Page 12 of Call Off the Dark

“You’d find a way out.” He leaned forward, as if he were telling her a secret. “There’d be a hidden crawlspace in the attic that would lead to the outside.”

She leaned forward too. “What’s the lifespan of a lion?”

“Not sure. Let’s say it’s similar to a cat.”

She took the final sip of her drink and said, “As the housecat, who’s my owner?”

“I’m your owner.”

Helen narrowed her eyes. “You’re my owner? Was this game just a ploy to tell me about your preferences?” The way she said “preferences” insinuated a lot.

Tyler sat back and his cheeks turned pink. He shook his head and looked down at the table as he laughed. This time, Helen didn’t laugh with him. She just watched how cute and boyish he was in the moment.

When his laughter faded and he looked back up at her, she whispered, “Definitely the housecat.”

“Oh.” He smiled, but then the server arrived with the check and saved him from needing to come up with a better response.

As Helen and Tyler exited the restaurant, they were talking and laughing about something as they turned toward each other. She could feel the happy flush in her face, and she loved the way his eyes sparkled when they met hers. They both went still, and there was a breath suspended in time before their lips found each other. It was impossible to say who moved first. It was a magnetic pull more than a choice or action. It was just the truth of what was always going to happen between them, and she thought, Here comes the fall.

There on the sidewalk, with strangers passing by, Helen and Tyler kissed for the first time. Their lips started soft and sweet and then set into an entrancing rhythm, and she felt herself fill up with a million glowing stars. And then she was laughing again, because they were making out on the city sidewalk.

When they stepped apart, she reached for his hand and softly asked, “Do you want to come to my apartment?”

Tyler didn’t say anything, just nodded and looked at her a little like he was in awe, and she thought, Please let that look on his face be real.

Four blocks later, Helen unlocked the front door to her building, and they started kissing halfway up the stairwell. One of the ceiling lights was burned out—the management was never on top of things—and the dark haze made it feel that much more electrifying, forbidden even. Helen pushed Tyler against the wall, and his hands moved inside her wool coat and gripped her waist through the thin cotton of her dress. She pressed the length of her body against his and then stepped back.

“We’re not actually in my apartment yet,” Helen said.

“Oh?” Tyler said, feigning confusion.

“This is just the stairwell.”

“Ohhh, okay. I was thinking, wow, her apartment is huge.”

Helen burst out laughing, and so did he, and then she heard someone’s door open on the second floor. She took Tyler’s hand in hers, leading him up the stairs, and past her second-floor neighbor, a middle-aged man who always seemed to be coming and going with a beat-up brown briefcase. She nodded hello as they passed by the neighbor, and she felt as though a sign were hanging around her neck that announced her sexual intentions.

Once Helen and Tyler were inside her studio apartment, he took off his jacket and draped it over a chair. That was the chair she ate breakfast on every morning, grumpy while she waited for her coffee to kick in. Now that they were no longer in the dark stairwell, broken lights coaxing her to be bold, things felt very real. She wanted the frenzied passion back, but he was staring at the leatherbound collection on the bookshelves in the entry.

“You have an entire collection of encyclopedias.”

“I do.”

“How very nineties of you.”

“They are from the nineties,” she said. “My mom wanted to donate them because, you know, the internet…”

Tyler smiled.

“But I couldn’t let her do that. I used to spend hours reading them as a kid.”

“You spent hours reading encyclopedias as a kid?”

“Yeah.”

Helen thought he was going to make a joke, but instead he said, “That’s really cool.”

Then he moved farther into the studio and said, “I like that,” as he took in the piece of art hanging above her couch, an eerie painting of a woman with multicolored smoke swirling around her face. Helen’s walls were covered in weird art, inexpensive pieces she’d found in vintage stores and junk shops around the city. She removed her coat and put it on the chair next to his, then stepped up beside him and crossed her arms, as if they were taking it in, side by side at the Seattle Art Museum.