Inside Suzi Chapter 4
by Inside Suzi
Chapter 4Testing the CurtainThe call ended at two forty-seven on a Tuesday afternoon, and for a moment I simply sat in the chair and let the silence settle around me.It had been a good call. Ninety minutes with a private equity client whose portfolio was underperforming in two specific sectors and who needed someone to tell him so in a way that didn't wound his ego enough to lose the account. I was very good at that — the particular diplomatic surgery of delivering an uncomfortable truth wrapped in enough data and deference that the man on the other end felt advised rather than corrected. I had been doing it for years. It required a version of me that was fully assembled: voice calibrated, posture upright even on a call no one could see, every sentence placed with intention.I closed the laptop and sat for a moment longer, feeling that version of myself begin to loosen at the edges the way it always did when the work was done. The home office held the particular quiet of a Tuesday afternoon in a neighborhood where most people were elsewhere — at desks in offices downtown, in schools, in the ordinary machinery of weekday life. Through the window the street was slow and still. The light came in at a low afternoon angle, warm and unhurried, falling in long bars across the desk and the closed laptop and my hands resting on the surface.I looked at the window.The curtains were open. They were always open when I worked — I liked the light, liked the sense of the world continuing outside while I sat in here doing careful precise things with language and numbers. I had never thought much about whether anyone could see in. The angle of the afternoon light and the position of my desk and the particular geometry of the houses on this street had never seemed like something to calculate.I was calculating it now.I stood and stretched — slowly, arms overhead, feeling the pull of a body that had been still for too long — and I let the stretch go on longer than it needed to, my blouse pulling free of my skirt, a strip of bare midriff visible to anyone looking in from the right angle. Then I rolled my shoulders, walked to the window, and looked out at the street.Tom's truck was in the driveway.Tyler's bedroom window, second floor, was half-open. A curtain moved in the afternoon breeze — or something else moved it. I watched it for a moment, calm and still, the way you watch something you're not yet ready to act on but have decided not to look away from.Then I went upstairs.—I unbuttoned the blouse slowly, standing in the middle of the bedroom, not at the mirror — just standing, feeling the air on my skin as each button gave way. This was not a performance. There was no one here to perform for. It was simply the particular pleasure of undressing at the end of a work day, of shedding the assembled version of myself piece by piece the way I shed the professional voice, the careful sentences, the precisely managed impression of someone who had everything under control.Except that the curtains were open.I shrugged the blouse off my shoulders and let it fall to the chair. My bra followed. I stood in my skirt and the anklet and nothing else, and I looked at the window.The curtains are open, I thought. I should close them.The thought arrived with no urgency. No anxiety behind it. Just the observation, offered by the part of my mind that still kept track of what I was supposed to do, and then set down again when I chose not to act on it.Shouldn't I?I unzipped the skirt and stepped out of it and walked to the bathroom in my underwear and the anklet, the chain catching the afternoon light with each step, and I did not close the curtains.The shower ran hot. I stood under it and thought about the call — the client's voice, his particular brand of defensive confidence, the way I had navigated him. I was good at my job. I had always been good at my job. And I was standing in a hot shower in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon in a house with open curtains, having just undressed in front of a window that faced a street where two men lived who had seen me in ways my colleagues never would, and I felt no contradiction between those two facts. They were simply both true. Both parts of the same woman.That felt new. Not long ago the woman in the boardroom and the woman in the garden with the wet shirt had seemed like separate people requiring different management. Now they were beginning to feel like two expressions of the same thing — both deliberate, both capable, both entirely hers.I turned the water off and reached for the towel.And stopped.The bathroom door was open. The bedroom beyond it was lit by the afternoon sun coming through the unclosed curtains, warm and gold. I could see from where I stood the angle of the window — and I could calculate, from that angle, what someone at Tyler's second-floor window might be able to see into this room.Not everything. The geometry wasn't quite right for that. But the movement of a body. The suggestion of a silhouette. A woman stepping from a bathroom, reaching for a towel, the light falling across the curve of her shoulder.I took the towel. But I took my time with it.I dried my hair first, arms lifted, which meant my back was to the window and my shoulder blades moved under my skin in the light and my ass was visible in the bathroom mirror and by extension, at a particular angle, possibly through the bedroom window. I did this slowly, the way I had learned to do things slowly, with the unhurried attention of someone who had stopped pretending that nothing was happening.Something might be happening. Someone might be watching. That was the point.I wrapped the towel around myself eventually — loosely, at breast level — and walked out of the bathroom and across the bedroom to the closet, passing directly through the band of window light. And in the window light I paused, as if remembering something, and let my hand rest against the towel's edge, and looked at nothing in particular for a count of three.Then I went to the closet and got dressed.My heart was beating faster than it should have been.Not from fear.—I put on the loose tank top and the denim shorts and the anklet, and I left my hair down still damp from the shower, and I went out to the garden.This was not unusual. I watered the tomatoes most afternoons. I snipped dead blossoms from the roses and checked the pepper plants and sometimes just stood in the small patch of yard and let the afternoon air do its work on whatever the day had left in my shoulders. Marcus knew this about me. The neighbors knew this about me, to the extent that neighbors know anything about each other's habits. It was ordinary.Except that I had put on the tank top specifically because it was thin enough to show the shape of me underneath and I had specifically not put on a bra, and I knew from having stood in front of the mirror for a moment before coming downstairs that my nipples were visible through the fabric — not obscenely, not obviously, but visibly, in the particular way that makes a man look twice and then look away and then look back.I picked up the hose and turned it on.The water was cold at first and I aimed it at the tomato plants and let my mind go quiet the way it did in the garden — the particular quiet of a task that requires just enough attention to push other things aside but not so much that you can't think. I moved slowly. I watered from right to left, which meant my back was to Tyler's window for the first third of the garden, and I was aware of my back. Of the way the tank top moved against my shoulder blades. Of the anklet catching the light at my ankle with each small shift of my weight.Then I turned to water the left side and I was facing the street — facing Tom's house, facing the angle of approach from anywhere a person might be standing — and my front was visible. The tank top clung where the first spray of water had caught it. My nipples were making themselves known through the fabric with the specific insistence of nipples in cool air, which was not something I had engineered but which I did not try to hide.I thought about Tom at his window. I thought about Tyler's curtain.I bent forward to adjust the hose nozzle.I was not adjusting the hose nozzle. The hose nozzle was fine. What I was doing was bending forward at the hips with my legs straight, in denim shorts that left my thighs bare and sat low on my hips, and staying there for a count of five — one, two, three, steady,