Chapter 4
“My friend…uh, Calvin…stopped by this morning. And he noticed the hole I’d accidentally put in the wall when I was moving my…”
“Hammer?” Jack raises a brow from my doorway. He’s back from a run this morning, his dark hair damp from the shower. He’s dressed in an über-casual dark jeans and green T-shirt combo. The shirt brings out the malevolent spark in his eyes. “Some accident. That thing’s got a three-foot diameter.”
I glare at him and turn back to Calvin, the man the city sent to check out the hole after I called about it.
Except I don’t want Gence to know I called the city—thus, my “friend” Calvin was born.
My eyes dart to Gence and away. He is standing next to Calvin and glowering at me.
I feel a trickle of sweat roll down the small of my back.
He knows. I’m not a good liar. I shouldn’t have let Margie talk me into doing this, Jack hatred or no.
No. I can’t blame Margie. I’m an adult. And I have never been susceptible to peer pressure.
Except when Margie convinced me to do shots until I was guaranteed a three-day hangover this past weekend.
Or when she goaded me into taking a hammer to my wall last night to “fix the situation so you can shut up about your neighbor already.” She’s a bad influence.
I should have listened to Avery. Bad, bad Margie. Dumb, dumb Penny.
“Anyway, so Calvin was visiting, and—”
“How do you guys know each other?” Jack asks.
“We—”
“Not you,” Jack adds, pointedly looking past me at Calvin. “Him.”
“High school,” Calvin says, looking desperately uncomfortable that I’ve asked him to lie.
I swallow my groan. Calvin looks eighty years old if he’s a day. And Jack looks like he’s trying desperately not to laugh. The nosy douche wandered over when Gence started flipping out about the hole.
“Oh. Were you a senior when she was a freshman, then?”
I march over to Jack, giving him my meanest glare. I ignore his scruffy, dimpled smile and grit out, “He was my teacher, actually. We had a torrid affair that culminated when I turned eighteen and he was finally able to ravage me on his desk.”
I slam the door in his face before he can respond, then return to the grandfatherly pair in my living room. They’re both awkwardly averting their gazes, staring at the wooden beams and the back of Jack’s wall through the enormous hole I’ve put in mine “by accident.”
Heat climbs up my neck. Nice work, dumbass. “Ah…Gence, that last part was a joke.”
“Eh, lope kosit. S’ka marre hic,” Gence mutters.
Calvin fills Gence in on exactly what Genevieve told me, and Gence shakes his head, as if denying all the work that’ll be required of him to bring the wall up to code.
I feel a twinge of conscience and resolve to give him a bigger holiday gift than usual this year.
But then Calvin drops a bombshell: Genevieve was right, and this wall was put up illegally. Which means that the building owner either needs to take it down and make it into a single apartment again, or he needs to legalize the unauthorized work and put up a new wall to code.
“Either way, the defect needs to be remedied. Sixty days, no extensions,” Calvin says.
As they’re leaving, I see Gence eyeing me and Calvin doubtfully, probably picking up on our less-than-familiar demeanor. Or at least I think that’s the look he’s giving me.
“Bye, Calvin! So good seeing you again. Say hi to the family for me,” I say, an octave this side of suspicious.
I hold my hand up to Calvin for a high five, which he slowly reaches up to deliver.
But in the split second he hesitates, I decide to go in for a hug instead.
The result is an awkward hug-handclasp combo that makes it look as if we’re about to launch into a hallway waltz.
Fantastic. I’ve accosted a city official all because I couldn’t remember how normal human friends say goodbye.
I realize too late that Jack is lazing on the threshold to his apartment, lapping it all up. When Gence and Calvin have descended out of sight, I wheel on him, bracing for the onslaught.
“May I have this dance?”
I roll my eyes.
“No? Okay. Need help cleaning up the plaster instead?” He’s smirking, the right side of his lips quirked, his eyes more than a little amused.
“Not from you,” I snap, trying to preempt whatever insult he’s cooking up.
“Maybe we should call your good buddy Calvin back. He can help, since you guys are so tight.”
I sniff and cross my arms. “He’s the best.”
Jack shakes his head and leans against his doorframe. “Destruction of property, compulsive lying… What levels won’t she stoop to? What won’t this girl do, folks?”
“You. This woman won’t do you. I’m pretty sure Dante wrote about it as one of the circles of hell.”
He grins and straightens, taking a few steps toward me until we’re a breath from each other.
I force myself to stand my ground and look up at him.
His gray eyes twinkle like plummeting pieces of a defunct space shuttle.
He should smell like sulfur. Instead, he smells woodsy.
Like Pine-Sol. Or the air freshener from a cab I puked in once when I had the flu.
It makes me want to gag. No human man should smell like air freshener. It’s disgusting.
“You bring up sex with me an awful lot for someone who claims not to want it. Your subconscious speaking?”
“I bring it up in the negative. Scary but not surprising that I say ‘no’ and you hear ‘yes.’”
“The neighbor doth protest too much, methinks. Maybe I’ll open up a hole on my side of the wall, too,” he muses, a finger tapping his mouth as he stares up at the hall ceiling. “We can pass each other secret clubhouse messages through it. Or you can pass me love letters.”
My eyes flare wide with alarm, and I fall back a step. There is now only a very thin coating of plaster and some wooden slats separating his apartment from mine. “You wouldn’t dare.”
He shrugs noncommittally. “You don’t know me very well, 5A.”
After he closes his door, he starts to whistle.
Today was supposed to be a good day. I woke up well rested, since my new noise-canceling headphones managed to drown out DJ Dickhead’s latest idea of a funny song to play on repeat: Extreme’s “Hole Hearted.” The new Evadon global marketing framework launch call went reasonably well.
We’ve gathered, Avengers-style, a solid virtual team to make it happen, and though I’m only a senior manager, people seemed receptive to me leading the project.
I got my hair done yesterday post-hole-inspection, a fresh trim and golden highlights to break up the copper.
And I’m wearing the skirt that makes my ass look like it’s been raised on a steady diet of StairMaster and squats.
This isn’t how this day was supposed to end. I sit down hard on the sofa and stare.
I really like his barstools.
The thought floats through my mind because my brain is protecting me from the shock of what my eyes are really seeing: the three-foot hole in my wall now goes straight through to Jack Craig’s apartment.
Jack is dressed in a baby-blue dress shirt and dark pants, just back from work, and is standing on his side of the hole, arms akimbo, lips pursed tight.
No, not the hole. This thing is monstrous, catastrophic, game-changing. It’s The Hole now.
“Gence. What the fuck, man,” Jack snaps.
Gence peers through The Hole at Jack. “Sorry, I have an accident. Now I am trying to make sure everything is to code.” He slants me a sidelong look.
“This isn’t happening,” I murmur.
Jack’s nose scrunches up like a subway rat’s, and the space between his eyebrows furrows into a mean-looking eleven. He looks stupid when he’s livid, like someone beaned Indiana Jones with a shovel.
“Oh, it’s happening, 5A. You and I have taken the next step in our relationship and moved in together thanks to your antics.” He runs a hand through his thick hair.
The image of Jack moving in with a woman floats through my mind. Poor pretend woman.
I swallow hard and turn my best imploring expression on Gence, calling on the goodwill I’ve earned with dozens of cookies. “There has to be some way to fix this. Can you board it up for the time being? We can’t live like this.”
“No, I can’t. Plaster here and… No, no. Need to bring it to code, Penny.” He shrugs. “I’ll work on it more tomorrow.”
“But what are we supposed to do tonight?”
Gence mimes chewing. “You have maybe some bubble gum and a sheet, kastravec?” He laughs at my horrified expression and pulls his tool belt higher over his paunch.
I plant my face in my hands and my elbows on my knees and hear Jack take over, proposing a few solutions, none of which Gence thinks feasible.
I let their sharp words circle around me.
I thought I had no privacy before. But now?
“Tomorrow, I come and take the rest of this wall down, t’kap kolera.
It’s drywall so easy job. If lath and plaster, then it would take longer time.
I do the framing, drywall one side, mudding.
Then you have privacy. Next day, inspector come, I put drywall up other side, mud there, sand here.
Bam boom, boom bam, three or four days, brand-new wall.
A morre veshe? Just no walking around the living room in your underwears, heh? For one day, shtaze t’egra.”
“I need to go to sleep,” I announce. “Please, Gence. Tomorrow you’ll fix it?”
“Of course. For you two, Gence work all day.”
“The hole didn’t look this big in the pic you sent me yesterday,” Margie says, staring at the now six-foot hole in the center of the wall between my apartment and Jack’s.
Avery shakes his head. “I’m going to have to institute a crisis intake form so I know what the hell I’m rushing over straight from work to deal with from now on.”
“Because it wasn’t this big yesterday,” I snap at Margie. “Where the fuck is Gence? He isn’t answering his phone.” I dial him again on speaker, and a ringing sound fills the silence. I hang up.