Handyman and Tenant Stuck Between Floors

There was no room left to be a separate man, and it was not the cab’s fault. The residential lift had died between the fourth and fifth floors, the emergency bulb had fluttered once and gone out, and the black had sealed around them with the finality of a locked trunk. It was a small cab, built for two people and a mop bucket, the kind of box that made strangers study the floor indicator, but there was floor enough, if a man wanted it, to put a full stride between himself and the woman beside him. Malakai did not take it. He stood with his arms forced down at his sides, palms flat to his own thighs, Camille’s shoulder set against his ribs because that was where it had been when the light went, and he had not found the nerve to be the one who moved. The panel at his back was cold through his shirt, the dry iron cold of a thing that had never been warm. Her hair touched the hollow under his jaw each time the box settled another useless fraction, and his stomach, the part of him that got everywhere first, rested against the bone of her hip.

He did not lift his hands. If he lifted them he would have to put them on her, and months of hallway proximity had taught him better than to spend a want he had never confessed. She came to the hollow of his throat and no higher. The top of her head would have tucked under his chin if he bent, her shoulder sat level with his sternum, and he knew these dimensions the way he knew the building, from carrying them around without being asked. She had only ever seen him in light. Fluorescent landings, the stairwell with the bulb he kept replacing, the laundry room at two in the morning when she came down in a sweater and he was on his back under the dryer with his belly rising over his belt. Every time, she had looked somewhere just past him, at the valve, at the door, at the floor, and he had read that not-looking as a verdict delivered gently and taken it home with him. He had been taking it home for months. Now she did not shift away, and he told himself the stillness was the same indifference she used when the radiator knocked and she only wanted the valve turned, not the man who turned it. His body kept count anyway. The heat of her came through two layers of cotton in a slow, climbing gradient, cool at the point of her shoulder and warmer where it met the thick of his ribs, and under the grease and dust that lived in his work shirt he could smell her, soap and something greener, the leaves of whatever she kept on her sill, and the even pace of her breath against the mess of his.

Time came apart. The grate under their feet ticked and settled. A pipe somewhere above them knocked and gave up. His boot found a buckled seam in the old linoleum, where the floor had warped away from the frame, and his weight shifted before he could stop it. His forearm came off his thigh and lay along her waist, spanning it with room left over, and the soft give of his stomach dragged across her front. Cotton, and under it the small rise of a breath, and the plane of her, flat as he had not allowed himself to know in the lit hallway and warmer than any apology could survive. The contact lasted a second. He heard himself say he was sorry, too loud in the box, and started to take the step back that the cab had room for. She did not let him. Her shoulder came with his ribs, a small weight leaning after him, and he stopped where he was because stopping was easier than understanding. The apology sat between them and did nothing.

After that he could not stop learning the size of her. His forearm stayed where the stumble had put it, along her waist, and the waist was a span his hand could have closed around like a tool he had no license to carry. He held the arm still. It did not help. The blackout had made a fact of him, pressed to the top of her hip because there was nowhere else for it to go, and his hips had almost no distance to travel before the whole of him was seated against her. He was certain she could feel both the stop and how soon it came. His stomach touched her before anything else of him could, filling the space between them before his hips had a vote, and the rest of him followed it, smaller than the fear, and the fear was of crushing her anyway. He was too much torso and not enough of the part he had spent years bracing out of every want. The hair on his chest rasped against the weave of her shirt when he breathed. He could not make himself move away from it, and the not moving was worse than the stumble had been.

Her hand found the open placket of his work shirt and settled on his sternum. Her fingers worked into the hair slowly, the pads of them finding skin at the roots, her palm flat to the thick of him, learning the give over his ribs and not pulling back from what it learned. A minute. Another. Not a pat. Not a test she withdrew. Just her hand, warm where the rest of him was taking the chill of the panel, rising and falling with a breath he could no longer keep quiet. He did not know what it meant. The not-knowing sat in his chest under her palm like a second cage, and he stared into nothing and felt each hair under her fingers as if she were counting a body he had already decided she would refuse once the light came back.

A bang dropped down the shaft, metal on metal, far and sudden. She startled into him. Not away. The full length of her hit his front, her ribcage slotting flush against the hair on him without a gap, and his hands came up at last because there was nowhere else for them to go. He bracketed her shoulders, carefully, heels of his palms on the small bones, arms locked so the weight of his torso stayed his own problem. Then her hands came up and closed over his forearms, and pushed. Down. He felt it clearly, her whole slight strength bent on bringing his arms in, and he did not understand it, so he held. He thought she wanted the frame of him looser, more room to breathe, and he gave her room, locking the elbows harder, keeping himself off her with everything he had while her hands kept pressing the other way. She was not pulling free. That was all he was sure of.

She turned by heat alone, with no light to aim by. Her mouth found the corner of his and then the center, and he answered slowly, the way a man answers a thing he is still afraid of breaking. He kept his hips back as far as the lean of her allowed, which was not far. He kept his arms braced so his stomach only grazed her and did not seal. She tasted of the mint she must have had on the landing and under it the hour itself, the stale two-in-the-morning of the building, and he could not get enough of either. Her stillness, he understood and did not trust, might never have been the absence of want. Or it had. He still could not tell. He only knew she was kissing him, and that his hands were shaking with the effort of not giving her the rest of his weight.

Her fingers found his wrist and guided his hand down, and then under the hem of her shirt. The skin of her side was a shock after the cotton, warm and dry and so close over the bone that he could feel the edge of her ribs move when she breathed. His hand went up slowly because she was leading it and he was afraid of every place it would land. Up the fine run of her waist. Over the ladder of her ribs. To the center of her, where his palm covered her from collarbone to the foot of her sternum with nothing to break the seal, no curve to lift the heel of his hand, only skin and the faint point of a nipple and under all of it her heartbeat, quick, with nothing between it and bone. No performance. Just the body he had spent months refusing to picture, there under his hand, and his hand not good enough for it. He stopped. He asked. Her name, once, rough, the only decency he had left in the box.

She answered by pressing his hand harder to her. Then her hands were at his shirt, and the shirt was the thing he had worn like a wall. She worked it off one shoulder and he caught it, actually caught it at the elbow, a reflex older than any want, and for a second they held it between them, her pulling and him not letting go. Then he let go. The buttons gave. She got it down his arms and it dropped to the grate at his feet, and the thick hairy front of him stood bare in a blackout that smelled of hydraulic oil and dust and her, and the cold found the soft of his belly first because the belly was out farthest. She did not pause at the shape of him. She pushed her own cotton up until it bunched under her arms, and her chest met the hair on him, and the sound she made was not a retreat.

His forehead dropped to her hair. It smelled of the green thing on her sill and of sleep. He stayed braced. And she leaned. Not a sway. She put the whole of her weight into his chest, the way a person leans on a door to learn whether it is locked, and for one breath he had all of her, the full press, her feet barely bearing her. Then he stepped it back. He took the weight off her by taking half a pace, arms still locked, because a woman that size leaning that hard into a man his size had to mean she needed air, and he would rather lose the contact than be the thing she had to push off. She came after him again. He did not know what to do with that either.

Her hand went to his belt, and everything in him flinched. Not his body, which was already a fact against her thigh. The rest of him, the part that had spent years deciding in advance how this moment would go. He had a speech for it. He had rehearsed a tone, light, self-deprecating, something to get out ahead of what she would find. The belt gave. The button. He heard the zipper in the quiet like a thing being torn, and he made himself stand there and be found. She shoved the work pants down over his hips and they stopped at his knees, caught on his thighs and the boots below them, and her hand came back up the inside of his leg and closed on him, and did not search. That was the thing he would keep. It did not hunt around for more. It closed on exactly what was there, as if she had already taken the size of it against her hip an hour ago and had been waiting for the rest of him to catch up to the fact. He got the heel of one boot against the other and worked it off, the laces already loose from the end of a shift, and dragged that leg clear so the pants hung half-shed from the ankle still in its boot. Hers came off easier, undone and stepped out of and kicked somewhere against the grate. The dark kept the sight of him from her and did not keep the feel.

His hand went down the front of her on its own this time, over the hollow of her stomach, through the small rough patch of hair, and she opened her stance by a few degrees to let him in. She was wet. He had not let himself expect it, not in the hallway, not under the dryer, not once in the hundred times he had found a reason to be in her corridor. The heat of her coated two of his fingers in a single slow pass and his mind went white and then went nowhere else. He stayed there, learning the slickness and the way it gathered, the small catch in her breath when his knuckle grazed the top of her, the way her thighs tightened around his wrist and then let go so he would keep on. He kept on. He wanted to be certain of it, certain past doubt, and certainty took time, so he gave it time, two fingers moving in her with a patience that had nothing to do with skill and everything to do with disbelief. She was wet for a man she had never looked at in the light. He could not make that true and could not make it false, and his hand went on being coated in the evidence.

Her hand left him only long enough to reach behind her for the fold-down attendant seat and drop it from the wall. The hinge gave a dry click he knew from a hundred night shifts, and then nothing, the seat hanging open in the black. She found his wrist again and drew him the last step, cotton still rucked under her arms, the seat at the back of her knees. He came in slowly. His stomach reached her first, the way it reached everything first, and settled against the bare plane of her chest, and as she pulled, his palms landed flat on the metal wall behind her, one either side of her head, every locked muscle in him still holding the rest of his weight off her.

The seat took her weight with a tired creak, and Camille locked her legs around the give of his waist before he could think of a reason to stay back. He had to bend to her, knees softening, the one boot scraping the grate, until his hips came level with the edge of the seat and hers. He felt the cab close around them again in a different way: ribs, belly, the cooling metal at his shoulder, the narrow span of her under him. His hairy stomach hung and sealed over the flat of her ribs and the hard little ridge of her waist, and there was nowhere for a thrust to go. Only a grind. Only the slow, humiliating honesty of how the angle used every bit of what he had.

He entered her by inches he could count. Heat first, then the tight pull of her around the modest length of him, then the point where his hips met hers and there was nothing left to give. She made a sound against his mouth that was not surprise. His hands stayed braced on the metal behind her, arms locked, keeping the full press of his torso off her the way he had been keeping it off her for months. She answered by dragging him closer with her heels. His belly rode up across her sternum as his hips rolled. Hair caught on the thin cotton still rucked under her arms. He held there, buried to the root of what he was, and rolled instead of driving, long holds that made his own pulse sound loud in the dark.

Every shallow return taught him something he had no business knowing. The way her chest rose into the hair on his. The small, involuntary clench when he stayed still too long. The heat of her waist when one hand finally left the wall for it, a span finer than his worry had allowed. He was sure she could feel how little of him there was, how the soft of his stomach arrived before the rest of him, how his breath broke when she tightened. He kept his weight honest and off her anyway. She kept pulling it down with her legs.

Her mouth left his and found the hinge of his jaw. For a moment he thought she was only breathing him in. Then she said it against his skin, low and clear, as if the blackout had finally made room for the sentence.

She wanted to be pinned. Completely. Helpless under him, not held up by him. Her wrists gathered. His weight allowed. She asked for it in the same steady voice she used in the hallway when she told him the radiator was knocking again, and then she gave him a word to stop it. Red. Ordinary. Impossible to miss.

The want hit him harder than the admission. He had spent the blackout bracing against the fear of his own weight, and she was asking to be overwhelmed on purpose, by this body, in this cab. He did not trust his voice. He nodded against her temple and felt her nod back.

They went down carefully, him sliding out of her for the few seconds it took, her hands on his shoulders, the seat snapping back up against the wall behind them. The floor was colder than the seat, ridged where the old linoleum had lifted. He got his knees under himself, one leg bare and the other still dragging its boot and the empty leg of his pants, and covered her without dropping all at once, one forearm beside her head, the other hand finding both of her wrists and drawing them up above her until her shoulders opened and her chest lifted into his. She was so short under him that his soft belly blanketed her from the foot of her ribs to the top of her hips, and his hairy chest lay over the rest, her breastbone, the small bones of her collar, the hollow of her throat where his breath went. He found her again by feel and sank in, and there was no room to pull back far enough to thrust at this angle. He could only slide into her and stay, trapped there by his own weight and by how little room the floor allowed.

He checked anyway, her name and then the word and then whether this was the pin she meant.

Her answer was her wrists testing his grip and then going still inside it, and the slow spread of her knees around his waist. He let the brace go. The full heat of him settled, the dense press of a man who had been trying not to be this large against a woman who had just asked him to be exactly that. She made a broken sound that went straight through his ribs. He did not speed up. He could not. Each slow roll ground his belly over her waist and seated him again to the limit of what he had, and the limit was enough. He felt her take it in long, helpless clenches, felt the fight leave her arms and turn into something else, felt his own restraint burn down to the simple fact of holding her where she had asked to be held.

She came first, quiet and trapped, shaking under the weight instead of away from it. The clutch of her around him pulled the rest of him over with her. He stayed buried and let it happen in thick, stuttering pulses, his forehead against the floor beside her hair, his hand still closed around her wrists, his belly sealed to her as if the cab had finally decided they were one shape. He did not thrust through it. He held, and the holding was the whole of it.

Light hit them without warning. The emergency bulb snapped on, then the cab lurched and began its sullen descent toward the lobby, metal complaining, the sudden brightness carving every hair on his stomach, every soft fold, the smallness of her under him, the place where they were still joined. Shame arrived with the light so fast he almost lifted off her. He expected the flinch. He expected her eyes on the body he had spent months apologizing for in advance.

Camille did not flinch. She kept his hand where it had fallen when he released her wrists, pressed flat to her sternum, over the small rise and fall of her breath and the sweat caught in his palm. Her other hand stayed on his hairy side, not pushing. In the ugly yellow light she looked at him as if the seeing had been the point all along.

“The pin,” she said. “Not the dark. Come upstairs when the shift ends.”

The cab shuddered toward the lobby. He stayed where her hand held him, spent and small and suddenly, terribly visible, and did not move until the doors began to open.