Doors slide shut on the twentieth floor,
mirrored walls catching what we both ignore,
your perfume hits like a closed-room verdict,
something expensive and slightly wrong,
two inches of charged air between us, the kind that hums its own specific song,
I watch you in the reflection, which is safer than watching you direct,
the line of your throat above your collar, a geometry I can’t correct.
You shift your weight and the whole box shudders,
or maybe that’s just what I tell myself,
the numbers count down with the patience of judges,
methodical, certain, beyond all help,
and I’m doing the math no man admits to doing in polite and fluorescent company,
calculating distance in fractions of nerve, converting proximity to currency.
We’re falling between the floors of what’s permitted,
two bodies in a box the size of a confession,
every floor that passes is a restraint omitted,
every second is the pressure of a question,
your lips say nothing and your spine says everything,
I’m burning in the shaft between intention and the act,
the doors will open and we’ll both walk clean into the light,
but right now, right now, we’re caught in the vertical contract.
Back to the drop — floor nine, floor eight,
your skirt hem grazes the rail at an angle I calculate,
the mirror doubles you, and I take both,
I’m steady on the outside and a wildfire underneath the coat,
your heel shifts, your shoulder tilts my way one millimeter, no more,
but a millimeter in here is a country I’ve been wanting to explore.
Floor six — you know, floor six — I can feel you knowing,
the peripheral flick of your eye is a current showing,
you’re reading the room and the room is reading back,
and everything unsaid between us has a pulse and a track,
your breathing has changed in a way that isn’t accidental,
a half-note deeper, a fraction more fundamental.
Floor four and my hand is a discipline problem,
standing at my side like a man under arrest,
I’m thinking about the hollow behind your knee, the architecture of your chest,
the way your collar shifts when you swallow,
the precise and maddening weight of your hair,
I’m thinking about it in clinical detail with the air of a man who isn’t there,
who absolutely isn’t pressed into the awareness of your heat from eighteen inches out,
who definitely isn’t running scenarios no lobby conversation is about.
Floor three — the cable hums, the walls contain us,
two strangers in a physics problem that will detain us
exactly long enough to understand the cost of what we won’t do,
long enough to feel the outline of the door we’re walking through,
you adjust your bag strap and your knuckles brush the rail,
and I watch your fingers and my whole careful argument goes frail.
Floor two — the longest floor —
where the air thickens to the consistency of a decision unmade,
I could speak and the whole constructed silence would fall
like something overpaid,
I could cross those eighteen inches which are also eighteen years of being reasonable,
I could make the mirror earn its keep for once and witness something seasonable,
instead I watch the L light up above the door like a small municipal verdict,
a single letter standing in for everything the descent has circled.
Lobby — the doors part —
the cold air of the world rushes in to remind us who we are,
we separate into the population,
two strangers putting distance with the practiced ease of scar,
you don’t look back and I don’t follow,
which is either decency or cowardice, take your pick,
the lobby swallows us and the mirror upstairs is still warm with it,
still holding the shape of what two people almost were between a floor and a floor,
the doors slide closed on the empty box and it begins its climb once more.