Prologue #2
He doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, doesn’t blink those (seriously unreasonable) lashes. He just stands here, radiating a quality that I can only describe as controlled fury. You know the kind, too much self-possession to yell, and is therefore somehow more frightening than someone who would.
“Oh god,” I finally say. And my voice comes out breathy, and apologetic. “I'm so sorry. That was… the rug came out of nowhere…bad rug!” I look down and shake my finger at the ground as if I am scolding a pet that’s made a mess of the floor. (Though I’m the one responsible for the mess.)
I drop to my knees before he can respond and start collecting things, gathering his papers before I gather my own, because that somehow feels polite.
I hand up a sheet stamped ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ and he takes it without comment.
The bits and bobs of my own life, the batteries, the childhood photograph, the underwear (oh my god, there is a pair of my actual underwear on the floor of this lobby) remains scattered around me like a jumble sale staged by someone having the worst day of their life, which is apparently me.
But maybe whoever’s bad day this is needed the day off.
So I’ll take it for now. I just need to burn some sage when I get upstairs.
Sage, make a simmer pot, pay an Etsy-witch, become a witch. I don’t know.
“This suit is bespoke,” he says, finally. His voice is a low rumble that I feel before I understand the words it forms. A depth like it is single handedly responsible for the thickness in the air. (It might be.)
“Fancy,” I say, scrambling upright. “These overalls are from high school.” I gesture at myself.
The denim, my hair that gave up on being a bun several U-haul trips (and one rug trip) ago, the general chaos of my personhood.
“So we’ve both got a thing. Except mine has daisies, does yours have daisies?
” I slip my thumbs under the straps of the overalls to showcase the hand embroidered daisies on the bib of the denim hoping he finds some humor in the ridiculousness of this situation, because obviously, his ‘bespoke suit’ does not have daisies.
“I did it when I was bored in math one afternoon, like a decade ago, and then I passed a pop quiz I had no business passing, and they have been my good-luck overalls ever since.”
“This is your good luck?” He does not have a sense of humor about this. I’m not sure he has a sense of humor at all.
“Well, no, but maybe someone else’s. Because, you see, if I have a bad day, then I’ve given someone else my good-luck day, because they needed it more than I did. So the good-luck overalls still work.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“How do you know?” I ask as I cock my head to the side.
His face makes a small movement, and his nostrils flare ever so slightly as the smell of his tea-stained shirt reaches them properly.
“What is that?” It is not a question, but a man identifying a crime through locked jaw and gritted teeth.
“New meaning for the term tea-shirt!” I say, but he remains stone faced, even though Oscar, the doorman I met a few hours ago, laughs under his breath.
“Sorry,” I correct. “It’s Throat Coat!” I say, too fast, too loud, too much for this person who wants to rewind the last minutes just to avoid knowing I exist in the same zip code (or world) he does.
“It’s medicinal. Very good for the throat,” I say, as I tilt up my chin and awkwardly stroke the elongated column of my neck.
“I’m a voice actor, which feels like relevant context.
Obviously less good for the, erm—bespoke situation, but the intent was… ”
I spot a dish towel in the wreckage. Trailing off my sentence, and focus, instead seeing the opportunity to fix the problem, make the new brooding man not hate me.
The ‘EVERYTHING’ box coming through for me exactly once.
And I grab it, and hop back to my feet to begin dabbing at the center of his chest. He goes rigid.
His hands come up in a silent, absolutely unambiguous protest, and then he reaches out and snatches the towel from me in one swift motion. He takes over and does not even chance a look at me while he does it.
“I have court in thirty minutes,” he says. “I am now stained and smell like a Victorian apothecary.”
“Oooh, court for what?” I ask, fixing my hair into a new (equally unruly) top knot as the one it was in just ten seconds prior. But his eyes just narrow as his eyebrows pull together in such a clear unspoken comment of ‘you’ve got to be kidding me.’
“I can make it up to you,” I say, desperate, pivoting into the only currency I have.
“Like I said, I’m a voice actor, so if you ever need a commercial, or a podcast intro, or actually I also do romance narration, it’s pretty much my toast and butter, if you’re secretly a novelist, which, you know what, probably not, but the offer stands, I’d hate to judge a book by it’s cover…
” I can hear myself. I hear every word coming out of my mouth and I am powerless over any of them.
“It’s bread,” he says as he exhales with the exhaustion I smelled in the air earlier.
“Huh?” I blink.
“The expression is bread and butter.” He’s shuffling the papers in his folder, straightening them at the corners so they aren’t sticking out.
“What did I say?”
“Toast.”
“That’s the same thing.”
“It is categorically not the same thing. One is an idiom, the other is breakfast,” he says, looking up slowly. He stares at me for a long moment. As flat as the set of his lips and the unmoving line of his brow.
This man, who I don’t know, hates me before he’s even learned my name.
And the one thing about me, (or one of many things about me) is that I hate when people hate me.
I also hate when they are mad at me. Or when I just think they might be mad at me.
Which is unfortunate because right now, it’s pretty clear he is most definitely mad at me and probably hates me.
It’s terribly inconvenient, and incredibly unfortunate.
I don’t need everyone to like me. I just need them not to actively not.
Which is a distinction without a difference that is currently doing absolutely nothing for my anxiety right now.
“I also work at the coffee shop, the one two blocks down on the corner. Free drinks. For as long as you want. A week, a month, a year…” And then, in a move that I cannot explain except as a Pavlovian response hardwired into me by the years of Friends binge-watching, I do the four-count clap from the theme song.
I do it.
Out loud.
In the lobby.
At this man.
His expression shifts. The fury doesn’t leave, but something else moves through it. A genuine, bewilderment, almost confusion, as if he's encountered a life form he doesn’t have a category for.
“No,” he says, the word feeling like a slammed door on the conversation. He checks his watch, bends down to retrieve a paper I must have missed, and tucks it into his folder.
“What apartment?” I ask. “Just tell me your apartment number and I'll cover dry cleaning, I'll drop off apology muffins. I am a pretty good baker, but you also look like someone who eats protein bars anyway so the bar is low.”
“The last thing I need,” he says, adjusting his folder, stepping over a rogue piece of bubble wrap, “is you knowing where I live.”
“That's a little dramatic,” I say. “I’m moving into 7B.”
He goes very still. Just the smallest micro-adjustment in his posture and I realize he is thinking through his entire morning. He looks at the door. Then back at me. Then at the door again. His jaw tightens in a way that suggests his back teeth could crack if he continues.
“Great,” he says.
It is the most exhausted, insulted, expensive-sounding use of the word great I have ever heard in my life. It carries his annoyance as he acknowledges his day has taken a turn he did not schedule. (And from the look of him, there could be nothing worse.)
“I'm trying to apologize,” I start.
“I don’t need an apology.” He turns toward the door. “I need you to pay attention to your surroundings.”
The heat crawls up the back of my neck. I am tired. I have underwear on the lobby floor and I am not going to stand here and be dismissed by a man in a suit who has, as far as I can tell, the emotional warmth and depth of a toothpick.
“Hey, neighbor,” I yell towards him. “I was paying attention!” My voice finds its register and fills the room. He stops. His hand is already on the door, but his shoulders lock and I know he’s listening. “I just wasn't paying attention to you.”
A hair of a second exists between us. Standing amongst the ruins of my things, the artifacts of my life as he is prepared to walk into the bright morning of his.
“Clearly,” he says. And he’s through the door and gone. Even though the word is heavy, it floats to me on the cold air of the lobby like a final decision on something I didn’t even know was a question.
I stand in the wreckage of my ‘EVERYTHING’ box and the ghost of twelve ounces of tea with the very clear knowledge that I have just introduced myself to my neighbor.
“Welcome home, Lou,” I say, to the traitorous rug and the underwear I still need to pick up. “You’ve officially met the enemy.”