There was a drawer.
In the bathroom. The small white-painted cabinet under the sink with the loose handle, right-side drawer of three. A wooden hairbrush with platinum strands caught in it, a small dark-glass bottle of something with a Japanese label I couldn't read, the lip balm she'd left the first night she stayed long enough to need it, a pair of folded black hair ties on top of the brush. The counter above had had three things on it for two years — my toothbrush, a glass, a tube of toothpaste. There were now five. I'd cleared the counter space at some point. Neither of us had said anything about it.
Three weeks in.
She'd been at my apartment four nights the previous week, maybe five. I'd stopped counting. She used my shower. She'd told me what was wrong with my shampoo, with the same unbothered certainty she'd handed down on the coffee. Tuesday she'd pulled me into the bedroom before I'd put my bag down. She had my jeans open and my cock in her mouth before I'd gotten my shoes off, her hands on my thighs, her head bobbing fast and wet. She sucked me until I came in her throat, swallowed, wiped her lip with her thumb, and said, "What do you want for dinner?" Dinner was late.
At the gym Thursday, she put two fingers on my lower back the same way she'd put them on my knee four weeks ago.
"Same problem," she said. "Different joint."
I pulled the deadlift the corrected way. She wrote something on her clipboard. Same professional satisfaction as the first time. Amber the trainer and Amber who had a drawer in my bathroom. One of the funnier things I'd run into in my adult life. She didn't find it funny.
The email arrived on a Wednesday.
From: Hartwell Facilities ([email protected])
Subject: RE: Chair Replacement (Overdue) - Apologies for the Delay
The body was apologetic. Someone had taken a call from above. A replacement ergonomic chair was coming Thursday. Deep apologies for how long this had taken.
I had not escalated the chair tickets. I'd submitted three of them and watched them sit in the queue. Indefinitely, pending. I hadn't called the building manager or facilities or any specific human.
She was at my apartment when I got home. I showed her the email.
"I had three tickets open," I said. "They weren't moving. Now I'm getting an apology and a Thursday delivery window."
She looked at the email. She looked at me, and something pleased moved at the corner of her mouth and stayed there.
"The chair was wrong."
"It was. It's been wrong for six weeks."
"And now it isn't." She said it the way she said everything she was sure of, like the world had only ever been waiting for her to get around to fixing it. "You'll have the new one Thursday."
She didn't understand why a debrief came after. She'd seen a thing that was wrong, and somewhere in nine hundred years was a method for unsticking a facilities ticket at a mid-size logistics company, and she'd used it, and the wrong thing was going to be right by Thursday. That was the whole arc, to her. The part where I wanted to stand in my kitchen and marvel at it was mine alone.
"I accept the chair," I said.
"Good." The pleased thing surfaced the rest of the way, warm and a little wicked. "Sit in it and think of me."
I didn't ask what she'd done. I wasn't going to be able to reconstruct it anyway.
Saturday evening she was on my couch reading her phone. I went to the kitchen for water. When I came back with two glasses she already had a full one on the end table.
I looked at it. She didn't look up.
I hadn't refilled it. She hadn't gone to the kitchen while I was in the kitchen. The glass was full.
I sat down. Drank my water. Put the extra glass on the counter.
Chair resolved. Counter cleared without discussion. Dinner ready when I got home. Glass full when I didn't know it was empty. She read what I needed and acted on it before I said anything, and she'd been doing it long enough that she didn't seem to notice she was doing it.
Vermont Avenue on a Wednesday. Beva on the block between the Korean BBQ place and the karaoke bar, the same warm-dark interior with the Edison bulbs and the unfinished walnut counter, the Wednesday crowd thinner than the Thursday I'd be there with him later in the year. Marcus had the back corner table, two beers already on it. Same gray jacket on the back of his chair. Same white shirt. He'd loosened his tie the half-inch he loosened it after work.
"So," he said, after we'd established that we were both fine and work was work. "The Hartwell girl."
Not a question.
"Yes."
"That's the one you brought to the office."
"That's the one."
He picked up his beer. Marcus is Korean-American, slightly taller than me, looks about six years younger than he is. We went to the same school. He ended up in LA nine months before I did. He knows my actual voice.
"She's a trainer," he said. "I got that from how she looked at the pull handles."
"She works at the gym where I have sessions."
"And."
"And what."
He sat with that. "Why are you being weird about it."
"I'm not being weird about it."
"You're being weird about it in a specific way where you answer every question directly and give me exactly what I asked for and nothing else, which for you is weird."
I drank my beer. He was right on all counts. "She's a personal trainer. I met her at the gym. She's incredible."
Marcus looked at me for another second. He doesn't push when pushing's not going to work.
"Okay."
We talked about his job and my job and a movie one of us had seen. I didn't add anything unprompted. He texted me three blocks from my building: *She sounds real.* I sent a thumbs up.
Twelve minutes from the bar to my building. Vermont at nine on a Wednesday in the way Vermont does Wednesdays — the BBQ places filling for the post-work second-wave dinner crowd, the karaoke bar's purple sign on, the dry-cleaner closed, a guy unloading a delivery truck three doors down from my building under the orange of a single streetlight.
She's a succubus. She'd picked me as a target and whatever was supposed to happen hadn't happened, and now she had a drawer in my bathroom and had fixed my chair and the previous Tuesday she'd pulled me into the bedroom before I'd put my bag down.
She drinks my coffee with the face of someone being mildly wronged. She has a tail that curls around my ankle when she falls asleep, and she doesn't know she does it. She'd asked a follow-up question last Tuesday about freight routing software that proved she'd been listening to the first answer. She fixed my chair. She cleared a space on my bathroom counter and neither of us said anything.
I was falling in love with her. I didn't have a plan for what to do about that.
The lock took two tries. Four flights. My door.
Same apartment. The drawer was in the bathroom.
I checked it was still there on my way past.