This all happened quite a while ago, when I had just moved back to New York with my girlfriend after living in the Northwest. I'm a tall, thin, long-haired white guy, fit in well in the Northwest, where the hippies still seemed to thrive. In New York then, the tough mid-80s, my girlfriend, a tall strong Jamaican woman, was more at home. We found a top-floor walkup in a old building way east in Alphabet City, a little one-bedroom, with the main room all windows facing off to the south, and the tiny bedroom in the back, a window on one side facing the building next door, and the other on the air shaft, a few feet from a window into our neighbor's place.
That window, opening onto what seemed to be darkness, turned out to be what changed my life.
I worked overnights, where exactly isn't important. But it meant my girlfriend and I didn't sleep at the same hours, since she worked days. I would come home before most of the neighborhood was waking up, when the city was strangely quiet, and it was one such summer sunrise morning shortly after we'd moved in that this began.
Something made me decide to stop in at the Korean deli on the corner before I went upstairs. I couldn't say I was hungry or thirsty, nothing I could say I wanted, but still I looked at the store and felt oddly compelled to go in.
The old woman behind the counter said good morning, and I smiled and said hello, then started through the narrow aisles between the densely stacked shelves. There was a scent I wasn't used to, and then I saw a small woman, her head lost in a cloud of uncontrolled red curls that fell well down her back and tumbled around her shoulders. Her bare arms were obviously strong and her thighs under a thin, muslin shift were powerful, muscled. She turned her head and I saw she was freckled, wide cheekbones, broad forehead, small full-lipped mouth and green eyes like knifeblades that slashed right into my heart.
She looked at me boldly, calmly, and I felt the scent around her fill my nose, my head. It was smoky, like her hair, like a good lapsang souchong. I wanted to say something, but didn't know what. I felt dumbfounded, slightly ridiculous, and felt my cock stiffening in my pants, and the way se looked at me, I thought she knew everything.
She turned and came right past me -- I saw she was holding three mangoes gathered in her hands against her flat belly, below her small breasts. She didn't take her eyes from me, holding me prisoner, and only when she was right next to me did I hear her voice, low, barely a whisper, just a breath: "Be careful."
I mindlessly gathered some fruit, heard her speaking to the old woman, realized they were not speaking English, but when I turned to bring what I'd found to the counter, the redhead was gone, and after I had paid and gone outside, she was gone.
My building was two doors down, I walked slowly, the vision of her, the strangest thing being that I felt an overwhelming urge to jerk off while she was still in my head. I felt like a teenager again, the power of a girl's body, the mystery, the ache. But then when I got in the building and started up the stairs, I caught her scent, heard footsteps, slow, above me. So of course I hurried.
At the third floor I caught up to her, she climbing slowing. She glanced back at me over her shoulder and said, "Neighbor."
Following her up the next three flights -- six, really, as between each floor the stairs turned once, I found myself mesmerized by the movement of her ass under the muslin shift, just tight enough to grab her hips as she moved, but loose enough to release them, to keep them a mystery. And her calves, bare, reddened, freckled, and her feet, bare in leather Indian sandals, those kolhapuri chappals so popular with hippies, like my first girlfriend wore. I knew my girlfriend was up there in the apartment, but my head was here with this woman, and when she looked back at me again over her shoulder, I knew she knew it.
By the time we reached the top floor, I was breathless, though not from the climb. There were only three apartments on each floor, and she went to the door opposite mine. She started to open the door without even putting a key in the lock, and then turned her face to me. Her every movement seemed slow, graceful, controlled, as though time and everything around her were brought in to the pace she set. The left corner of her mouth curled up slightly, and she said, "Marina."
