I Came on Her Black Stockings the Day I Moved In: Unforeseen Entanglements, #48

He showed up at noon with a duffel on one shoulder and his girlfriend half a step behind him. The hallway was too hot. The door across from the unit opened on coffee gone cold and a woman who did not look thirty-one. Short dark hair. A soft white shirt. A denim overall dress. Black stockings. She said his name like she had been waiting for it.

His girlfriend saw the way he looked. She said so. Then she left.

Thirty days. That was the job, the lease, the only reason the apartment existed. He told himself that with the wall still thin enough to carry water running on the other side, and the image of those stockings still sitting behind his eyes.

The doorbell went before he could be better than that.

She had changed. Lace, now, the kind of thing a married woman puts on when she thinks she is done being seen for the day. Her husband needed a file. The box was too high. It would only take a minute. The bedroom still held the afternoon she had not finished putting away: lingerie on the quilt, two pairs of black stockings laid out like they had just come off her legs. The step stool slipped. They went down together. What started as an accident did not stay one.

There is a photograph on that bedroom wall. There is a phone on the bed. When it rings, she answers, and he does not leave her body.