Chapter 2
Chapter Two
JUST ANOTHER PRICK AND A WALL
LOUISA
Roma’s notes from the other day live rent free in my head.
She sent over some flags and a nine-minute-long voice note, which means it was too much to type and she didn’t want me to be able to interject like I could on a phone call.
So I listened to all nine minutes, and it pained me to admit she was right.
‘Too controlled,’ she said. ‘I can hear you thinking about it instead of feeling it.’ (She’s always right when it comes to this.) I was too slow (too distant) from the passion.
Fine. Fine. I am living in it. I am the passion.
I am the passion as I finish up the final chapters of this romantasy series novel that has consumed the last months of my life and which I have loved deeply and will miss enormously, and also need to hand over by Friday or Roma might actually get on a plane and show up at my door.
I am the main character. I am Ilaria. And Ilaria wouldn’t lie awake obsessing over all the ways she has accidentally annoyed people this week wondering if they are thinking about her.
Ilaria is a woman who has been imprisoned in a dungeon by a dark-winged man named Igor, who is objectively her enemy and subjectively the most enticing person she has ever encountered, and she is currently pressed against damp granite with her silk pinned to her skin and her moral compass pointing somewhere it never has before, and she does not apologize for any of it.
She does not apologize, she does not spiral, she does not have forty-three browser tabs open.
She has one tab open and it is vengeance. (Okay, only parts of me are Ilaria.)
I can do this.
I need to do this, actually, because these are the final chapters of a book I should have handed over last Tuesday.
I also have a new book starting next month, this one a Scottish Highlands romance, enemies to lovers, slow burn, wildly explicit, six hundred and nineteen pages.
So I can’t afford to be behind schedule.
When I tell people I have a recording studio, they usually picture something behind glass, while someone fusses with dials.
Maybe a guitar leaning against a stool for atmosphere.
(Surprise! I don’t play guitar.) When in reality it’s a small walk-in closet with deep-wine-colored velvet drapes pinned over sound-reduction foam.
I picked this closet not only because I had limited options, but because it doesn't share an exterior wall with the street, which is critical for a narrator.
It means no sirens, no delivery trucks, no the-city-never-sleeps ambient noise threading itself into a medieval romance and ruining the atmosphere.
I spent a weekend lining the walls with acoustic panels, then added the fabric over the top of them, which was technically for vibes but which I maintain also improves the resonance.
There is an Ikea table along one wall, just wide enough for my screens, microphone, and my iPad stand.
Plus a hook for my headphones. It is the most efficient use of square footage I have ever achieved, which is impressive given that I’m not known for efficiency, and on any given night allows me to become a medieval prisoner, a woman fleeing a serial killer (also the serial killer), or the narrator of a very tasteful intergalactic why-choose.
It’s a foam-and-textile-lined sensory-deprivation chamber, purpose built for the professional pursuit of making complete strangers feel things.
While they are stuck in traffic or their lives, whether they are lying in a bath or to themselves, maybe pretending to work.
Maybe they just need to pretend. These books pull people into places they want to go, and give them things they didn’t know they needed. (Me too.)
Sometimes those things are ‘I should really buy that Bluetooth blender’ or ‘this mortgage rate makes me think I’ll be able to buy a house.
’ Most of those things are, if I'm honest, ‘I want a man with wings and a tragic backstory he refuses to discuss, who has been my captor and is now something considerably worse, to pin me against a cold stone wall in a mountain fortress and absolutely ruin my life while the snow comes down outside and neither of us survives it emotionally.’
(Same, girl.)
What I did not account for when I was measuring foam panels and debating velvet colors of wine versus burgundy (which is funny because burgundy is just a type of wine) was the interior wall.
Now if it was shared with anyone else, perhaps it would not be the issue it is, but this wall in particular is the one I share with 7A.
(Aka Angry Neighbor?, you remember him? From the coffee shop?
From the lobby? From my nightmares of rabid vacuuming as the most inconsiderate, pretentious, arrogant… I digress.)
The wall must be a single layer of drywall and whatever lives inside it.
Insulation, presumably, though this is an older building, so also possibly a ghost of my poor decisions, or a rodent, even a rodent family.
Based on available evidence, it might actually be just Hudson ‘I don’t have time for this’ Ellis’s neighborly disapproval, which, in terms of density, is not nothing.
But appears to be thin enough to let sound through.
I had, at one point, pushed my wardrobe flush against it as an additional sound barrier, which I thought worked, but left no room for me to breathe.
Which was a problem and a panic attack I was going to deal with later, but I was cup-of-tea-to-the-chest struck by the realization it didn’t even matter when he knocked on my door at near midnight one Tuesday night to tell me he could still hear me.
And when I made my case about the wardrobe, he lectured me about how those types of things should be ‘affixed to walls for safety.’ Hudson ‘I know everything about structural integrity’ Ellis struck again.
I brush away the thought of the man on the other side of the wall, I’m starting early enough that tonight should not elicit the same level of annoyance where he tells me how inconsiderate I am, something he’s felt since our first encounter.
I settle into my recording chair and pull the headphones on, opening the session file.
“Okay,” I say quietly, not to the microphone but to myself.
No, to Ilaria, who I need to conjure with some urgency.
I have the microphone tilted slightly away, still getting the right levels.
“Roma wants passion.” I roll my shoulders back and crack my neck.
Closing my eyes and waiting for the room to go quiet enough inside my head that there’s space for Ilaria to move in and come through.
I try to place myself in the dungeon. The smell of torch smoke and old water. Igor's hands. (Yes, Lou, think about his hands!) Igor, a strong man who has been holding something back for so long, something more than his wingspan, that the moment he stops, it's total, complete, and all-consuming.
“Igor,” I breathe into the mic. Unsteady the way Ilaria’s voice goes when she is losing the argument she’s been making to herself for the last three chapters.
Her hands are tangling in his hair, pulling him closer, collapsing the last careful inch of distance between them until there is no more distance and her back is against the wall (literally and figuratively) and with nowhere to run, finds to her absolute devastation and complete desperation, that she doesn’t want any. (Take that, Roma!)
I’ve been at it for twenty minutes when it starts.
THUD.
I stop recording, unsure if I actually hear anything. The phantom noises sometimes creep through the headphones. Like a vibration of your phone that has you checking your pocket every minute when you're waiting for something, all without it ever ringing.
But I don’t hear anything else, so I continue. I reset, find Ilaria again, the damp nature of the setting and the devastation of wanting someone you have excellent reasons not to. I hit record, again.
“Ilaria’s silk is pinned to her skin by the heat and sweat between them,” I say, in a voice that lives deep below my normal speaking range and above the one I’d use to whisper in someone’s ear. “Igor slides a hand up her thigh, the fabric bunching under his fingers, climbing higher, and she—”
THUD. THUD.
Two this time, and I most definitely heard them.
Louder and more deliberate than the first. Two knocks on the wall meant to say ‘You are an annoyance.’ (I know because he’s said it out loud also.) I pull one headphone off my ear and sit for a minute in the tainted silence.
This is not new, this is something we do often.
It’s part of the reason why it takes me longer to finish audiobooks than other narrators.
It also is why my editors have to do more to clean up some of the files when he decides to be unrelenting.
Then I reach for the monitor controls, pull up the playback from the previous session, Ilaria’s breathy escalation (if you want to call it that) building toward something absolutely filthy, and I turn the volume up.
Ilaria’s voice fills the padded space, doubles back on itself and becomes enormous with nowhere else to go.
And through the wall, I hear his reply. The escalation from knock (or really bang) to vacuum.
It’s not just running but ramming, which is a new technique he has developed, where he slams the the nose of the vacuum cleaner into the baseboard with a rhythmic, aggressive consistency that vibrates through the drywall and into my foam panels and communicates, very clearly, that he is not actually cleaning.
(Though I’m sure his apartment is spotless, he just gives off that energy.) The man is conducting psychological warfare from the other side of a shared wall using a Dyson as his instrument of choice.