Chapter 17
It’s a few agonizing seconds before he answers. My heart pogos around my chest at the sight of him. When he sees me, his eyes narrow, and he crosses his arms.
“Can I help you?” His voice, even at the worst of our exchanges, always had a warmth to it. Humor. Care. I realize that now because it’s gone—and what’s left is glacial. I feel a little bereft.
“Hi. Listen. I wanted to talk about the elephant in the room.”
“Not nice to call people names.”
My eyebrows pinch together, and I hesitate a beat. This isn’t going well. “Ah… What I mean is, let’s try… I want to try this again—”
He snorts.
“I— I didn’t mean it when I said I don’t like you. I shouldn’t have said that.” Especially shouldn’t have said that right after I had his hands all over my ass. I wince. “And I left the other night because I— I mean, I’ll get to that. But I’d like to—”
“Hey, Jack.” There’s a purr behind him. Yelena, the appraiser, her bounty of cleavage spilling from the sweetheart neckline of her blue top, pouts prettily. “Can I ask you about—”
Her eyes flare with recognition when she notices me, and she hesitates. “Oh, the neighbor from the hole.”
She makes me sound like a hobbit. I clench my fists.
“Yelena, meet 5A. Formally meet, I mean. 5A, this is Yelena,” he says.
I take a halting step backward, unsure if I want to flee or take a swing at him. Everything I planned on telling him dies on my tongue. He’s watching me with a shuttered look I can’t read. I give them both a tight smile, and he turns to Yelena.
“Give me a second while I deal with this. Almost done.” He says “this” like he’s about to salt a slug on his porch.
I squeeze the strap of my bag until my palm aches. “Anyway, I’ll make it quick since you have company. The main reason I’m here is that—”
“You want to try this again.” He sneers. “You said.”
The speech I prepared on the bus fails me, along with my courage.
“This, being neighbors. Normal neighbors.” I am reversing course faster than Sergeant Al Powell’s squad car from Nakatomi Plaza in Die Hard.
It makes me dizzy. My unspoken words are razor-sharp.
They claw at my chest. I want my sofa, my blanket, my apartment, and I don’t want to leave it for a month.
“If we’re going to buy our places, and maybe be neighbors for a while, we’re going to need to be cordial. We got off on the wrong foot.”
“That what you call the closet? Or the sofa?” Jack says.
His sarcasm cuts through my second-hand guilt.
My nostrils flare. “That was a mistake, like I said.” The angry words trip from my lips, pitchforks in hand, while the rest of me cries out, It wasn’t a mistake!
I wanted to come here and tell you I want to work on me.
Maybe work on us. I’m the mistake! I ruin everything.
“All three of those things were your fault, incidentally. Getting off on the wrong foot, the closet, the sofa.” He tips his head, and I hear a little bit of the old fire in his voice. I’d rather have a hot war than a cold one with him, I realize.
“Yes to the first, debatable about the second, though you didn’t help things with your idiocy, and the third… I blame The Pirate Duke. So let’s just bygones it out and—”
“Is ‘bygones-ing it out’ similar to your idea of ‘normal neighbors’? Because not interested.”
I open my mouth to respond, and he cuts me off.
“I already told you once, messing with me is fine. Messing with my job isn’t.
I’m getting nonstop emails to my work inbox for juice cleanses, vitamins, and essential oils.
And cars! Every POS from here to the river is available for no money down, did you know?
The nudist colony interest form was a nice touch—points for creativity there.
I had to spend an hour clearing that shit out and unsubscribing instead of working on my client case files.
You know, the people at risk of rather time-sensitive legal matters?
I’m sure that has nothing to do with you? ”
Fucking Margie! Loyal, angry Margie.
“I said not to! The second I found out about it, I…” My explanation dies on my tongue in the face of his judgment. Shit. I need out of this conversation. Immediately.
“We’ve got another few days of demo, and then we can get started on the repairs. I want to forget you exist.” LIAR. “And I can’t do that until all open space between our apartments is sealed up. Will you be getting the materials, or should I?” I demand.
He peers down at me like I’m an alien species.
His jaw has a dark dusting of stubble. He’s usually relatively clean-cut, so right now he looks like Harrison Ford’s evil twin.
I glower at him, unblinking, wanting to kick him in the nuts and run like hell so that he’s forced to share some of the hurt I’m feeling.
“You said you would help build the wall when we were on the ship. Are you backing out of that offer?” I press.
His lips firm, and I remember the feel of them on mine. Is he thinking of what followed him offering to fix our wall, too? I blink away the burning sensation in my eyes, willing myself not to cry.
“I don’t remember a ton about that night, you know. Lots of alcohol. Only thing that really sticks out at all as important is agreeing to fix the wall,” he says with a smile, a hard glint in his eye. “I’ll buy the stuff.”
Snapping a snide remark back in response comes as second nature to me now. I have to force myself to smile sweetly and press forward instead.
Jack inhales sharply, his ego probably expecting a kiss instead of the Street Fighter three-hit combo I want to deliver.
We’d be nose to nose if he wasn’t so tall.
I hear Yelena in the apartment behind him, shuffling around.
Is she there to appraise the place? Hang out? Get motorboated? Why is she here?
“Good. Buy the stuff. Oh, and I’m going to want to get it done sooner rather than later. Planning on bringing someone by.” LIAR. “I think you’ve heard enough moaning from my room, so the soundproofing is very—”
He closes the door in my face. And I realize that I desperately need professional help.
My knee bounces as I take in the reception room.
It’s all things Zen and bright in here, with whitewashed furniture, light-gray walls, and greenery everywhere.
I admire the lacy plant in a macramé holder dangling from the corner of the room and make a mental note to ask the therapist where she got it.
The six-foot potted palm plant next to my umber vegan-leather chair, though…
I examine the fronds, noting the yellowing tips of the leaves.
The two windows next to the plant are giving it a sunburn.
I’m edging it out of the direct path of the light when the therapist calls my name.
“Ah, I was just… Your plant is—”
“Thank you. I’m Wendy Halloran. You must be Penelope. It’s nice to meet you. Do you want to come in?” She has long, straight dark hair, luminous dark brown skin, and the long, lean build of a yoga instructor.
“Penny. I’m Penny. Penelope is what people call me when they’re mad, mostly.”
She smiles and gestures that I should follow her into her office, and I scurry behind, taking a seat on the soft beige sofa opposite her chair. I take a white throw pillow with a needlepoint canary on the front and hug it to my middle.
“Your office is very calming. The waiting room, too. By design, though, right? Using psychology stuff to get people to relax… I’m a sucker for calming environments.
I researched the crap out of everything before I decorated my apartment.
Is this Benjamin Moore Edgecomb Gray? It looks like it, but lighter.
Maybe cut with some white? I—” I force myself to stop.
There is an indulgent look on her face, one that isn’t quite neutral, but not judgmental, either. “I’m going to shut up now.”
“No, not if you don’t want to. Do you want to talk about your apartment?”
“I mean, maybe… I’m here because I just… I had a crappy thing happen with my neighbor.”
“Tell me about it. Or maybe start with a little about you?”
When I started my hunt for a therapist last night, I didn’t expect to find one so fast, let alone one who’d respond to my query the next morning.
And when she asked when I’d like to start, and I jokingly responded with, “How about fourteen years ago?” I didn’t expect her to say, “Well, all my yesterdays are booked, but today I had a cancellation if you really want to get started immediately.”
I shift on the sofa and realize I’m violently hugging the pillow to my chest. I deliberately set it on my lap, bird side up.
“I— You know my mom would freak if I ever told her I was in therapy.”
“Why’s that?”
I trace my finger over the little thread bird. “She doesn’t believe in it. Got to tough it out, whatever life throws at you. Therapists only make you hate your parents,” I mimic.
“And what do you think?”
“I don’t think that. But I used to think I didn’t need it because I had my friends Margie and Avery to talk to, and because I turned out fine no matter what life threw at me… But I think I overestimated how fine I am. All this nuttiness with my neighbor Jack really hit that home.”
“Are you comfortable sharing more?” Wendy tilts her head, her expression open and earnest. Her degrees are hanging across the room, denoting her PhD and master’s and all the other proof that I’m here with a professional. “Tell me about Mom. Or Jack. Whatever you’d like.”
I nod, quickly before I lose my nerve, and start talking.
Not about Mom, though. I tell her about Jack.
About what he looks like, his snark and humor, about our fighting and the games we played and how my bias formed on false pretenses started it all.
It is a stilted and meandering telling, an uncomfortable stream of consciousness that picks up momentum as I go.
And suddenly, there’s an avalanche of mental baggage falling out of me, and my eyes are stinging, and I’m accepting my second tissue.
“I’m an idiot, because I have been nothing but awful to Jack, and I like him, I do, and yes, he was awful back to me, but that was before the party, and it just feels like things changed there, and he even took care of me, and then I broke everything. And now he’s with that appraiser.”
“Do you know for sure that he’s with her?”
“No. But…” My shoulders slump. “It doesn’t matter.
Even if he’s not, look at the Vaughns, like I told you!
A daily trust fall? How the hell do I make something work when they barely did?
I’d just ruin it all with Jack anyway and end up living next door to an ex forever.
I have never made a relationship last, so there’s no reason to think it’d be different with him. ”
“I’d say one difference is…you’re here. Committed to working on yourself.”
I make a face, reluctantly accepting her words as true.
“Let me ask you, Penny: you briefly mentioned your work on our call. There, if a project is difficult, does that mean doing it doesn’t have value?”
“No, of course not.”
“So why, when it comes to relationships—yours, the Vaughns you so admire—why does difficulty in that sphere mean that the endeavor doesn’t have value?”
I open my mouth. Close it. I hug the pillow again, her words and the confusion they churn up somersaulting through my mind. I take a bracing breath.
“That was good. That was a good and cleaning deep breath. Maybe do that again.”
I do. But I’ve got nothing to say in response to her thought grenade.
Wendy’s voice has been melodic and soothing this entire session, but it gentles even more when she says, “Maybe another way of thinking about difficulties in relationships is… Isn’t there perhaps beauty in choosing one another each day? Over and over?”
I make a noncommittal sound. Even if a relationship being hard is part of it… Even if it’s worth it despite the difficulty… Jack is angry with me and may have moved on. And, regardless, I’m still very much the mess that is me.
When I do speak, it’s to say: “Can we maybe do this twice a week?”