No One Knows Us Here(38)

Sam could go over and check on her. He could climb out the window and work his way along the ledge like he did last time, peek into the window and make sure Wendy was all right—that she was, at the very least, alive.

I stood up and walked over to one of the windows looking out onto the Park Blocks. “You can see the Schnitz from here,” I said. Sam would still be there, onstage. So he wouldn’t be able to check on Wendy after all. Anyway, I’d unceremoniously dumped him and then deleted his number. Great. Really excellent planning on my part.

“Turn around,” Leo said.

I turned to find Leo on the couch, two cups of tea steaming on the coffee table in front of him. He was sitting up straight, like a kid sitting in the front row of the class, the teacher’s pet.

“Yes?”

“I want to look at you.”

I stood up straighter. I felt nervous all of a sudden. Stage fright. I tried to smile. “No one’s watching, are they?”

“Just me.”

“I mean—” I glanced up at the ceiling, with its exposed ductwork and thick wooden beams. “Like surveillance cameras? Glasseyes?”

“You think I’m filming myself?” He said it as if the very idea were preposterous. “Why would I do that?” Leo took a tentative sip of his tea and set his mug back on the table. Then he stretched his arms up over his head and rose to standing. He walked over and circled around me, slowly. He stopped in front of me and we stood face-to-face, only a few inches between us.

He was tall. I knew it, but now I could feel it, too, him towering over me. I tilted my head up to meet his eyes.

Perhaps he was waiting for me to make the first move. I could do that. I’d done this so many times, with other guys.

Sometimes you just have to go for it—jump right in. I took a deep breath for courage and then went straight for his crotch. My hand kneaded the front of his pants, searching for him, but somehow I managed only to grab a handful of fabric.

“Whoa!” Leo stumbled backward, his hands raised up, his eyes opened wide. He looked—he looked scared. And maybe—angry? “What are you doing?”

“I’m—” I froze, searching for words. “I thought—”

“What?” He patted himself down, trying to smooth himself out.

“I’m sorry.”

Leo raked his fingers through his curls. “No, I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what—”

“It’s okay.” My voice was smooth and sweet. He was shy; I could work with that. I turned around and lifted my hair up. “Can you help me with this?”

Leo unzipped the back of my dress so slowly I could hear the zipper, its metal teeth loosening. He slipped the straps from my shoulders and lowered the dress down, past my hips, and then he held it there so I could step out of it, one leg at a time.

He draped the dress over the arm of the couch and sat back down. “You can keep going,” he said.

Underneath the dress, what I had on was all wrong: the same basic black bra I always wore. Black cotton underwear. I’d gotten dressed so quickly, I hadn’t had time to dig out my fancy lingerie. At least the bra and underwear matched. At the last minute, I’d yanked on some sheer nylons. It was cold outside, and I hadn’t known where Leo was planning to take me.

I didn’t know how to take off a pair of nylons seductively. I just took them off the only way I knew how: pushing the waistband down past my hips and pulling them off at the feet by the toe.

My feet looked like they belonged to a senior citizen. The polished cement floor was hard and cold under my bare feet. These were inhospitable conditions for a striptease.

When I straightened back up, Leo was still appraising me.

The nylons had pressed angry rivets into my flesh, a rippled dent from my belly button on down, a ring around my waist. My body was washed in an eerie bluish light. I stood backlit against the windows. Maybe I didn’t look so bad. It was like stripping down in a cave.

I waited for a moment—for him to give me direction, maybe, or for some primal instinct of my own to kick in. Nothing happened. So I put a hand to my waist, jutted my hip out, and narrowed my eyes at Leo Glass. After a moment, I switched position, jutting my hip in the opposite direction. “You like what you see?” The words sounded insincere. Not seductive in the least.

“Keep going,” he said, eyeing my bra.

I reached behind me to unhook the clasps. My eyes stayed glued to his face. This should have felt raw and intimate. It was more like a grade school staring contest, daring the other not to blink first. It was difficult to remove my bra under this kind of scrutiny. My fingers felt clumsy, twisted behind my back, tugging at the material. The hooks wouldn’t release from the eyes. I was about to pull the whole thing down to my waist when, at last, I managed to unclasp the thing. I smiled to cover up what must have looked like a pained expression.

With one arm, I held the cups of the bra to my body. With the other hand, I nudged one strap off my shoulder, then the other. The bra dropped to the floor, and I stood there awkwardly, unsure of what to do with my hands.

“Come here,” he said.

I walked up to him, crisscrossing my legs and swinging my hips like a model on a catwalk, and sat down next to him on the couch. He inhaled sharply through his nose and shook his head briskly, as if to wake himself.