The Window Across the Courtyard

The courtyard was a square of bad brick and worse lighting, the kind of space architects draw when they have given up. I was twenty-four. He was twenty-five. We lived on the same floor on opposite sides, close enough that I could see the color of his shirts on the chair and far enough that we had never spoken.

I learned him in fragments. Coffee at the window. A laptop glow. The way he stretched until his shirt rode up and showed a slim pale stomach I had no right to know about. I told myself I was looking at the sky. The sky was not that interesting.

The night the blinds stayed open I had already decided to go to bed. Then I saw him standing there, looking straight across, not startled, as if he had been waiting for me to arrive at my own glass. He lifted two fingers. I lifted mine. My pulse made a fool of me.

Five minutes later there was a knock. He was even slimmer in the hallway, all wrists and collarbones, hair still damp. “I'm Jules,” he said. “You've been watching. I've been watching back. If that's a problem I can go die of embarrassment in the stairwell.”

I let him in because the alternative was becoming a person who closed the blinds. He walked my apartment like it was a continuation of his, then stopped in front of me and said, quietly, “Can I?” I said yes.

Kissing him felt like agreeing to a rumor. He was careful and hungry in the same breath. When his shirt came off I saw what the window had only hinted at: a skinny, beautiful body, no armor on it at all. I put my mouth on his shoulder and he made a sound that wrecked the last of my manners.

We made it to the bed because the couch felt like a half-measure. He asked if I had done this with a man. I said yes, once, badly. He smiled like that was useful information, not a grade. He took his time. Fingers, patience, the kind of talk that keeps you inside your body instead of floating above it. When he pushed into me I held his thin waist and laughed once from sheer nerves. He waited. Then he moved.

It was not cinematic. It was better. The courtyard light striped his back. My neighbor's TV murmured through the wall. I came with his hand on me and his forehead against mine, and he followed soon after, shaking, saying my name like he had practiced it.

Afterward he stole a glass of water and sat on the sill, still naked, looking at his own dark window across the way. “Leave yours open,” he said. “I'll knock when the light is on.”

I left it open. He knocked the next night. And the one after. The courtyard did not become beautiful. It became a distance I no longer had to invent a reason to cross.