My apartment faces west, so late-afternoon sun spills through the blinds in lazy golden stripes that crawl across the floorboards like slow fingers. I never close them all the way anymore. There’s something addictive about that sliced light, the way it turns ordinary things suggestive: the curve of a coffee mug, the slope of a shoulder, the shadowed hollow beneath a collarbone.He arrived just as the stripes were lengthening, two bottles of wine in one hand, the other raised to knock again though I’d already opened the door. We’d agreed on dinner, nothing more. We both knew better.The kitchen was small; we kept brushing past each other reaching for glasses, for the corkscrew, for excuses to let the contact linger half a second longer than necessary. Every graze felt deliberate, like notes in a piece of music we hadn’t admitted we were playing.We never made it to the table. Instead we ended up on the living-room rug, backs against the couch, legs stretched out into the sunlit dust motes. The first bottle emptied faster than it should have. Conversation drifted the way the light did—slow, warm, unhurried.He asked what I did on nights when I couldn’t sleep. I told him the truth: I left the blinds exactly like this and let the city watch me move through the rooms in whatever I happened to be wearing, which was often very little. I watched his throat move as he swallowed.“Your turn,” I said.He considered. “I sit on the fire escape and pretend I’m somewhere else. Somewhere with fewer rules.”The second bottle was half gone when the light turned peach and the stripes across his forearm looked like tiger marks. I reached out without thinking and traced one with a fingertip. His skin was hotter than the air. He didn’t stop me.Time softened around the edges. We talked about everything and nothing: favorite smells after rain, the way certain songs feel like someone else’s memory, the precise moment you realize restraint is its own kind of foreplay. Our voices grew quieter, as if volume itself might shatter whatever was building.Eventually he shifted to face me fully, one knee drawn up, the fading light cutting across his cheekbone like a secret he’d decided to share. I mirrored him until our knees touched. The contact was small, denim against bare skin, but it felt seismic.He asked, very softly, “Do you ever close them?”
“Only when I want to be found.”His smile was slow, almost shy. Then he reached past me—not touching, just close enough that I felt the warmth of his arm—and hooked one finger under the cord. The blinds lowered another inch. The room dimmed to a hushed gold.Better, we agreed without words.We stayed there until the stripes disappeared entirely and the only light came from the streetlamps outside, muted and bluish through the slats. By then our shoulders were touching, our hands resting palm-up on our own thighs like offerings. Neither of us had crossed the final inch. We didn’t need to. The possibility was enough; it hummed between us like a tuning fork struck hours ago and still vibrating.When he finally stood to leave, the room felt colder in the exact shape of where he’d been. At the door he paused, looked back once—at me, at the half-closed blinds, at the promise still hanging in the air like perfume.“Next time,” he said, “leave them exactly like that.”I will. Some invitations are best issued in slices of light and the quiet certainty that the person on the other side of the window already knows how to read them.