Naomi locked the front door of the gallery at eleven-forty and felt the building exhale. She was thirty-four, a curator who had learned to wear black as a kind of armor, and tonight the armor was useless. June, thirty-one, photographer, the reason the room had been too warm all evening, was still in the back office, packing prints with a care that looked like tenderness.
“You don’t have to stay,” Naomi said from the doorway.
June looked up. Her shirt was open at the throat. A smear of wine lived at the corner of her mouth. “I know.”
They had been circling for four months. Emails that were too long. Studio visits that ran late. A kiss in January that Naomi had called a mistake because she was afraid of wanting a woman who worked in her world. June had accepted the word without believing it.
Naomi crossed the office and stopped close enough to smell June’s perfume, something like vetiver and skin. “I was wrong in January.”
“Say what you mean,” June said. Not unkind. Exact.
“I want to take your clothes off in this building I am responsible for,” Naomi said. “I want you to tell me if I should stop. I will stop.”
June’s smile was slow. “Don’t stop unless I say it.”
They did not make it to a bed. Naomi backed June against the worktable and kissed the wine from her mouth. June’s hands found the zipper of Naomi’s dress and drew it down with a photographer’s patience, as if she were developing something that could be ruined by haste. The dress fell. Naomi’s bra followed. June’s mouth closed over her nipple and Naomi’s knees remembered they were optional.
“Table,” June murmured. “If you want.”
Naomi sat on the edge, papers whispering under her thighs. June knelt on the scuffed floor, the same floor the collectors had admired, and put Naomi’s thighs over her shoulders. She licked her open, unhurried, then with a rhythm that made Naomi grip the table’s lip. Naomi came with her head tipped back toward a photograph of a hotel corridor, a long vanishing point, and she thought, absurdly, that she would never hang that print the same way again.
June stood, mouth shining. Naomi pulled her close and got a hand into June’s trousers, into the heat there, two fingers sliding where June was already wet. June cursed softly and bit Naomi’s shoulder, not hard enough to mark, hard enough to mean it. When June came she hid her face in Naomi’s neck as if the empty gallery might still be watching.
They dressed badly. Naomi unlocked the door and locked it again, a ritual, a joke. On the sidewalk the city was ordinary. June took her hand.
“Next time,” June said, “my apartment. I have a bed. I am thirty-one, Naomi. I can host.”
Naomi laughed, thirty-four and finally not performing composure. “Next time,” she said, “we will use the bed and we will still think about this table.”