Unlikely Story

Chapter 13

“What do you mean?” I ask, hoping that he’s just messing with me. Although from the worried expression on his face, it doesn’t seem likely.

“I mean, the door always locks when it’s closed. You can’t have a building where someone could climb onto the roof and then get inside.”

“I wasn’t suggesting that—”

“Right, so you closed it. It’s locked.”

He’s staring at me now, almost daring me to understand the predicament we’re in. And I’m going to start by refusing to believe him.

“Call Tom or Meryl. They’re always home at night,” I suggest, trying not to panic. “They’ll just come open the door.”

“You call them,” he says, a note of irritation in his voice finally overshadowing his fear.

“I, uh ...” I think about my phone happily charging on my nightstand. “No, you.”

He stares at me, eyes narrowing. I shift uncomfortably at his focus. I can practically guess the next words out of his mouth.

“I didn’t bring my phone upstairs with me.” My mouth falls open. This is bad . This is extremely bad. “Please tell me you didn’t just storm up here without your phone or keys to yell at me about making some noise at like seven at night and now you’ve locked us both out.”

“Well, why don’t you have your phone or keys?” I ask, trying to divert.

He stands up and walks toward me. I find myself backing into the door. With his muddy jeans and sweaty shirt, he looks like a dreamy dirtbag from an eighties music video. And I have no idea why that’s the thought bursting into my mind, when in actuality I’m faced with a man who looks like he wants to murder me.

“I’m building a planter,” he says. “I didn’t bring anything with me because I didn’t want my stuff to get dirty. It didn’t occur to me that anyone would come up here and slam the door shut.”

“Well, what if you had an emergency?” I counter, delaying the moment when we’ve run out of blame and have to actually contend with the situation.

He puts his hands on his hips. “Yes, obviously now I’m wishing I’d made some different choices.”

We stand, staring at each other, my heavy breathing from running up the stairs finally starting to calm, even if my pulse is now racing for a different reason. How long are we going to be up here? No one else comes to the roof for anything. What’s going to happen to George?

Oh my god, George.

He’s going to have a meltdown over my disappearance. He’ll be all alone and, yes, okay, I always have food sitting out for him, because he’s the pickiest dog on earth and likes to graze like the weirdo that he is, but I didn’t even take him out tonight! He’s not going to understand what’s happening. He’s going to think I abandoned him. At some point he’s going to start barking and never stop, and no one is going to realize my door is unlocked, and no one else has my key except our super, Vardan, and he doesn’t even live in our building, and now it’s too late for anyone to even call him since he’s already gone home for the day, and—

Eli grabs my shoulders, and it shocks me out of the panic I’m spiraling into.

“Don’t go there,” he says quietly, his face close enough to mine now that I can make out the flecks of honey in his otherwise brown eyes.

“Go where?” I ask suspiciously.

“Panicking.”

“I’m not panicking,” I lie.

“What’s got you the most worried?” he says, in an oddly calm voice. His hands are still gripping my shoulders, and I have to admit it’s helping a little.

“My dog,” I admit. “He was already freaking out”—I stop myself from saying because of your hammering , because it strikes me as extremely unhelpful in this particular moment—“and I haven’t even taken him out tonight, so he’s going to be uncomfortable and confused.”

“He’ll be okay, though,” he says, much more soothing and matter of fact than I would’ve expected from him. It reminds me of his deft handling of Kwan through poker; he’s showing a sliver of kindness without being patronizing or even acknowledging that he’s helping.

It’s strange to see this side of him again, and even stranger that it’s in my direction. I’m sort of surprised he hasn’t continued berating me. As much as I’ll probably never admit it, this situation is obviously my doing, even if I didn’t mean to get us into it. I’m never this rash; something about Eli makes me rash. But it’s still my fault that I stormed up here without any keys or phone and then slammed the door in my worked-up state.

“He’s going to be so scared,” I say quietly.

“I know,” he sighs. “But he’s not going to starve, and the worst thing that’ll happen is you’ll have to clean up a bit of mess whenever you get home.”

I don’t love that phrase—“whenever you get home.” At some point someone will come searching for us, right?

“Did you tell anyone you were on the way to shout at me?” he asks, verbalizing my own thoughts but with a touch of amusement in his voice.

It hits me. “Yes! I told my best friend, Dane,” I cheer. “Or, well, she suggested I come shout at you, actually,” I emphasize, as though another person encouraging me somehow lessens my own crime.

“The urban landscaper?”

“Yes.” I’m shocked he remembers that.

“So if you don’t respond, do you think she’ll come find you?”

At that my heart sinks. “Well ...” I shift on my heels, sheepish because I know what the answer is. “I suppose, at some point she’ll find it weird. But she has pool tonight, and if I don’t answer her, she’s probably just going to go to practice and not really give it another thought. Sometimes, if I don’t want to go out, I avoid texting her back. So she’s probably just going to think that’s what’s happening.”

He nods, taking it in. He keeps nodding well past the point where he should’ve understood, but I guess this situation warrants quite a bit of acceptance.

After what feels like an eternity, he turns around. Does he have a plan of action? Maybe he knows how to get us off the roof without keys? Maybe he was just messing with me and is now going to call someone?

But all those hopes are dashed when he unceremoniously plops to the ground and leans up against the planter he was building.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“I’m sitting.”

“Yes, I can see that, but why are you sitting? What are we going to do?”

The sun is starting to set, and the light makes him look unfairly angular, almost ethereal, up against the backdrop of steel and brick New York City buildings behind him. But it also showcases how weary he looks. He’s got a smear of dirt across his face, and his hair is tousled. Instead of that sort of badass look I encountered when I first stormed in, he now just seems contemplative. There’s so much expression written across his face that, in combination with the light, I find myself thinking that his profile is bursting to be photographed. There’s so much life in this image in front of me. Frustration, defeat, acceptance, physicality, dirt, golden hour light, messy curls, and a shirt that sits just so while being crumpled enough to display how hard he was working.

I need to stop staring at him, so I do the only logical thing. I slump down next to him, trying to be careful with my previously-a-great-idea swishy skirt that now I’m realizing I’ll probably have to sleep in.

“I’m sorry I closed the door,” I say, because I am.

“It’s not your fault,” he murmurs, and my head whips toward him, incredulous that he’d let me off the hook so easily. He sees my stunned expression, and a small smile lightens his face. “Well, it is your fault, but there was no way you could’ve meant to do that . It was an honest mistake, and bad luck that we’re the only two people on the planet who can go anywhere without our phones.”

I chuckle, because it really is that. Truly bad luck.

“Are you worried?” I ask.

He nods. “I’m not worried about me, but yeah ... I have ... cats.”

At that my eyes widen. “You? Have cats?”

“They were my nan’s,” he explains quickly, as though he’s confessing something. I don’t say anything else, because as a dog person, I never know what to say about cats. Cats are fine alone, right? Don’t they prefer that? Does it really matter if he’s gone? But he continues. “They’re mine now, and I sort of ... dote on them. So I’m a little worried that they’ll get flummoxed if I don’t come home.”

I don’t want that to melt some small corner of my heart, but it does. I can’t help but let an image of this bombastic, overt, know-it-all man softening around little animals run across my mind.

“What kind of cats?” I ask, before I can stop myself. The need for the visual is too great.

He hesitates, but then relents. “They aren’t like a specific breed or anything. My nan adopted them, and she never put much stock into thinking any animals were more special than any others.” I think about my little mangy mutt of a George and couldn’t agree more. “But they’re both sort of ... I don’t know ... white and floofy?”

“‘Floofy’?” I choke out, trying not to laugh.

“Well, yeah. Their hair makes them look three times larger than they actually are. It sticks out straight, as though they’ve been electrocuted. So I don’t know how else you would describe it. ‘Floofy’ is colloquial enough to make sense.”

“You live with two porcelain-colored giant shedding maniac cats?” I ask, trying to mentally wrap my mind around this updated image of his home.

“I never said they were maniacs,” he responds with a roll of his eyes. But he’s not denying the rest either.

“That’s surprising,” I say.

He fixes me with one of his smirks. “Why?”

I purse my lips in thought. I can’t say the sort of gross patriarchal thought that’s floating through my mind. He’s too masculine for cats. For floofy cats . But maybe, on second thought, it makes sense. “I guess I could see that,” I finally say. “Cats are sort of prickly and arrogant.”

He bursts out a laugh, and I’m surprised that he seems to enjoy the roasting.

“And as a dog person, you are ...,” he leads.

“Oh, well, dogs are devoted,” I say without hesitation. “They give of themselves. Dogs have no judgment. Dogs are the best.”

“Right, the dogs themselves might be the best, but maybe that means the people who own them are insecure, praise-hungry clingers.”

I snort out a laugh. Nicely played.

“What are your cats’ names?” I ask, trying to picture them. And from the embarrassment that crosses his expression, I’m particularly delighted to have asked.

“Paws and Whiskers,” he says, and now my laugh is even louder. “What?”

“Those are the kinds of names a toddler would come up with.”

“I think you’re going to feel really bad when you learn that my sister’s kids named the cats.”

“Actually?” I ask, unsure.

He pauses. “I have no idea, to be honest,” he says and slumps a little more. “But it would make a better story, right? It’s not inconceivable, since my sister does have two little kids.”

I roll my eyes back at him and he smiles. It’s funny how much his face changes, depending on the angle and expression. He’s not classically handsome—it’s why I never gave it much thought over video. Well, that and obviously the fact that he was sort of my patient. But in person he’s dynamic. He’s megawatt. And that smile seeps into whoever it’s directed at. It’s that masculine energy again, which is so much of what I dislike about him from afar. But up close it’s captivating.

And it makes it even more obvious when the smile goes away.

“I didn’t talk to my nan as much in recent years as I used to,” he says quietly, surprising me with the subject shift and his sudden morose candor. I guess being stuck with an indefinite stretch in front of you makes you immediately let go of airs. “I spent every summer with her as a kid. We had kind of the same brain, only hers was more mathematical and mine was more linguistic. So we were very bonded. And I think my mum thought it would be nice for me to get out occasionally, away from London and everything. But lately, I didn’t call her as much, because I’ve just been so damn busy. I still would’ve said we were close. When we talked, it was like nothing had changed. But I took her presence for granted, and I really regret it.”

The sun is starting to set even more now, and he looks out into the sky, pink hues shifting the light.

“I didn’t mean ...” I pause, not sure what I want to say, because I know I didn’t intend to make him feel like this. But he waves it off.

“It just got me thinking, when you asked why those were the cats’ names. It’s the kind of thing I would’ve known years ago. I’d probably have been the one to name them, to be honest. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.”

“Well,” I say slowly, “it must be a constant reminder, living in her apartment.” It hadn’t really dawned on me how much that must be weighing on him every day to be in her space.

“We have so many memories there,” he says, tousling his hair like a nervous habit. “It’s a lot, but in a good way. I’m surrounded by her, and I think I needed to be for a bit. But it’s also why I want to change some things. I can’t just stew in it all. She wanted me to have the flat, so I need to honor that.”

“Did you want to move here?” I ask, suddenly curious.

I realize I don’t really know much about his job or his circumstances. It was never really relevant to therapy, so I don’t have that context. His work wasn’t a sore spot in his and Sarah’s relationship, and she never brought it up.

He sighs, the question lingering in the air. I don’t know how we got so heavy so fast from a conversation about cats. Maybe—fortunately or unfortunately—the therapist thing makes people get to the core of their stuff more quickly.

But then he turns and gives me a wry smile. “Well, for some reason my girlfriend broke up with me”—he chuckles—“and I was crashing at my sister’s house, so the opportunity to move to a place of my own was very appealing.”

I walked right into that one.

“I didn’t—”

“I shouldn’t have yelled at you when I saw you,” he says, cutting me off. I can feel my eyebrows rising, the surprise of that admission strange in the air. He rubs his hands down his face and takes a deep breath. “I was still pretty mad about the whole thing.”

“And now you’re not?”

He turns his head straight toward the skyline again, watching the clouds move and darken as he takes the question in.

“This month here has been sort of cathartic,” he finally admits. “Clearing out Nan’s things and resetting has sort of made me ... able to put the past in the past, I suppose. I obviously knew rationally you didn’t cause Sarah to break up with me. But it was just easier to believe that for a while.”

He’s still not looking at me, but I can tell there’s something palpable about letting that go for him. It’s almost as though his shoulders relax with the admission.

“I can understand that,” I say honestly. The therapist in me wants to ask so many more questions, but I stop myself. He’s not my patient anymore—and really, he barely ever was. It was so short, and I talked to Sarah so much more than him anyway. I’d rather stick to trying to find a way to coexist as neighbors. “So do you think you’ll stay here? Or go back to London?” I ask, trying to switch gears a bit.

“Just making conversation or trying to get rid of me?” he retorts.

I shake my head. “You’re impossible.”

At that he grins, as though he’s enjoying baiting me. “I’m not sure, actually,” he replies, answering my original question. “I can work remotely, so it doesn’t really matter where I am. I could see myself going back to London—it’ll always feel like home, and my family’s there. But I really like it here. I’m not sure I understand everything about America or New York, but for now it’s suiting me.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“Like ... I’ve always known your health care system is shite, but I didn’t realize that eyes and teeth aren’t included,” he says, and I now have no idea where he’s going with this, but I find I want to go down the rabbit hole with him. “Who decided that? Who designed a system that was like, right, hearts and bums and ears are all under this one plan. But if you want them to make sure your teeth don’t fall out, that’s dental insurance. And if you want to not be blind, that’s a separate vision insurance. Why?”

I’m trying not to laugh at him, but it’s such a good point that it’s almost ridiculous. “I never thought of it that way,” I concede. “But you left out the brain. It’s even worse for mental health insurance—I get to deal with that all day long.”

“I’ll never understand it,” he says, tossing his arms up, both of us finally succumbing to laughing over the factual absurdity of what he’s saying but also, perhaps, our entire current situation.

I look around and notice it’s almost dark. My stomach growls a bit, and it makes me nervous. I look over at Eli, and he’s watching me with concern.

“Someone will come for us eventually,” he says, accurately guessing my mood shift.

“Not tonight, though,” I admit, despite not wanting to stare into the truth of the situation.

“Probably not,” he concurs softly.

“What are we going to do?”

“Twenty questions? Thumb wars?” He considers. “I don’t know—just whatever we can to pass the time and not go completely nuts while we overanalyze how long it’s going to be until someone looks for us.”

“ Thumb wars? ” I ask.

At my incredulity, he turns and comes to sit right in front of me.

Why does he take every single thing as a challenge?

He holds out his hand, thumb up, waiting for me to join. There’s self-satisfaction written all across his expression. If I don’t participate, then he wins by default by psyching me out. If I play, I’m a chump who’s given in. It’s lose-lose for me, and he knows it.

But there’s nothing else to do on this ridiculous roof, so I might as well succumb to the madness.

I take his hand, watch it curve around mine, and immediately realize this was a bad idea.

I’m not sure I needed to know the texture of his grip. I’m not sure I needed to know how warm his hand is, even as the steamy weather has cooled off around us. I’m not sure I needed to know the ways my fingers feel small inside his.

Whatever visceral reaction I’ve been having to Eli since the moment we met, it’s compounded by having these physical revelations. I want to shed them like a skin and burn them out of my mind, because for everything I dislike about this man, I’m going to have to stop kidding myself and admit that I’m undeniably attracted to him. It doesn’t have any bearing on anything for a multitude of reasons—former patient, agitating neighbor, his entire personality—but it’s still floating there, palpable and irrefutable, even if all rationality would say it shouldn’t be so. My body inexplicably wakes up around Eli, and it ignores that that fact is a major inconvenience.

I realize I’ve been staring at our hands intertwined for too long and look up. His eyes are on me, unreadable. I’m finding it sort of hard to breathe.

“Ready?” he asks, and I huff incredulously. He has no idea what I’m ready for in this moment.

But he’s oblivious as he starts moving his thumb and saying words I haven’t heard since I was probably in middle school. “One, two, three, four, I declare a thumb war.”

I move my thumb side to side along his, and I can’t help but giggle. This is ridiculous.

And of course, because I’m not taking it seriously—and admittedly distracted—he smushes my thumb almost instantly.

“Aha!” he says, throwing his hands into the air, as though the victory is for something other than two bored people locked on a roof.

I’m grateful for the loss of his hand on mine, though, because I need to get whatever thoughts are running through my brain to exit. Immediately.

“So that was a really great activity for passing thirty seconds of time,” I say dryly, hoping to put an end to any consideration of another round.

He laughs and shakes his head. “Okay, yeah. We can probably do better than thumb wars,” he admits. “Truth or dare?” he asks, eyes widening as though he’s had a really brilliant, unique idea.

“What are you, stuck at the age of seven?” I ask.

“Just someone who was stuck on a lot of long car trips with my little sister as a kid and hasn’t had a need for entertainment without audio, books, or television for quite a long time,” he points out.

I stand up, maybe to get a better lay of the land, but mostly to shake off whatever’s lingering after touching him. I need to tamp down the firestorm that’s exploded across my insides.

I look across the mostly empty roof, the expansive skyline of New York City stretching out in front of us but so unreachable. We really are in a closed circuit here. There’s the water tower and some air-conditioning equipment, but otherwise it’s just us, Eli’s in-progress planters, and a locked door.

I sigh, the movement having allowed me to pull myself back together, and sit back down—although this time a little farther from Eli to keep some physical distance between us. “I don’t think any dares are doable in a place with nothing around us.”

“Okay then, truth,” he says, clearly not the type to be put off by wrinkles forming in every single plan. “Tell me an embarrassing thing.”

“You first,” I say automatically, as though my default with this man is distrust.

“I really like my food burned to a crisp,” he responds without hesitation. “Like, if you give me a piece of meat fully charred, I’m so happy. And I’ll eat a vegetable that’s been cooked to within an inch of its life.”

“That’s not embarrassing ,” I remark.

“It is when a rare steak is placed in front of me.”

I roll my eyes. “All food?” I ask.

“Not junk food or dessert,” he says. “I love to bake, so obviously you don’t want to burn any of that.”

“You love to bake ?”

The idea of this man in an apron dusted with flour seems anathema to his wiry, tough exterior. I’m a baker. I’m an introvert who loves to be alone with books and recipes and snacks. Not this guy.

But apparently I’ve gotten another thing wrong about him.

“Oh yeah,” he says, clearly enjoying upending my expectations. “I was totally the gawky little kid with that kind of pudding-bowl haircut who would sit on the counter and lick the spoon while my nan was baking for me. I was a super-picky eater, but I loved cookie dough and cupcakes and really any baked good. And it’s what my nan did with all her free time, so I got used to watching her and then eventually she taught me too.”

“Huh,” I say, trying to imagine it. Trying to picture brash Eli as a small child nestled in with a middle-aged Esther, chocolate frosting getting scooped out of a bowl. The edges of young Eli are fuzzy but there. Yet there’s one part I cannot picture. “It’s so strange to me, thinking about Esther as maternal,” I say, almost to myself. “She was always so stern. Mathematics professor has always made sense to me, but doting grandma baker is blowing my mind.”

His expression softens as I talk about her. Even with her being described as stern, he seems to love the memory.

“She was definitely no nonsense,” he remembers. “And she wasn’t exactly maternal; you’re right about that. But we sort of fit together. It was easy for me to be with Nan. We understood each other, and we didn’t require a lot of energy from one another. We liked a lot of the same stuff, and we had the same sort of logical way of approaching things. So she brought that into baking, too, and it really worked for my style as well.”

I can’t help but think it’s like the opposite of my family. Eli and Esther were hexagonal pegs in a world of round and square holes, but they went together. Whereas my brother and I are those normal rounds and squares, but my parents are pterodactyl shaped, completely off the board of anything you can imagine. I wonder if my parents ever wished they had kids who saw the world the way they did. What a comfort it must be to be a unique entity who happens to be related to a similar unique entity.

“Okay, now it’s your turn,” he says, breaking my thoughts.

“None of those were particularly embarrassing,” I point out. “More like fun facts.”

He smirks. “Okay then. Your turn for some fun facts.”

I feel sort of boring, because I don’t have an instant answer to that query. There’s nothing about me that I would say automatically stands out. I try not to stand out. The only person who seems to make me go off the deep end of normal behavior is Eli.

But that’s not something I want to admit.

He doesn’t let it go, though. “How about—what if I asked your landscaper friend? What would she say?”

“Dane?” I think. There’s a million things Dane would love to embarrass me with. “She also mocks my baking, even though she’s probably the largest consumer of its spoils,” I say with a smile. “She does like to knock the way I read, though,” I admit.

“How can someone mock the way you read?”

“I always read the end first,” I admit.

At that he stands up, incredulous. Dramatic. Typical. “You can’t be serious!”

“Just like the last couple of pages.” I cross my arms across my chest, armor against his disbelief.

“The whole point is to wonder how it ends. That’s a crime. That should be officially entered as a criminal act. You can’t read the ending before you even start!”

He’s pacing a little, and now I’m sort of enjoying how much this boring fact about myself has flummoxed him.

“It’s comforting!” I explain with a shrug. “You can get into the story and the details without all the anxiety of not knowing what’s ahead.”

“That’s life, Nora. No one gets to know what’s ahead.” He crouches down until he’s in front of me, and I’m once again rattled by his nearness. “That’s the fun of it.”