to say about that. Not unkindly. In Cole Valley we had spent our Sundays making stews and bread we always underproofed, and he believed breakfast was something you sat down for.

He would have had nothing to say about the text, because I would never have received one like it. With Abe, I made the plans. Every weekend we ever had, I booked, and he turned up, cheerful and chill, excellent company inside the arrangements I had made. He found it restful. So, for two years, did I.

Marcy Avenue. 9. I'll bring the coffee.

No time to finish. No name of a place. No idea what I was supposed to wear. For the first time in my life, somebody else was holding the plan.

I waited to feel anxious about that.

I didn't. My competitive edge, the sharp intensity I usually camouflaged in black tailoring at the office, didn't feel like a weapon I needed to hide. It felt like fuel.

Let Leo keep his cards close to his chest. Sunday morning was coming, and I had absolutely nothing to wear. That, at least, I could fix.

* * *

By Thursday, the text exchange was buried under an avalanche of Slack notifications from the engineering channel. Our office was a single open room on the second floor of an old print works: exposed brick, cables snaking across the floor, and the two founders pacing the perimeter while arguing about user acquisition metrics.

There was nowhere to hide a phone. I kept mine face down on the shared plywood desk, next to a stack of half-empty paper coffee cups. Every time it buzzed, the vibration rattled the wood, and every time it was an urgent tag about a bug in the beta launch.

By Friday, the late nights were catching up with me. At nine-thirty the room was quiet except for the clicking of my keyboard and the low murmur of the founders ordering takeout in the corner. The whiteboards were covered in frantic strategies in dry-erase marker, and the air smelled of cold pizza and stale espresso. I sat tracing data anomalies in our analytics dashboard, my eyes burning under the bare bulb overhead.

A week ago, at this exact hour, I had been in a borrowed dress in a room with no name on the door, eating wings with my fingers.

'Betty, you can head off if you're hitting a wall,' one of the founders said, looking up from his laptop with dark circles under his eyes.

'Just wrapping up this query,' I said. My voice sounded flat, hollow in the big room.

When I finally left at ten, the streets were quiet under the amber glow of the streetlights. Walking to the subway, I thought about San Francisco, where Abe and I would already have been asleep by now, and it felt like a scene from someone else's life. Was I sad? A little more than I cared to admit. Tiredness does that to a person. It strips away the professional armor you wear all day and leaves something raw underneath.

But as I stepped onto the platform I noticed that the raw thing was not only sad. It was expectant. Sunday was a day and a half away.

* * *

On Saturday I took the train up to the weekend flea market in Chelsea.

It was only my second month in the city, but I wanted things to be in place, and my intensity has never stopped at the office door. I chose two small prints from a woman who had made them herself. Supporting local artists made me feel connected to the place, and I liked the idea of my walls having something on them that somebody in New York had made.

Then, two stalls along, I found an off-white linen shift dress, undyed, that came to mid-thigh. I tried it on in a fitting room that was really a curtain on a rail, in front of a mirror the size of a laptop screen, and I read the look as casual chic. Most importantly, it was comfortable. I could picture it with flat sandals, or sneakers. It was the dress of a woman who did not look as though she had tried too hard, and yet was entirely put together.

Best of all, it was not black.

I hung it on the back of my closet door when I got home, and stood looking at it for longer than a dress deserves. I would not, this time, need to borrow anything from Mandy.

* * *

Sunday

I am an early riser by nature, and Sunday was no different. But today was no ordinary Sunday. I put a load of laundry on before Mandy could get to the machine, and went for a run.

I love to run. I still felt a thrill when I passed the green and red 'Welcome to Little Italy' signs on Mulberry, outside Casa Bella. Crossing over to Canal Street at the edge of Chinatown, I jogged on the spot at the lights, deciding whether the line at the famous beef noodle place would ever be worth it. I wasn't going there today, but I love a spicy beef noodle every so often. The thought of heaped spoonfuls of cilantro over chili oil made my mouth water.

I finished in a sprint and took the three flights of stairs at a jog. Mandy was in the kitchen making coffee. Her cool blonde hair was tied up in a neat high ponytail, and she already had her books laid out next to her iPad.

'How was the run?' she asked.

'Good. I spotted some new places I could try for dinner.'

'That's great. If you ever find a night to be home for dinner.'

'I'll find one,' I said.

She had already turned away, headphones on.

'I make time for dinner,' I called after her. She didn't hear me. That was possibly the point.

I looked at my watch. I was going to have to be quick. I had thirty-six minutes to become a woman who could have coffee with a man without behaving as though she had been given a small and very complicated examination.

Having changed twice, I ended up in the linen shift with flat powder-blue slip-ons. For a dash of color, I reasoned.

I checked the nightstand before I left.

The coaster was still there, exactly where I'd put it the night of the Winchester. His name was written across the back in block capitals, as though the person who had written it wanted to be sure nobody could possibly mistake it for someone else's.

'In case you need a friend, call him instead,' he had said. I had turned this phrase over in my mind several times.

Was I being friend-zoned? His actions afterward indicated otherwise, which made me smile again.

I turned it over once.

Then I left it where it was.

There were things I was trying not to make into symbols. I had decided this was a sensible approach to life, although it was possible I had only decided it because the symbols kept getting out of hand.

* * *

The J came up out of the ground after Essex Street and went out over the Williamsburg Bridge, and for a minute the whole train was full of light. Below us the river was flat and gray-green. Someone across the aisle was eating a bagel out of a paper bag. A small boy had his face pressed to the window and was counting something under his breath, possibly boats.

I held on to the pole and did not check my reflection in the window when we pulled into Marcy Avenue. I want that on the record too.

I was two minutes early.

Leo was already there.

He was in the coffee shop across from the station, standing by a small table near the window, holding two paper cups. He wore dark jeans, a white T-shirt and a jacket that looked as though it had been bought a long time ago and kept because it was good. His hair was still slightly damp, and there was a faint mark on one of his hands, a blue-black line near the base of his thumb.

I noticed all of this before I noticed the coffee.

'Morning,' he said.

'Morning.'

He held out one of the cups.

I took it, making sure to brush his hand with mine. This was a trick I had learned in one of my early marketing classes: when you want to connect with a buyer, you make sure you touch them when you hand over the free sample. The context was different, and I was not trying to sell Leo anything, but I thought it would be a good move nevertheless. My brain was always thinking about odd things at odd times, and this was one of those times.

It was a cappuccino, with the right amount of almond milk and no sugar.

I looked at him.

'What?'

'How did you know?'

He glanced at the cup in my hand.

'Know what?'

'How I take my coffee.'

He seemed to consider this.

'You told me.'

'I did not.'

'You might have.'

'I would remember.'

'Would you?'

'Yes.'

He looked at me for a second, and then smiled.

It was not one of his rare smiles, exactly. It was smaller than that, and perhaps a little more amused.

'Maybe I guessed.'

I looked at the coffee again.

It was a very good guess.

I decided not to pursue the matter. I had begun to understand that Leo could answer a question without necessarily satisfying it, and that this did not always mean he was withholding something. Sometimes it meant he had answered the question he wanted to answer.

I was not sure how I felt about that.

'Have you been waiting long?' I asked.

'Not really.'

'How long is not really?'

'Long enough to get the coffees.'

'That's not an answer.'

'No.'

He said it so calmly that I laughed.

We sat down at the table. The shop was busy in the way New York coffee shops are busy on a Sunday morning: people with laptops, people with dogs, people reading books they seemed to have brought specifically to be seen reading, and one man who was conducting an extremely serious conversation with a small child about the structural integrity of a croissant.

Leo put his jacket over the back of his chair.

I took a sip.

'This is really good. You got it right,' I said.

'I did?'

'Don't look so pleased with yourself.'

'I'm not.'

'You are.'

'Maybe a little.'

I watched him drink his own coffee. He didn't seem like a man who had spent the morning worrying about whether I would come. He seemed like a man who had got up, made a decision about what to wear, bought two coffees and walked to a place on Marcy Avenue.

It was a remarkably ordinary thing to do.

I found it unexpectedly reassuring.

'So,' I said. 'What do you do on Sundays when you're not arranging secret meetings?'

'Secret meetings?'

'You sent me an address. You could have been anybody.'

'You could have Googled it.'

'I could have.'

'But you didn't.'

'No.'

He looked at me over the rim of his cup.

'Why not?'

It was a reasonable question. I had an answer, but I wasn't sure I wanted to give it to him.

'Because I wanted to find out.'

'What?'

'What you're like.'

He set the cup down.

'And?'

'I don't know yet.'

He looked at me for a moment longer than I expected him to.

Then he nodded.

'Fair enough.'

I had thought he might make a joke. Or say something charming, something that would let us both step away from the honesty of the exchange without having to acknowledge that it had happened.

Instead, he let it sit there.

I looked out of the window.

A woman was trying to persuade a small dog to walk past a man eating a bagel. The dog had made its position clear. The woman had not accepted it.

'Are you going to tell me what you do on Sundays?' I asked.

'Sometimes I work.'

'That's sad.'

'Sometimes I don't.'

'That's better.'

'I paint.'

I looked back at him.

'I know. I saw you.'

He raised an eyebrow.

'You were standing between me and my fountain,' he said.

'Tell me about the paintings at the Winchester.'

'Nothing much to tell. I paint what I like.'

'You don't have to sound so mysterious about it.'

'I'm not being mysterious.'

'You're doing it again.'

'Doing what?'

'Answering questions in a way that makes me want to ask another one.'

He laughed quietly.

I felt absurdly pleased with myself.

'What do you do on Sundays, Betty?'

'Laundry. Grocery shopping. I call my mother if I can get the time difference right. I sketch when the mood takes me. Sometimes I go for a run. It's therapeutic.'

'Do you like New York?'

The question caught me off guard.

I looked down at my cup.

'Most of the time.'

'And the rest?'

'The rest of the time I wonder why I came here.'

He didn't immediately reassure me that I had made the right decision. He didn't tell me that everyone felt that way, or that New York was a city of possibilities, or any of the other things people say when they want to make an uncomfortable feeling go away.

He waited.

I was beginning to notice that about him. He could leave a space open without rushing to fill it.

'It's not that I don't like it,' I said. 'I do. I like the noise, and the fact that nobody looks at you for very long, and that you can buy a sandwich at two in the morning if you want one. I like that I can walk down the street and see ten things I've never seen before. I even like the garbage trucks that run at all hours. I just don't always know what I'm doing here.'

'What did you think you'd be doing?'

I shrugged.

'Something more definite.'

He nodded.

'I know that feeling.'

I looked at him. 'Do you?'

'Sometimes.'

I waited for him to explain.

He didn't.

I took another sip of coffee.

It was getting cold.

* * *

We left the shop just before noon.

I had expected coffee to take half an hour, perhaps forty minutes if we were getting along particularly well. We had been there for nearly an hour and a half, and I couldn't have told you exactly where the time had gone.

We walked without deciding where to go.

Marcy was busy, the sidewalk full of people moving in different directions with the determined expressions of people who had somewhere to be. We crossed at the lights, passed a florist arranging buckets outside her shop, and stopped while a delivery truck reversed into a narrow space.

Somewhere around the florist, he took my hand.

I decided that I liked the feel of my hand in his. I was conscious of how tall he was, and of feeling tiny beside him, and of not minding.

A woman with a stroller came toward us. Leo let go of my hand and stepped aside to let her pass, and then found my hand again as though it had never been anywhere else.

This happened again and again. We didn't speak. I still had no idea where we were going.

'You're very good at that,' I said.

'At what?'

'Not knocking into people. You always seem to know where to stand. When to move. When to let people past. It's like watching someone who's had instructions.'

'Have you had instructions?'

'Not good ones.'

He considered that.

'Maybe I'm just old.'

'How old are you?'

'Twenty-eight.'

'That's not old.'

'I'm glad we've established that.'

I was twenty-two, which meant that he was six years older than me, although at that moment I couldn't have told you whether six years was a meaningful amount of time or not. It depended on the day, and the person, and whether you were talking about rent or relationships or how long you could leave a carton of milk open in the refrigerator.

A man with a phone pressed to his ear came straight at us, not looking. Leo stepped aside for him without breaking stride.

'I used to be bad at it,' he said. 'When someone knocked into me, I took it as a question.'

'What kind of question?'

'The kind men ask each other.' He looked straight ahead. 'That was a long time ago. I have good control now.'

Good control.

I turned the phrase over. Leo didn't come across as aggressive at all. He was certainly tall, with broad, strong shoulders. But then what does an aggressive person look like? I didn't really know. I didn't have much life experience of that kind.

And I had seen his control, I realized. On the edge of his desk, when I said not now, and he said okay as though it cost him nothing.

I did not ask what it had cost him to learn it. Not in the middle of Marcy Avenue, after an amount of time together that could objectively be measured in hours. It wasn't the right place for something that might be awkward, or lead to a long story.

Mostly I didn't ask because I didn't want to spoil our Sunday.

* * *

We passed a shop selling old records. Leo stopped.

'Do you mind?'

'No.'

He went inside.

I followed him.

The shop was narrow and dim, with wooden shelves and handwritten labels. There was a man behind the counter wearing a green cardigan and listening to something that sounded like a person having a difficult afternoon with a trumpet.

Leo went straight to a section near the back.

'You know this place?' I asked.

'Sometimes.'

He ran a finger along the spines of the records. He didn't seem to be searching for anything in particular. He seemed to be looking at them because they were there.

I stood beside him and pretended to understand the difference between the various categories.

'You like music,' I said.

'I do.'

'That's another thing I know about you.'

'What else do you know?'

I thought about it.

'You have keys.'

He looked at me.

'Quite a lot of them.'

'Some of them are even mine.'

'I remember.'

He smiled.

I continued.

'You have a bar with a secret door. You know how to make tea with a whistling kettle. You paint. You have a good sense of humor, although you try to conceal it. You don't like being thanked too much.'

'Do I?'

'Yes. You look uncomfortable.'

'Maybe you're thanking me for the wrong things.'

'What should I thank you for?'

He returned his attention to the records.

'I don't know.'

I watched him for a moment.

It was the first time that morning he had seemed genuinely unsure of what to say.

I liked it.

Not because I wanted him to be uncomfortable. I didn't. But I had spent the last week remembering how easily he seemed to move through the world, how he knew when to speak and when to stop, how he had made a place for me at the Winchester without ever making me feel as though I was being admitted to something I hadn't earned.

It was nice to see that he didn't have an answer for everything.

He took a record from the shelf and looked at the cover.

'Do you know this one?'

I shook my head.

'Neither do I.'

'Then why are you buying it?'

'I'm not.'

He put it back.

I laughed.

'You're very strange.'

'That's possible.'

We left the shop without buying anything.

Outside, the sky had turned a flat gray. The air smelled faintly of rain, and someone was playing music through an open window above us. It was an old song, though I couldn't identify it. The sound drifted down between the buildings and disappeared beneath the traffic.

Leo looked up.

'Do you know it?' I asked.

'No.'

'You seem to like things you don't know.'

He turned back to me.

'Don't you?'

I thought about that.

'Yes,' I said. 'I suppose I do.'

We walked on.

'It's time,' he said.

'Time for what?'

'Madame Betty requested Sunday. Sober,' he said, in a terrible French accent, waggling his eyebrows.

He had dropped the morning. I noticed that. It was past noon, and the morning had gone somewhere between the coffee and the records, and he had quietly edited my words to fit the day.

I laughed. 'That's a terrible accent. But oui, Monsieur. I did.'

'Would you like to come to my place?'

He asked it plainly, the way he had asked whether the table at the Winchester was all right. As though there were other answers available, and he would be fine with any of them.

There was a version of me, not very long ago, who would have run the risk assessment. Daylight, yes. Public street, yes. Anybody who knew where I was, no. Six years older. A great many keys.

I did not run it.

'Yes,' I said.

That was all. He didn't smile, exactly. He just nodded once, the way you nod when someone has told you the time, and we turned left at the next corner instead of going straight.

* * *

It took me two blocks to recognize the street.

The scaffolding was still there, and so was the gray-green wall behind it. The posters for the one-woman play had been pasted over with something about a film festival. Blankey was still there, whoever they were, untouched in the corner, as though even the people who put up posters had decided to leave it alone.

In daylight it looked like nothing. A construction hoarding on a Brooklyn street, the kind you walk past a thousand times. I looked for the little door in the panels and couldn't find it, and then I did, and it was smaller than I remembered.

Leo walked past it without slowing down.

I looked at him. He didn't look back. I decided that if he was not going to mention it, neither was I, and we walked to the end of the block like two people who had never been on the other side of that wall.

His building was around the corner.

It was old and brick, six stories, with tall factory windows divided into small square panes, a few of them painted over from the inside. High up on the side wall, so faded you had to want to see it, was the ghost of a painted sign. I could make out an M, and what might have been the word BRUSHES, and nothing else.

'What did they make here?' I asked.

'Something.'

'Leo.'

'I genuinely don't know,' he said. 'I've been trying to read that sign for four years.'

The front door was steel, painted black, with a small wired-glass window. He took out his keys.

There were a lot of them. I had known that, in theory. It is different watching a man go through them on a Sunday afternoon outside his own front door. He did not search. His thumb went to the right one without his looking, the way your tongue finds a chipped tooth.

The lobby was not a lobby. It was a concrete hallway with a row of dented brass mailboxes, a bicycle chained to a radiator, and a sheet of paper taped to the wall at eye level, handwritten in marker:

WHOEVER IS LEAVING BIKES IN THE HALL. I KNOW WHO YOU ARE. - R.

I looked at the bicycle chained to the radiator. I looked at Leo.

'Not mine,' he said.

At the end of the hallway was the freight elevator.

I had never been in one. I had seen them in films, usually right before something terrible happened to the person inside. This one had a pair of heavy wooden doors that opened up and down instead of side to side, like a mouth, and behind them a folding metal gate, the kind that collapses into diamonds when you pull it across.

Leo hauled the outer doors apart with one hand, pulled the gate open with the other, and waited for me to step in.

I stepped in.

The floor was wooden planks, worn pale in the middle where a hundred years of feet and hand trucks had gone in and out. It smelled of machine oil and old dust and, faintly, of paint. There was a single bulb in a wire cage overhead. On the wall a small brass plate said CAPACITY 2,500 LBS, and somebody, a long time ago, had scratched a tiny smiling face into the corner of it.

He closed the gate. It made a sound like a long breath being let out through teeth.

Then he took hold of a lever on the wall, a real lever with a worn black handle, and pushed it forward without looking at it, and the whole box gave a small lurch and began, very slowly, to rise.

It was slow. I mean truly slow. Through the diamonds of the gate I could watch each floor go by: a strip of concrete, a door, a strip of concrete. Somewhere on the second floor, somebody was practicing the same eight bars on a cello, over and over, and getting one note wrong every time. On the third, the smell of someone frying onions.

We stood side by side. Not touching.

And I was aware of everything.

That was the thing I had not expected about sober. At the Winchester there had been the Blueprint and the Jäger and the wings and the noise of my own heartbeat, and I could have told myself, afterward, that any of them was the reason. Here there was nothing to blame it on. No drink. No music. No dark. Just a Sunday afternoon in a wooden box with a man I was choosing, with my whole head, to go upstairs with.

I could feel exactly where his arm was, an inch from mine. I could hear him breathe. I could see, in the light of the caged bulb, the mark on his hand near the base of his thumb that I had noticed in the coffee shop, and see now that it was not paint. It was ink. Very fine, very black. The kind you get from a pen, not a brush.

I did not ask about it. I added it to the pile.

On the fourth floor the cello player got the note right. Leo smiled at the gate, privately, as though he had been waiting four years for that too.

On the fifth floor he pulled the lever back, and the box shuddered and settled, a half-inch below the landing, and stayed there.

He opened the gate. Then the doors.

There was a short landing, and a single door at the end of it, painted the same gray-green as the wall I had walked past two blocks ago. I noticed that, and decided I was not going to make it into a symbol.

He found the key without looking.

Then, with the door open an inch and his hand still on it, he stopped and looked at me. Not a question, exactly. More like a man checking the weather before he steps outside.

'After you,' he said.

I stepped into his apartment.

It was one open room, compact but thoughtfully arranged. The kitchen took up the far end, with a washer-dryer tucked under the counter. A tall cabinet and a closet stood along the right-hand wall. A white shelving unit, just high enough to screen the bed, did double duty as storage and as the wall between the sleeping area and an L-shaped gray sofa with a low coffee table built into it. Near the kitchen sat a small round dining table with three chairs.

A floor-to-ceiling window framed the kitchen sink. I imagined Leo standing there, looking out over the street as he washed his dishes, lost in thought.

The bathroom was tucked to the left of the kitchen, beside the bed. A basket of roughly folded clothes sat beside the dryer, and the air carried a faint mix of air freshener and the fabric softener my mom used back in LA. The familiar smell caught me off guard.

Just inside the entrance, on the left, stood a computer desk and a large, high-backed office chair, the kind favored by people who spend hours playing online games. This surprised me. Leo didn't strike me as a gamer. In my mind, online gaming belonged to young men with little ambition and too much time on their hands. I turned the thought over, then quietly filed it away.

A pile of books lay nearby, mostly on architecture and engineering. Two Malcolm Gladwell books sat on the floor among them.

Above the desk hung two paintings, each signed discreetly with the initials LM in one corner. A third framed painting had been turned to face the wall.

I knew the first one. The fountain from the little park, the stained urn and the fall of water, finished now, the light on the stone still the early Sunday light it had been the morning I stood in his peripheral vision. He had kept it. He had hung it where he would see it from his desk.

The second was this street, from above. The window over the sink, I realized, at some other hour, the sidewalk wet and the fire escapes opposite put down in three or four strokes each. It was looser than the fountain. More felt than seen, as I had thought the first time, in the park, before I knew his name.

I stood in front of it longer than I meant to.

'You've changed how you do the light,' I said.

He had come to stand a little behind me.

'Have I?'

'Between the fountain and this one. Yes.'

He didn't answer right away. When I glanced back, he wasn't looking at the painting. He was looking at me, with the expression I remembered from the easel: not the flirting one, the other one. The one that read.

'You said a little,' he said.

'What?'

'In the park. I asked if you painted, and you said a little, and you shrugged.'

'I remember the shrug.'

'So do I.'

I looked at the third canvas, the one facing the wall, and then made myself look away from it.

'That one's not finished,' he said.

'I didn't ask.'

'You were about to.'

'I was not.'

I had been.

Three small white pots sat on a tiered plant stand, each at a different height. One plant still showed signs of life; the other two had all but given up. Leo gave a half-sigh, half-shrug.

'A gift from my sister.'

'Are they peace lilies?'

He crossed to the stand and leaned in to read the labels.

'Peace lily and...' He squinted at the second. 'A succulent.'

'Do you think this one will make it?'

'There's always hope.'

'Try succulents. They're practically unkillable.'

He smirked before he could stop himself, then turned and walked toward the sofa.

'Come. Sit.'

I sat. He went into the kitchen and put the kettle on.

When he came back, I was looking at the books on the floor.

'You read all these?'

'Most of them.'

'Which is your favorite?'

He looked at the pile.

'That's an unfair question.'

'Why?'

'Because it depends on when you ask me.'

I nodded. 'That makes sense.'

He sat down beside me.

For a little while we talked about books. Or rather, I talked about books, and he listened, and then he told me about one he had read years ago and still thought about now and then. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I hadn't heard of it. He tried to describe it, then gave up and said I should read it.

'That's not a recommendation,' I said. 'That's an assignment.'

'Would you prefer a summary?'

'No.'

'Then read it.'

I laughed.

The kettle clicked off in the kitchen.

Neither of us moved.

Eventually he got up and made tea. He brought it back in two mugs, one blue and one white. Leo gave me the blue one.

He sat next to me again, held his mug in both hands and looked down at it.

'You have a lot of blue things,' he said.

'Do I?'

'Your shoes. Your mug. Your hair.'

I touched the navy tips of my pixie cut.

'That's not blue. It's navy. Besides, you're the one who gave me the blue mug.'

'Of course.'

'You can't just call everything blue.'

'I'm sorry.'

'You're not.'

'No.'

I smiled into my tea.

The afternoon moved around us. Somewhere downstairs, someone was hosing down the sidewalk. A siren passed in the distance. The radiator knocked three times, paused, then knocked again.

I looked toward it.

'Does it always do that?'

'Yes.'

'Have you had it looked at?'

'By whom?'

He gave me a look.

'Right,' I said. 'The super. Or whoever.'

He shook his head. 'I should have it fixed.'

'It's a radiator. It's allowed to have opinions.'

I laughed.

He watched me for a moment. Then he joined in.

His laugh was different from the one I'd heard at the Winchester. There was no room full of people around us, no bartender pretending not to listen. He didn't seem to be trying to contain it.

It was just a laugh.

I found myself wanting to hear it again.

I put my mug down. 'Leo?'

He turned toward me.

I reached for his hand.

It was a small movement, but I felt the moment change. He looked at our hands, then at me, his forehead creasing as if I were a puzzle he had just been handed.

I had always known he was handsome. Anyone with eyes knew it. But I had spent the afternoon not thinking about it, the way you stop seeing a view you walk past every day, and now it came back all at once: the dark brown hair with its streak of chestnut where the window caught it, the jaw, the mouth that was not quite smiling. Gosh, you're handsome. I nearly said it out loud. I didn't. But I was aware of him, suddenly and completely, the way you become aware of your own heartbeat when a room goes quiet.

I had been thinking about kissing him for most of the afternoon. I had thought about it in the coffee shop, in the record store, under the scaffolding, in the elevator. I had thought about it while he made tea, while listening to him talk, while pretending to be interested in the radiator.

Now that I had the chance, I found I didn't want to think about it at all.

So I kissed him.

For a second he was still, and then his hand closed around mine.

He kissed me back.

It was not like the office at the Winchester. There was no music, no alcohol, no dim light to make everything seem more deliberate. There was only the sofa, the two mugs of tea, the terrible radiator and Leo's hand against my cheek.

I had imagined what it would be like to kiss him when neither of us had anywhere else to be.

I had not imagined how much I would like the ordinary parts of it.

The way he smiled when I bumped my nose against his. The way he paused, just briefly, when I moved closer. The way his fingers found the back of my neck and stayed there, as though he had discovered something he wanted to remember.

I laughed once, quietly, because I was suddenly nervous.

He drew back.

'What?'

'Nothing.'

'Betty.'

'It's just that I've been thinking about this all day, and now I'm doing it badly.'

He looked at me.

Then he laughed, and the sound was so unexpected that I laughed too.

'You're not doing it badly,' he said.

'You're obliged to say that.'

'Am I?'

'Yes.'

He considered this.

'Then I'll try to be more objective.'

'Please do.'

He kissed me again.

I forgot about the radiator.

I forgot about the books on the floor and the dead plants and the gamer's chair.

I was there. I was entirely there.

And when I wanted him closer, I moved closer. When I wanted to stop and look at him, I did that too. He didn't seem to need me to explain every small change in my mind. He noticed, and he responded, and sometimes he got it wrong, and sometimes I did.

At one point my elbow knocked the white mug off the table.

It landed on the rug without breaking, spilling tea in a wide brown circle.

We both stared at it.

'That's my good rug,' he said.

I looked at the rug, a faded rectangle that looked like it had come from a thrift store for twenty dollars.

'Is it?'

'No.'

He started laughing.

I pushed him lightly in the shoulder.

'You're not helping.'

'I know.'

He got up to fetch a cloth. I watched him kneel on the floor and blot the tea from the rug with the concentration of a man repairing a small but significant structural failure.

It was such an ordinary sight that I felt something in me soften.

I had spent a long time believing that being wanted meant being looked at. That if someone was attracted to me, I had to stay interesting, funny, beautiful, surprising. I had to keep the moment alive, keep myself alive in their attention, make sure I didn't become too much or too little.

But Leo was on his living-room floor, cleaning tea out of a rug that wasn't worth twenty dollars, and he didn't look as though he expected anything from me at all.

He looked up.

'What?'

'Nothing.'

He narrowed his eyes.

'That's twice you've said that.'

'Maybe I have nothing to say.'

'Maybe.'

He got up and sat beside me.

I touched his face.

This time, when I kissed him, he was the one who moved closer first.

And after that, we stopped trying to talk.

He took my hand and walked me the few steps to his bed.

Holding his eyes with mine, I pulled the shift dress over my head and stood in front of him in my black bra and powder blue cotton panties.

He unbuttoned his shirt, pulled it free of his jeans and dropped it where he stood. He stepped out of his jeans. Plain gray briefs, Hanes on the waistband. His chest and shoulders were as strong and cut as I remembered. Light-headed, I sucked in a breath, aware of my heartbeat in my wrists. Something unnamed went through me, a roar started in my ears, loud and unmistakable, and a tingle ran down behind my ears and along my neck that I didn't fully understand at the time, but have since learned to recognize as want. Plain, uncomplicated want.

I reached back for my bra clasp and he stopped me, his hands light on my arms.

'Here, let me. I've been dreaming about having you here, on my bed, undressing you slowly.'

'Please. I want you to.'

He lifted me onto the bed by the hips and laid me down. The bed was soft under my back. I lay there facing him, waiting, watching, wanting more.

Leo's eyes took me in, his expression somewhere between hunger and wonder, as if he had never seen me before. He ran his hands up and down my arms, over my face and shoulders, touching me everywhere. His lips found my ankles, then my calves, then worked their way up to my inner thighs. I felt suspended in time, aware of nothing but his fingers on my skin. Heat climbed from my sternum to my throat. I shivered and felt my pussy start to get wet. My legs took on a life of their own, moving against the sheets, then wrapping around him, one over his shoulder, the other tucked under his arm.

My nipples were aching to be touched, but I couldn't find my voice to ask. My legs slid down to his hips and I locked them around him tighter, and I used my arms and hands to tell him what I couldn't say: that I was impatient, and that I wanted more.

He reached behind me and flicked off my bra. He took my left nipple into his mouth, suckling gently at first and then harder, working it with his tongue. The other nipple was between his finger and thumb, being rolled and gently pulled.

'Aah,' I breathed out.

He stopped immediately and looked at me.

'Is that okay? Was I too hard?'

'Oh, no, it's perfect. My nipples are very sensitive, but I love it. Keep going.'

He moved his mouth to the right nipple and took it in completely, licking and grazing it with his teeth, leaving a light wet trail. My head went back, my eyes closed, and every stray thought stopped.

His fingers made their way down from my nipples to my tummy and further. He found the edge of my panties and pressed on the soft fabric, teasing, testing. Then he pushed past the waistband and slid a finger inside my pussy.

My legs kept moving restlessly and my hips strained upward on their own.

All this time I had been stroking him with my hands, first his shoulders and chest, then down to the front of his briefs. The bulge was unmistakable. I stroked his cock through the cotton and cupped his balls.

I must have done something right, because he made small involuntary noises in his throat.

We stayed like that for a while, kissing the whole time. Leo was a good kisser, urgent, hungry, and my body began to sing. The roar in my ears grew louder. He seemed to feel my urgency. He took one more deliberate look at me, first at my face, then further down. He pulled off my panties and put his mouth where his fingers had been. His tongue was raspy and strong, the way it had been when he kissed me at the Winchester, moving up and down, his thumb pressing on my clit. I stopped thinking and came against his mouth.

'Betty, did you come?'

I nodded, blushing a little, loose and happy.

'Your turn,' I said, grinning. I sat up and patted the pillow. 'Lie down.'

He didn't argue with me.

I peeled off his briefs and his cock sprang out. He was long and hard, with a lovely mushroom head. I bent and gave the head a gentle lick, and was rewarded with a pulse that seemed to press back onto my tongue. I swirled my tongue around the ridge where the head met the shaft, then ran it up and down the length of him.

All this time he stayed quite still, his head on the pillow, eyes closed. I put my mouth over him and took in the head and a little more. Tasting, testing, and, I hoped, something that would pass for teasing. Trying.

'Tell me if this is okay.'

'Oh my God,' he said. 'It's wonderful. You have no idea how good that feels, Betty.'

I bobbed my head up and down with one hand around his shaft, the way the women did in the small amount of porn I'd watched.

He made a sound deep in his throat, half a curse, close to a groan. I was absurdly pleased with myself. I guess my trying had succeeded.

He put a hand on my head to stop me.

'Any more of that, young lady, and I won't be responsible for what I do next.' His breath was coming shallow. 'I'm very close. Give me a minute.'

I lay back and rested my head on his chest, one hand still on his cock, stroking slowly, enjoying the hardness. A drop of pre-cum had oozed out onto my fingers.

'It's fine. I'm in no rush.'

'No, no. I'm fine.'

He slid down the bed and settled between my legs. I knew what he would see there: my pussy, smooth and hairless, slightly puffy from his earlier ministrations. He put his tongue on my clit, gently, then licked along the slit. The light roughness of it made me gasp. He eased his index finger inside me, coaxing me open, then drew it out and licked it, looking straight into my eyes.

'You don't just look beautiful, Betty. Your pussy tastes amazing.'

I didn't know where to put my face, so I put my hands on his forearms instead and parted my legs in a show of invitation.

He reached into the nightstand drawer and came out with a box of condoms, still sealed in its cellophane. He picked at the corner with his thumbnail, got nowhere, and finally tore it open with his teeth, and I lay there watching a man who could make a cocktail as clear as water lose a fight with a piece of plastic. I didn't say anything. I didn't want to look like I was watching too closely. But I filed it away. A new box. He had bought them, not long ago, and he had not opened them for anyone else.

'Don't,' he said, not looking up. He had heard me smile.

'I didn't say a word.'

Then it was on, and he was over me again.

'You're sure, Betty?'

I nodded.

He pushed in, slowly at first, then with greater urgency, his hips finding a rhythm that I matched with my own.

The roar in my ears grew louder. Something coiled low in me, tighter and tighter, and he seemed to grow even bigger deep inside me.

'You're so tight, Betty.'

'Don't stop. I'm nearly there,' I whimpered, feeling the edge of pain inside the pleasure, every sensation narrowed to where we were joined.

We kissed open-mouthed, panting into each other. The touch of our tongues set every nerve on fire straight down to where our hips met. I didn't hold back. I burst into a million pieces, and the force of it clenched and pulsed around him.

He shuddered and came hard, spasms shaking his whole body in a way I had never felt with anyone before. I held him tight, my legs wrapped around him, as he collapsed onto me.

We lay like that until our breathing slowed. Somewhere below us, somebody's Sunday was still going on: a radio, a window going up, a woman calling a name that wasn't either of ours. The sun had moved along the floorboards while we weren't looking. Leo's hand found the back of my neck, under the blue tips, and stayed there. He didn't say anything, and for once neither did I.

* * *

I must have fallen asleep. When I woke up, Leo was standing by the kitchen window.

'Hey,' I said.

'Hey yourself.'

'Why didn't you wake me?'

'It's Sunday, and you looked like you needed the rest.' He paused. 'Besides, I've only just gotten up myself.'

I found my panties and his shirt on the floor, put them on, and went to stand beside him.

For a while we didn't talk. We stood at the kitchen window looking down at the street. A man was reading a newspaper. Two children were arguing over a red ball. A woman sat on a bench with her eyes closed, her face turned toward the weak sun.

I was aware of his shoulder beside mine, not touching, but close enough that I knew exactly where it was. I could smell his soap, something clean and unremarkable, and the faint trace of tea on his breath.

I wondered whether he was aware of me in the same way.

Then I wondered why I was wondering.

I had spent two years trying to work out what Abe wanted from me. It had been exhausting. I didn't want to do that again.

But I also didn't want to stand beside Leo and pretend I didn't care what he thought of me.

Both things seemed to be true.

'Can I ask you something?' I said.

'Of course.'

'Do you always know what to say?'

He looked at me.

'No.'

'You seem to.'

'That's different.'

'How?'

He was quiet for a moment.

'I don't always say what I'm thinking.'

I turned toward him.

'Why not?'

He looked at the children. The red ball had rolled under a bench, and one of them was now trying to retrieve it with a stick.

'Sometimes it's not useful,' he said.

'Useful to whom?'

He glanced at me.

'That's a good question.'

I waited.

He didn't answer it.

I could have asked again. I could have made a joke, or told him he was being mysterious, or tried to work out what he meant from the expression on his face.

Instead, I looked at the children.

The boy with the stick had managed to get the ball out. He held it up as though he had accomplished something of international importance.

His friend clapped.

I clapped too.

'Very good,' I said.

Leo laughed.

And just like that, whatever had been between us a moment earlier was gone. Not resolved, exactly. Just set aside.

I found that I liked this too.

He made eggs, which was apparently what he had, and we ate them with focaccia and lots of butter at the round table with the radiator for company.

* * *

It was nearly eight when I reached home. Leo had offered to ride with me and walk me to my door, but I had demurred. He ran a bar, did his own laundry, painted, and apparently had a lot of keys. I didn't want to be the person who needed him to do things I could perfectly well do myself.

Home? came the text.

Yes, safe and sound. Thanks for dinner. Water the peace lily.

His reply: There's always hope. Good night, Betty.

I went into my bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed.

The coaster was still on the nightstand.

I picked it up.

LEO.

The letters were as firm as they had been the night he wrote them. I turned the coaster over in my hands, then put it back.

I had wanted to discover him as he revealed himself to me.

I still did.

But I was beginning to understand that discovering someone wasn't the same as solving them. There would be things I would learn next week, or never, and things we would each get wrong about the other.

I didn't need to decide what any of it meant yet.

I could simply want to see him again.

I switched off the light and got into bed.

My phone was beside me, face up.

I didn't check it.

I didn't need to.

For once, I was not waiting to find out whether I had been too much.

I was thinking about next time.

And that, I thought, was quite a lot.

Thank you for reading. Accepting ideas on whether there is a Pt 4. If you enjoyed this story, please rate and leave a comment. I read all your comments, emails and I will reply. Feedback, good, bad or indifferent, helps me write the next part. X BettyBL