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You have a "woman."
She stays at your place once a month, perhaps even less frequently, and then vanishes back into the unknown. She sees several other women besides you, and she offers no explanation or apology for it. Never disclosing her residence or her occupation, she simply drifts in, eats, does what needs to be done, and departs the following morning by the time you wake up.
You have told yourself you understand the arrangement. You have named it, categorized it, held it at the proper distance the way you might hold a photograph of somewhere you have never been. This works, mostly. It works until you catch a particular slant of light through the subway window, or smell rain on pavement before it falls, and then the whole careful architecture collapses without warning, and you are left with nothing but the fact of her.
The first time you truly noticed her, she was seated on the subway. Her gaze was fixed on the smartphone in her hands, yet her posture remained remarkably poised. Occasionally she would look up, and the intensity in her eyes as she stared down the tracks intrigued you. They were a restless green—not a fixed color but a living one, shifting the way sea glass shifts when light moves through water, darkening into something ancient and forested, or clearing into pale crystal depending on the angle.
After that, you began to watch for her intentionally. She was always disciplined, riding the same car at the same time, disembarking exactly one station before yours. Some days she carried a book she never opened. Some days she carried nothing at all—no bag, no phone, hands resting in her lap with a stillness that looked less like peace than like something held carefully in place. You noticed she always chose the same seat when it was available, second from the end, and when it wasn't, she stood near the door without holding the rail, absorbing the motion of the train with a slight adjustment of her weight, automatic and unconscious, the way sailors do.
While your attention was captured by her, she never seemed to take any notice of you. Once, the train lurched, and in catching yourself you must have made some sound, because her eyes moved in your direction—not to your face, but somewhere just past it, the way you'd check a noise in a room you'd already decided was empty. You assumed it would always remain that way.
Then came a rainy Friday. In the afternoon, the sky suddenly unleashed a torrential downpour. The charcoal clouds were thick and oppressive; it didn't look like it would let up anytime soon. Remarking to yourself how unusual this was for the season, you unfurled the folding umbrella you'd kept stowed in your bag since the last storm—pale orange on the outside, the underside a vivid yellow floral in hogushi-ori weave, a souvenir from Japan. The moment you stepped out from under the overhang, you felt someone's presence beside you. You braced yourself instinctively, but upon realizing who it was, the tension drained away.
The woman you had only ever watched from a distance as she got off the train.
"Hey, I'd rather not get soaked today. Mind if I join you?"
She spoke in a composed, alto voice. Half a shoulder was exposed to the rain, and her coppery hair had darkened as it absorbed the moisture.
You stared at her profile for a moment. Then: "Sure."
Rumors circulated that she drifted between various women. Peggy, Maggie, Carol, Jane, Pepper, Wanda, Maria, Agatha—names without context, without explanation. Whether those names belonged to real people or were merely fabrications, you couldn't say for sure. You had learned, early on, that with her the question of what was real was not the useful one.
You'd even heard a story about someone presenting her with a ring, asking for her hand in marriage, only for her to press it back into their mouth in a parting kiss. She is quite the celebrity in certain circles, so there is never a shortage of gossip.
Don't get too deep. You told yourself this every time you met, every time your bodies intertwined.
The nights she came, she did not announce herself with noise. You would hear the door, and then nothing for a moment, and then she would be there, shedding her jacket the way water sheds off a roof—without fuss, without ceremony, as if rooms were simply things she moved through. You had stopped asking where she'd come from. The question had a way of making the air go flat.
There was a particular hour, somewhere between midnight and the kind of dark that feels permanent, when she would lie still and you could almost convince yourself that she was simply a person, resting, the way people do. Her breathing would slow. Not asleep—you had learned the difference—but somewhere adjacent to it, someplace she allowed herself to go when she thought you weren't paying attention. You paid attention. You had always paid attention. You had enough sense not to say so.
Once she said, to the ceiling more than to you: "I used to not be able to sleep in rooms with windows." A pause. "I'm fine now."
You didn't ask what changed. She didn't offer it. The city outside went on making its low, indifferent sounds.
In the morning, your voice was still thick with sleep. "Oh, Natasha." You pulled a pack of cigarettes she'd left behind from the bedside drawer. "You forgot these."
Taking the pack from your hand, Natasha pulled one out and placed it between her lips. You silently extended a lighter.
"Why do you have such a nice lighter? You don't even smoke, do you?" she asked in a flat tone as she took it from you.
"Oh, that? I got it from someone," you said nonchalantly. "If it's that nice, do you want to take it?"
Natasha considered your offer for a moment. "No, I'm good. Even if I have a nice lighter, I just end up losing it immediately." She spoke with practiced ease, the cigarette still dangling from her lips, as she flicked the flame to life—and then said nothing. But you had seen it—the fraction of a second before the nothing, the small adjustment behind her eyes, like a door closing quietly in a house you weren't supposed to know had rooms. She drew on the cigarette. Exhaled.
"The room is going to reek."
You said it flatly, which was worse than shouting.
Teeth brushed, clothes changed, coffee brewed. Sandwiches made from whatever was in the fridge—you didn't ask if she was hungry; by now you knew she always was. The two of you ate without talking much. You ate slowly. She didn't, but she waited anyway, turning her cup in her hands, and you watched her do it and said nothing.
She paused at the front door. She didn't look back immediately—just stood there for a moment, her hand not yet on the handle.
"Aren't you taking your cigarettes?"
"I'll leave them here."
The silence did its work.
"I'll come back for a smoke." A beat. "As long as there are some left."
When the pack started getting low, you made sure to buy another of the same brand.
The visits had changed too—once a month, then twice, then something closer to weekly, the numbers accruing quietly like interest on a debt neither of you had agreed to take on.
The season had turned without you noticing—the way seasons do when you've been paying attention to something else. The rain came differently now, not the sudden vertical kind that had soaked her hair that first afternoon, but a low, horizontal thing that arrived without drama and stayed. Sometimes on the subway home, the light would catch the window at a particular angle, and for a moment the city outside looked like something submerged, and you would feel it again.
Then the train would move, and the light would change, and you would be simply a person on a subway, holding a bag with a pack of cigarettes in it that was not yours.