Ten Feet

The heat on the roof had driven everyone toward the fire pit, which made no sense except that alcohol and stupidity worked the same way in groups. I stood at the railing instead, my back to the crowd, looking at the skyline that was supposed to be the reason for the party. Good jeans, dark, bought for the way they held everything in place while still suggesting the geometry underneath. They pulled across my thighs when I shifted my weight, and I’d been aware of it all evening in a low, idle way, the way you’re aware of a held breath.

I felt it before I saw it, that specific gravity of being looked at. Not the casual scanning of the room. Targeted. Sustained.

It went down my spine and settled low, and I stood very still while it did.

I didn’t turn immediately. Let them wait. My drink was sweating in my hand. I took a sip. The gin was warm and went down thick, and it did nothing for the dryness in my mouth.

Then I turned, casual, as if checking who was still here.

The man was near the bar, talking to a woman in a red dress who was doing most of the talking. Early thirties, maybe. Athletic shorts, the kind that stopped mid-thigh, loose enough to move but short enough that the dark hair on his legs was unavoidable, thick on the calves, heavier on the thighs, the kind of hair that caught the rooftop lights. Tan legs. The kind of tan that came from running shirtless. The runner, I thought, and the naming felt like taking something, and taking something felt good.

The runner held a beer by the neck, not drinking it, using it as a prop while his eyes did the real work. His T-shirt, gray, soft-looking, slightly too big, hung loose on his frame. When he shifted his weight, the fabric lifted just enough to reveal a line of darker hair trailing from his navel down into his waistband. There, then gone. It was nothing. It was a half second of skin above a waistband at a party, and my mouth went dry anyway.

Their eyes met. The runner didn’t look away. Held it one second, two, long past the point where either of us could pretend, and the third second was the one that did the damage. Then he shifted his stance, weight moving to the other leg, parting his thighs and changing the angle of the shorts. The fabric pulled, settled. The shirt lifted again with the movement, showing more of that trail, the way it thickened as it descended.

Heat came up the back of my neck and spread into my scalp. I was hardening against the seam of my jeans, slow, unstoppable, and there was nothing to do about it that wouldn’t be visible. I kept my hips where they were. I did not adjust. I let it happen, and I let the man across the roof keep looking at me while it did; knowing I was being looked at made it worse, and worse was the only word for something that felt like that.

The woman in red touched the runner’s arm, trying to reclaim his attention. He nodded at whatever she was saying, but his eyes didn’t leave. His free hand moved to his waist, thumb hooking into the pocket of his shorts, pulling the fabric tighter across his hips. The motion lifted his shirt higher, showing the bottom ridge of his ribs, the narrowing of his waist. I thought about the width of that waist in my two hands. I thought about it in enough detail that I had to look at the skyline for a moment.

I realized I’d been holding my drink too tight. I set it on the railing, freeing my hand, and made sure the movement was slow enough to be read.

A song came on with bass in it, something that vibrated up through the concrete and into the soles of my feet and kept going. The crowd reorganized itself around the change, three or four people drifting toward the speakers, and the gap they left suddenly made the angle better. I could see the runner in profile now. The way the shorts sat when he leaned against the wall. The particular curve of thigh where the hair grew denser before it disappeared under the fabric, and the shadow the fabric made, and how little it would take to move it.

The woman in red gave up. She touched the runner’s arm once more, said something he didn’t respond to, and went toward the fire pit.

Then the runner pushed off the wall. Not toward me, but to the edge of the roof on his own side, a different railing, a parallel view. The long way around. As he walked, his hand drifted to his stomach, fingers dragging through that trail of hair and lifting the fabric with them. The waistband of his shorts gapped, showing the tan line where his running shorts ended and the paler skin below it, and the sight went through me like a hand closing.

Then the runner was at the railing, looking out at the same skyline, ten feet away now instead of twenty.

Close enough to speak, if either of us decided to break the silence. Close enough to see the sweat on his neck, the way his chest moved under the gray cotton, the wet dark at the collar where the cotton had gone translucent against skin.

Neither of us spoke. We stood side by side, both looking at the city.

I took a step. Half a step. My weight went onto my front foot, and my body prepared to close the distance, but then my nerve failed me; I shifted the weight back and stayed where I was, and my heart was going so hard I thought the railing might carry it.

The wind shifted, carrying the smell of the river and something else, clean sweat, the particular musk of a warm body that has been in the sun all day. I breathed it in without meaning to, and then, once I had it, I breathed it in on purpose.

The runner came the rest of the way. Not a step announced as a step, just a drift down the railing, one hand sliding along it, the way a man repositions for a better angle on a view he isn’t looking at. Ten feet went in three unhurried movements, and neither of us acknowledged that it had happened.

The runner shifted his weight, and the motion brought our arms together.

It was nothing. It was skin against skin along four inches of forearm, cotton at the edge of it where my sleeve ended, and it was the most I had felt in a year. I could feel the individual hairs on the other man’s arm, the give of the muscle underneath, the heat coming off him like the heat off the concrete. Neither of us pulled away. One second, which was an accident. Two, which was not. Three, and I understood that the man beside me was holding entirely still on purpose, that this was costing him too, that we were both standing at a railing at a party pretending to look at a city while four inches of forearm did something neither of us could survive naming.

My whole body had gone down to that one line of contact. Everything else was rumor.

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Ten feet had taken the runner most of a song to cross, and he’d needed all of it. Twice he had set his weight to push off the wall, and twice he had not, and the second time the woman in red had asked him a question he answered without hearing, watching a man at a railing do absolutely nothing at all. He’d gone the long way because the short way was eight steps of open concrete with a face at the end of it, and he had known by step three that he would not survive being wrong.

What he could not stop thinking about was the throat. Early on, before any of it, back when the man still had his back to the room, he had tipped his head back to finish something in his glass, and the line of his throat had gone all the way down, and the runner had felt that in his hands and lower. He had been carrying it around the roof for twenty minutes. It had gotten worse, not better, and standing this close did nothing except make it specific.

The rest of it, the shirt, the shorts, the tan line, was noise he was making to cover the fact that he had no plan and no air. The man had set his drink down on the railing at some point. He had not registered why. He was aware of exactly one thing: four inches of forearm, and he was holding his arm so still that it had started to ache.

───────

I turned first.

Hip against the railing, facing him, and it cost more than it looked like it cost, because turning meant being seen, and I was in no condition to be seen. I let myself be seen anyway.

The runner took half a beat too long to answer. Then he turned too, and the stance opened his legs slightly and changed the fall of the shorts, the fabric pulling across the front; his shape there was not ambiguous, and he made no effort to make it ambiguous.

We stood facing each other now, the city behind us, the party behind us, the narrow gap of concrete between our bodies, both of us wearing the evidence.

The runner reached past me for the empty bottle he’d left on the railing. His forearm came close enough to feel the warmth radiating off it, close enough that the hair on it moved against my own, close enough to catch. I let it pass. I wanted to catch it so badly that my fingers moved, and I let it pass, and letting it pass was the hardest thing I’d done all summer. The reach had brought us to inches, close enough to smell the beer on his breath and the soap on his skin and the clean animal thing underneath, and neither of us stepped back out of it.

“Good view,” the runner said. His voice came out lower than it should have, and rougher, and he heard himself do it.

“Yeah,” I said. My own voice had gone somewhere. “Good view.”

The runner smiled, slow, and stayed exactly where he was. His eyes dropped, unhurried, taking the whole front of my jeans without any pretense of not doing it, and then came back up, and he wasn’t smiling anymore.

Behind us, the party went on, loud and drunk and oblivious, somebody’s laugh cracking over the music. The railing was cold against my lower back through my shirt, and it was the only cold thing left. I could feel my own pulse in three places. On the railing beside us, my glass still sat where I’d set it, the last of the gin gone warm, a ring of water spreading beneath it, and neither of us reached for it.