Ward #4
“I’m still hoping that’s a good thing.”
“Only somewhat?”
I couldn’t help my grin. “Well, sometimes things going sideways has its appeal, if you’re willing to see it that way.”
“And clearly you have no problem seeing it...that way.”
“I’ve been told I have a unique way of seeing things.”
He smiled. “Interesting, me as well.”
“Delightful, meeting someone who thinks too much like you can be boring, but it helps to have a few things in common,” I said with a grin. “You can call me Ward.”
“Arlo.”
I’d say he was a man of few words, but that would make it seem like he was afraid to talk or was a simple talker, neither of which was true.
He had no problem speaking, even with an audience, and he spoke well despite the potential awkwardness of how I found him.
He didn’t waste words. I’d be tempted to say he didn’t mince words, but that wasn’t quite it. He was economical and expressive.
My thoughts were strange and meandering, all of a sudden. It had been a while since I’d waxed poetic, and I couldn’t remember the last time it had happened around someone I barely knew. Perhaps the night wouldn’t prove to be a washout after all.
“Okay, Arlo,” I said, cocking my head. “If you didn’t come up here to throw yourself to your death, why exactly are you up here?”
Arlo shrugged, gesturing over the ledge. “I have an affinity for high places, solitude, and peace.”
I looked around and nodded. “I suppose this counts as high. And, ignoring that I invaded your solitude, how exactly were you getting any peace? You’re almost directly under my little party.”
Tilting his head back, he peered skyward, and although there was no way to know for sure, I was sure he was looking up at the balcony where the gawking guests still gathered. “I...enjoy being around the sounds of other people.”
“But not being around them.”
“I enjoy being around people. But I was hardly invited to the party, now was I?”
I grinned. “Alright, you’ve got me there. You can consider this a formal invitation, then.”
He snorted. “Just like that?”
“Why not? You’re the most interesting thing that’s happened all night, as far as I’m concerned. The rest of them? Who knows what they do and don’t find interesting.”
“You sound...bitter.”
Did I? I was bored until I started a conversation with him.
But perhaps there was something to that; it wasn’t like I’d spent much time figuring out where my mood was during the night.
Then again, it might not be the night he was reading in me, but my conversation with my mother.
She had always been good at getting under my normally indestructible skin.
Now that I thought about it, there was a low simmer of resentment and bitterness that I associated with any memory or mention of her.
It wasn’t as if my mother tried to be anything but a royal pain in the ass.
Of course, she would say the same about me, which probably balanced out in some book somewhere.
“I like to think of it as just bored,” I said rather than fess up to all the crap in my head. “From someone like me, that can sound like bitterness, I’m sure.”
“Someone like you,” he repeated slowly, his eyes squinting.
“Still young, absurdly rich, rebellious against at least one parent with high expectations, resulting in all sorts of hedonistic and irresponsible behavior that flies in the face of decency and propriety.”
“Mmm, self-awareness?”
“Not really, I’m a living, breathing cliche. Turn on any show, flip open any contemporary novel, and you’ll find a character who acts just like me.”
“Those characters would also be rather miffed to be considered cliché or predictable.”
“Ah, well, fictional characters can’t be a one-to-one with real-life people, can they? If anything, I almost kind of like it, though I can’t say exactly why.”
“Perhaps you’re just into classics.”
That brought another delighted laugh from me. “Now there’s a thought. I’m not cliché, just classic. I’ll be sure to tell my mother that the next time she throws that little observation my way.”
He said nothing, just staring back at me, and I wondered if he was at a loss for words or if, like his lack of the need to speak more than necessary, this was just him not needing to add to the conversation.
That, or perhaps I was overthinking things, caught up in my delight at finding someone weird enough to be interesting.
“Does enjoying the sound of other people and being up high require courting death?” I asked, glancing at the ledge. “I highly doubt the team doing renovations and repairs on this building worried too much about quality.”
“What’s life without some risk?” Arlo asked, reaching over to pat the ledge. “But...I tested the ledge a few times to make sure it would hold. Death might follow me, but I don’t want to invite it in.”
Oh?
“It...follows you? Death?” I asked, raising a brow. “In a Final Destination sort of way? A general curse? Or paranoia because you’ve seen plenty of death and you’re obsessed with thinking death has taken on an intelligence and decided to follow you around?”
His expression shifted almost imperceptibly, and only when he opened his mouth did it occur to me that I might have witnessed him backing off a little, as though I had alarmed or offended him somehow.
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m targeted, or that fate chose me.
Even if it did, it would be a cruel choosing.
..and no, it’s nothing like those movies. ”
The last was said with enough disdain that I was surprised he hadn’t wrinkled his nose. “Not a fan of horror movies?”
“Not a fan of the idea that death is a malicious, cruel force that hunts people down simply because they managed to live,” Arlo said with a shrug.
“So you’re haunted by death, but defensive of its reputation?”
“Death is death. It’s not an entity, it’s not a force, it just is what it is.”
That didn’t answer my question, but I let it pass. “So...how does death follow you?”
“It just does,” he said with a small smile and shrug.
“Mmm, should I be worried?”
“About yourself?”
“Well, if death is following you all over the place, it isn’t interested in getting its hands on you; otherwise, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. So it follows that the danger is for people around you.”
“Some people.”
“Like?”
At that, he gave a mysterious smile and shrugged. “I can’t really say.”
“Can’t, or won’t? I’m not scared easily.”
He chuckled. “I’m not trying to avoid scaring you. Some people find it unnerving, but for the most part, people dismiss it. I just so happen not to be able to give you criteria for what people. It just happens when it happens.”
“How delightfully ominous,” I said with a laugh.
“I’m glad you think so,” he said with a tilt of his head. “Though I think perhaps I should be a little concerned. Most people find that kind of fascination...macabre.”
“If you think for one moment that I haven’t spent my life constantly making people ill at ease, then you don’t have the perceptive skills I originally believed you had.”
He opened his mouth and frowned, looking up and drawing my attention back to the party.
At first, there appeared to be nothing but voices until I realized some voices were louder than before.
Not surprising since there was a party going on, but wherever in the penthouse it was coming from, the shouting was not what one would want to hear at a party.
“Interesting,” I said, brow furrowing. “Why do I feel I might have to involve the police?”
“Common for you?”
“Would you be surprised if I said yes?”
“From the conversations I’ve heard drifting down here, no, I would not be surprised.”
“You say the most interesting things. Mainly, when you say what could be a judgmental statement, and yet I don’t get the slightest hint of judgment from you.”
“Some people drown themselves in life; it’s not uncommon or shameful.”
“Drown themselves in—”
I trailed off as the commotion came closer to the edge of the balcony, and I blinked when someone threw themselves at the railing.
My chest tightened when they stumbled and nearly went over the top.
Someone grabbed them, though, and I was spared from seeing them plummet to the street below.
I had come over here to see if someone was going to take a fall willingly, but wouldn’t it be ironic if I got to see it anyway, just not in the way I had originally thought?
“H-he’s, he’s choking and I can’t...he’s choking!” the man rambled, and even from down below, I could see his pale features and how he gripped someone’s arm.
“OD?” I called up and then sighed when no one responded to my voice. “Of course, they can’t hear me.”
“They’re panicking,” Arlo said calmly, and I couldn’t tell if it was because he was simply that cool or because, like the death he said followed him around, he didn’t care what was happening, accepting it as a fact of life. “They’re not going to listen.”
“It’s probably an OD,” I said with a weary sigh, pulling out my phone. I winced when I heard a name being shouted down. “Ah, the Oxy fiend.”
“Codone?” he finished the word with a question.
“That’s the one.”
“Ah. Do you have Narcan?”
“Yeah, but those idiots clearly aren’t listening enough for me to tell them where the fuck it is...which I did at the beginning of the damn party.”
Arlo chuckled, and I jumped when he was suddenly beside me. “I see stress makes you drop all the purple prose.”
I glanced at him and frowned. “I wouldn’t say stress, more like annoyance. Honestly, what’s the point of having backup plans in case something goes wrong if people aren’t going to remember what I told them in the first place?”
“Most people don’t do well in emergencies when a life is on the line,” Arlo commented as he looked up at the building and then straight ahead. “Is there anyone in that apartment?”