Chapter 2
Chapter two
Sully
Two identical doors side by side, as if the building had copy-pasted them, with brushed nickel handles, the same wood grain, and matching three-digit plates at eye level.
I'd walked into the wrong one twice in eight months, which was either a floor-plan problem or a me problem.
I went with the floor plan. It was the kinder option.
My door was to the left. I unlocked it and went in. The friends I had over were gone.
I'd paused Spotify, and the music picked up where I'd left it, halfway through "Dreams," with Stevie Nicks spilling her grievances. I dropped my keys on the counter, and they skidded toward the edge. I caught them before they fell. It was probably the most coordinated thing I'd done all evening.
I couldn't stop thinking about Pratt's place. It wasn't the layout. It was the atmosphere. Nothing was waiting to be put away.
He had the counter clear and the other surfaces too. I saw a stack of books not yet shelved, but the stack was straight. The lamp rested in its box, flush against the baseboard, like he'd decided where it should wait.
Who decides where a box waits?
I opened the fridge. Grabbed the half-finished bottle of white and poured it into a rocks glass.
He had my spare key.
I'd walked over with wine, expecting at least a moderate amount of friction. It wouldn't be outright rejection, but maybe a let me think about it. He'd looked at the key, listened to the tall guy I thought I recognized, and taken it.
The whole thing had the quality of a toll booth. I'd handed something over; he'd received it; the bar had lifted, and I'd driven through.
I drained the glass and set it in the sink.
In my living room, in the corner, sat a printer in its original box. I'd mentioned the dishes, but not this. I'd purchased it in October during a brief period of misplaced ambition. In over three months, I hadn't needed to print a single thing. The box had started to feel like a silent roommate.
Pratt had my key. I hadn’t asked for anything back. It had happened sideways—wrong door and apology bottle—and it still felt right.
It was either good instinct or a warning sign, and I'd always had trouble telling the difference.
I flopped onto my couch and put my feet up on the coffee table. Mom taught me never to do that, but adult me didn't listen.
My living room operated on the principle that space was for occupying, and my couch faced the kitchen so you could talk to whoever was cooking. My rug was a size too large for the room, and when Dara from 4C pointed it out, I'd spent two days reconsidering before leaving it in place.
I had two plants on the sill, both alive and wary about the three predecessors I'd killed. It was a room designed for use.
I'd expected more. Everyone responded to my energy. They matched it, softened it, leaned into it, or pushed back against it, engaging with it as a thing. Pratt didn’t. He listened and answered as if that part didn’t matter.
I tried to place him in a category and couldn't. I was mad skilled at categorizing. It was a crucial talent working behind a bar. You assessed fast and filed correctly, or the night fell apart. Pratt resisted filing.
Despite the charm. Possibly around the charm. My charm had been, in the final accounting, beside the point.
I leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. A grin filled my face before I could stop it.
Gay man, near-certain, on the other side of my wall. He hung out with the two guys on his team who everyone knew were a couple. I recognized them from that.
He was a professional athlete. Gay. Muscular. My neighbor. And he had my spare key.
I slept until eleven, which meant I woke in the building's late-morning quiet. Everyone with a nine-to-five schedule was already gone. The hallways were quiet, and the elevator was idle. A bartender's hours landed in the odd period between the daytime and graveyard shifts.
Glancing at my phone, I saw a text from my sister. I'd successfully avoided the family group chat about my brother's plan to leave Boston. It had apparently gone feral overnight.
There was a scheduling notification from the bar.
The best one was a photo from my college roommate of his kid doing something inadvisable with a fork. He captioned it lol, and I found it funny enough to laugh out loud too.
I showered, dressed in whatever order my hands found things, and checked my pockets.
I had my phone, wallet, and CharlieCard. It was for Boston transit, two years useless in any practical sense. I kept it in my left jeans pocket. The day I took it out was the day I'd have to decide what that meant. I wasn't there yet.
I locked up and stepped into the hallway. Errands to run before work swallowed my evening.
***
The first hour at Carver's was always easy. The second hour was loud. By the third, someone spilled something, and everyone stopped noticing.
The after-work crowd came in still wearing their lanyards. A bachelorette party colonized the back corner: eight women, one wearing a Last Rodeo sash, and a bottle of Prosecco they'd requested with the cork in so they could do it themselves.
They could not.
“Okay, we’re going to try this one more time,” I said, handing the bottle back. “You—yes, Last Rodeo—less wrist, more commitment. Think champagne, not revenge.”
The cork went sideways and hit the wall.
“That’s on me,” I said immediately. “I gave you too much emotional context.”
The far rail had two guys on a first date sitting four inches farther apart than they wanted to. Probably Fine was on his usual stool, nursing a beer with the patience of a man with nowhere better to be.
Nora was already moving, which meant the floor was falling behind.
I tied my apron, checked the rail, and started pouring.
"Table seven wants to split the check four ways," Nora said, appearing beside me, waiting for a bottle. "The one guy's doing the math on his phone like he doesn't trust us with long division."
"Historically, we're experts at long division."
"He doesn't know our history." She took the bottle. "His problem."
Nora had six months on me and moved through the bar like she'd poured its foundation herself. We didn’t see each other outside shifts, but we didn’t need to.
She moved onto the floor when it started to slip.
I held the bar. Tomasz helped close and occasionally shared his thoughts on the impermanence of things, unprompted. It worked.
The TVs ran muted and captioned above the bar the way they always did. Ambience like the weather outside. Two of them were on the Ironhawks' game.
The camera went wide, and I looked up.
Pratt was in the crease.
I finished a pour and set it down, already reaching for the next glass before I realized I'd pulled the wrong tap. The ticket said bottle. I looked at the draft for a second—full, cold, for nobody—and I poured it out.
I'd known him for maybe fourteen minutes, through a wrong-door situation and a doorstep apology. Here I was looking at him on a TV in my bar, thinking: yeah, that's right. That's him.
"Hey." I set the pint in front of the guy at the far end. "Ironhawks up?"
He glanced at the screen. "By one. Third."
On screen, Pratt skated to the boards and said something to a defenseman, two words, maybe three. Then he skated back to the crease and reset.
Nora came back to the rail for a bottle and stopped when she caught my sightline.
She looked at the screen and then looked at me.
"Since when do you watch hockey?"
"I don't." I picked up a rag. "I'm watching my neighbor."
"No," she said.
"Way. He plays for the Ironhawks,” I added, like that clarified anything. “That feels like information I should have led with.”
Nora stared at me. “Since when do you lead with anything?”
“Fair.” I reached for a glass, didn’t need it, and put it back. “There may also have been a key involved.”
She didn’t move. “A key?”
“A spare key,” I said. “One of mine that's now in his possession. Temporarily. Or maybe indefinitely. We’re still workshopping the terms.”
She looked at the screen again, then back at me.
"How?"
“Walked into his condo like I lived there. Confident, committed, and full of immediate regret.”
Nora blinked. “You broke into your neighbor’s place?”
“The door was open,” I said. “Wrong door situation.”
"Sullivan."
"The numbers are small and the handles are identical—"
She took the bottle and went back to the floor, shaking her head.
The game started again. Someone wound up from the left circle—low, hard, going for the short side—and Pratt moved instantly. The save landed without drama.
A few people at the bar looked up. The bachelorette party didn't notice.
I watched the replay. Watched it again when the broadcast ran it a second time. I thought about my spare key in his hand.
The broadcast moved on. The bar needed me, but I looked up one more time before the period ended.
By closing time, the bar was down to its last-hour population: three regulars at the far end who needed nothing except drinks.
The Ironhawks had won by two. The post-game desk filled the screen. It was two analysts talking over a graphic about save percentage that I understood the way I understood most advanced statistics, which was not at all.
Nora refilled her coffee at the service end and leaned back against the bar. It was forty minutes until closing. The room exhaled.
She looked at the TV. "Okay," she said. "I've been patient."
"You've been working."
"Patiently." Both hands gripped the coffee mug. "The door situation. Walk me through it."
I gave her the condensed version—wrong condo, accidental introduction, wine as a reasonable apology, and my key offer. I didn't embellish and kept it factual. Nora had a finely tuned internal meter for bs.
She listened all the way through. "So he has your spare."
"Yes."
She raised an eyebrow.
"Practical arrangement," I said. "My auto-lock has a well-documented—"
"I have received calls from that hallway," she said. "At midnight on a Tuesday. That is not what I'm asking about."
I took a glass off the drying rack and held it to the light. "He's my neighbor. It's a logical solution to a recurring problem."
"Sullivan."
"What?"
"You gave a stranger a key to your condo."
"I gave my neighbor a key. Categorically different. Let's not forget the community-building aspect of this event."
She tilted her head. "What's he like?"
I thought about the question. The honest answer had more rooms in it than I was prepared to open at eleven-forty on a weeknight, so I stepped into the alcove. "Quiet," I said. "Not the shut-down kind. Like it's quiet but doing something."
Nora looked at me for a long moment.
"What?"
"I've worked with you for two years," she said. "I've watched you talk to every kind of person who walks through the door. You have never once said anything like that about quiet."
I moved down the bar and wiped the section near the taps.
The TV cut to a post-game interview. Pratt was there in the frame. He still wore his gear with a towel over his shoulder. A journalist off-camera asked him about a defensive gap in the third.
He answered it directly. He named the issue, described the adjustment, and stopped when he was done. The journalist moved on to the next question.
I knew what Pratt looked like at seven in the evening in his own condo, holding a wine bottle he'd accepted without drama. I knew the sound of his voice.
And I also knew what he looked like on a screen in a building that held nineteen thousand people who'd paid to watch him work. I listened to his voice with a journalist pointing a microphone at him.
The guy in the condo and the guy on the screen were the same person. My body decided he was trustworthy, and my body had a better record on those calls than my brain did.
The interview ended, and the broadcast moved on to something else.
Nora was still at the service end, sipping coffee and watching me over the rim.
She lowered the mug. "How many nights a week do you work here?"
"Four."
"And the TV's been on—"
"The well needs restocking before closing."
My deflection worked. She smiled and went back to wiping tables.
I got home at twenty past two. The hallway was quiet; no elevator hum and no sound through any of the doors. I was halfway to my keys when I saw it.
A folded piece of paper on the floor, pushed partway under my door. I picked it up.
The handwriting was even. No corrections or second pass. I couldn't address a greeting card without cross-outs.
Heard you come in around 1:30 most nights. I'm up then. If the lock gives you trouble. — Pratt. 8B.
I stood in the hallway and read it twice.
He'd signed it with his condo number. Like I might forget which door was his.
I folded it back on its crease and looked at his door. I thought about knocking and took a step.