Chapter 1 #3
They walk. She’s quiet for the first block, her dark eyes tracking every streetlight they pass under, every shadow at the edges of the road, every sound that echoes off the old brick buildings.
She is a child who has been scared today and who is still scared and who is holding the hand of a stranger because the stranger is the best option available, and Sidney feels the weight of that in his grip.
He talks to fill the silence, because the silence is too heavy for a five-year-old to carry.
He tells her about the leaky keg Xela has been fighting for three weeks.
He tells her about Gerald who sits on the same stool every night and orders the same drink and has never once said thank you.
He tells her about the time a troll tried to arm-wrestle a fae prince and they’d had to replace the entire bar top.
She doesn’t laugh, but she listens, and the listening is enough.
Then, out of nowhere, as children do: “Do you like sunflowers? I like sunflowers.”
“Yeah? Sunflowers are good. They’re big.”
“They’re the biggest.”
“What about redwoods?”
“What’s a redwood?”
“It’s a tree. Very, very tall.”
She considers this with the gravity of someone evaluating a competing thesis. “I like sunflowers better.”
“Fair enough. What’s your favorite food?”
“Macaroni and cheese.”
“The boxed kind or the real kind?”
“Dad makes the kind in the box.”
“Ah, an epicurean. Gotcha.”
Her feet start to drag after the third block.
Her steps get shorter, her grip on his hand gets heavier, and she’s listing to one side, the lean of a child who is fighting sleep and losing.
Sidney scoops her up without asking, one arm under her legs and one at her back, and she’s light.
She settles against his shoulder and her arms loop around his neck and she’s warm in the way that children are warm, radiating heat and trust in equal measure, and the trust is doing something to Sidney’s chest that he wasn’t prepared for.
He adjusts his hold and carries her the last block.
His apartment building is five stories of brick with ivy growing up the side and a secured front door that requires a code he has to punch in one-handed because his other arm is occupied.
The hallway carpet is the ugliest shade of mauve he’s ever seen.
He’s lived here for three years and the carpet has never improved.
He makes it to the fourth floor, manages the deadbolt with one hand and a creative use of his elbow, and lets them in.
The apartment is small. One bedroom, a kitchen barely wide enough for two people, a living room with a couch and a coffee table and a bookshelf that’s mostly empty because Sidney doesn’t read as much as he’d like to pretend he does.
He sets Penny on the couch and pulls the blanket from the back of it over her legs and she blinks at him, drowsy and unfocused, assessing this new environment with the bleary efficiency of someone who has just woken up in a new place and is deciding whether to be concerned. She appears to decide she is not.
“Do you have any cookies?” she asks.
Sidney goes to the kitchen and opens the cabinet. He has golden Oreos, which are what he keeps on hand because they’re the superior Oreo and he will fight anyone who disagrees, but he can see from the look on Penny’s face when he brings them over that she has strong opinions about this.
“These aren’t real Oreos,” she says, taking one.
“They are absolutely real Oreos. They’re the golden variety.”
“They’re wrong.”
“They’re all I’ve got, kiddo.”
She eats four of them. Her disapproval does not extend to her appetite.
He pours her a glass of milk and sits on the floor beside the couch, because the couch is her space now and the floor is the appropriate distance for someone who is not trying to crowd a child he’s known for two hours.
He finds the remote and flips through channels until he lands on something animated and colorful that he hopes is appropriate for five-year-olds.
It involves a cat with a sword, which seems aggressive for children’s programming, but Penny’s eyes light up and she says “It’s Blinky Cat!
” with enough enthusiasm that Sidney decides not to question it.
He leans his back against the couch and lets the noise wash over him and tries to figure out what exactly he’s supposed to do with a five-year-old overnight.
He doesn’t have kids. He’s never had kids.
His experience with children is limited to the occasional family that wanders into Willow’s before realizing it’s not that kind of bar, and one deeply unfortunate babysitting job when he was sixteen that ended with a fire extinguisher and a promise to never speak of it again.
Blinky Cat ends. Something else starts, something with a rabbit and a lot of yelling. Penny sets her milk down and shifts on the couch and says, “I’m bored.”
“You’re bored? You’ve been here for ten minutes.”
“That’s a long time.”
Sidney looks around his apartment. He does not have toys.
He does not have coloring books, or crayons, or anything remotely designed for the entertainment of a child.
What he has is a bottle of bourbon, a houseplant he’s been forgetting to water for three months, and the lingering sense that he is deeply unprepared for this situation.
“What do you want to do?” he asks, because he’s out of ideas and she’s five and probably has better ones.
Penny looks at his feet. Then she looks at his hands. Then she looks back at his feet.
“Can I paint your nails?”
“My nails?”
“My nails are painted.” She holds up her hands. They are, in fact, painted, a dark glittery purple that’s chipped at the edges and applied with the precision of someone who has not yet mastered fine motor skills. “Do you have nail polish?”
He does not have nail polish. He has never in his life had nail polish.
But there’s a look on her face, half hopeful and half braced for disappointment, and the bracing is the part that gets him.
It’s the look of a child who has learned to pre-empt the no, who has been told no enough times about enough things that she’s built the rejection into the asking, and Sidney is not in the business of disappointing children who’ve had the kind of day Penny has had.
“Give me one second,” he says.
He goes to the front door, opens it, and crosses the hall to 4B.
Mrs. Watts answers on the second knock, housecoat on and reading glasses perched on her nose, and gives him the look she always gives him when he shows up at her door at unreasonable hours, which is a mixture of fondness and exasperation and the tolerance reserved for neighbors who are strange but harmless.
“Sidney. It’s midnight.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Do you have nail polish?”
She stares at him. “Nail polish.”
“Preferably pink.”
Mrs. Watts looks at him for a long moment, the kind of moment where she is clearly deciding whether to ask questions and deciding against it, and then she disappears into her apartment and returns with a small bottle of hot pink nail polish that has probably been in a bathroom drawer since the early 2000s. She holds it out to him.
“Thank you,” he says. “You’re a lifesaver.”
“You’re a strange boy, Sidney.”
“I’ve been told.”
He brings the nail polish back to the apartment and presents it to Penny, who receives it with the gravity of someone being handed a sacred artifact. She examines the color. Holds it up to the light. Turns it over. Gives an approving nod that contains the full weight of her expertise.
“Sit on the floor,” she instructs.
Sidney sits on the floor. He extends his bare feet toward her because he’d kicked off his shoes the moment they walked in, and Penny slides off the couch and settles cross-legged in front of him with the focus and determination of a surgeon preparing for a complex operation.
She unscrews the cap, pulls out the brush, examines the brush, deems it acceptable, and begins painting his big toe with the kind of intense concentration that suggests she believes this is the most important thing happening in the world right now.
She is not good at this. The polish goes on his toe, and also on the skin around his toe, and a little bit on the floor, and Sidney watches her work and doesn’t say a word.
He sits there with his feet in the hands of a five-year-old girl he met two hours ago and lets her paint his toenails hot pink with the careful, devoted attention of someone who has finally found a task worthy of her abilities.
“You have to stay still,” she tells him.
“I’m not moving.”
“Your toes are moving. Tell them to stop.”
He tells his toes to stop. They don’t, but Penny seems satisfied with the effort and continues her work.
She does all ten, taking her time, going back over the ones she’s not happy with, blowing on them with little puffs of breath that tickle and make him twitch, which makes her scowl and tell him to hold still again.
By the time she’s done his toenails are a splotchy, uneven, deeply committed shade of hot pink, and there’s polish on the hardwood and on the edge of the blanket and on two of Penny’s fingers, and Sidney looks down at his feet and finds that he doesn’t mind at all.
“What do you think?” she asks, sitting back on her heels.
“I think you’ve got a future in the beauty industry.”