Chapter 2 #2
I know how this hatred escalated, but I don’t understand why.
Except that we are so locked and loaded on this mutually assured destruction that he might just be the only person I don’t lie awake wondering how to make him not hate me.
I did in the beginning, but it lasted about as long as my muffins remained on his doormat before he threw them away. (Not even 12 hours.)
His vacuuming picks up with the background of Pink Floyd being played at full volume.
Fine by me, I queue up the thriller-romance I recorded last month, one filled with blood-curdling screams. A satisfying sequence of screams that Roma called ‘visceral.’ I find the timestamp, turn the volume up further, and with a diabolical smile stretched across my face, hit play.
The sounds collide. (Like we did the day we met.) Ilaria’s breathless pleading, a full-throated scream of terror, and whatever is coming from his side of the wall.
This is technically nobody’s finest moment but is, I maintain, the correct response to the situation.
I tried to be friends, but he wasn’t interested.
For approximately forty-five seconds, 7A and 7B (us) are having a sound experience that I imagine is very confusing for anyone in the hallway. And is not particularly enjoyable to anyone involved.
The vacuum stops and the silence is sudden from his side, he’s adjusting his radar for a direct attack. I wait, holding my breath. I silence my own playback, and in the absence of noise hear the Jaws theme song in my mind building the suspense.
Nothing?
Nothing.
Nothing!
I’ve won this round, Hudson ‘Mr. I have a $400 vacuum that I use with the sole purpose of tormenting my neighbor’ Ellis! Take that you bespoke-suited, strong-jawed control-freak.
THUD THUD THUD. (Ugh!)
I completely yank the headphones from my head.
The banging hasn’t stopped, it’s relocated.
It’s not the wall this time, but my front door.
I stand up so fast, I knock the mic stand with my elbow and spend three seconds catching it before it can hit the table.
The whole frantic experience bubbling my anger and the four steps from my closet to the front door powering the rage within me.
It’s muscle memory at this point. A woman running on adrenaline, chocolate digestive biscuits, and high-stakes, slow-burn smut.
He is still knocking when I reach the door. Hard enough to make the framed prints rattle on the wall beside it. I want to compose myself, but fuck that. (And fuck him.) Instead I just yank the door open, lifting myself on my toes in preparation for the foot he has on me.
He’s mid-knock with his fist raised. And the sight of him at close range short-circuits approximately twenty-five percent of my functioning brain (get it together, Lou) before I can marshal the other seventy-five against it.
I know that he is attractive. I have known this since the beginning, since he was standing in the lobby with tea on his suit and tie, steaming fury and heat like a radiator.
It's not a secret but it’s also not relevant.
Because it’s the kind of attractiveness that exists entirely separately from whether you actually like a person, (which I don't) and which he has given me no reason to revise. What we have is reciprocal hatred that exists only because he started it and won’t let it go.
Which can be unfortunate, because right now his eyes are so dark that the amber at their core reads like a secret while his lashes are thick and do absolutely nothing to soften the expression currently arranged beneath them.
(Because the expression beneath them is not soft, and neither is the rest of him.)
His hair is usually brushed back, but right now it's damp and slightly disordered, pushed back from the shower but not styled.
He is wearing a pair of grey joggers and nothing else.
(Which feels like an intentional tactic from someone whose body looks like that.) And a single drop of water is making its way down the center of his chest with a sense of unstoppable determination.
Honestly, he looks like the cover of a novel I would narrate. For all the things I hate him for, I think I hate him for this specifically the most.
“Do you not know how to tell time,” he says, his voice bottoming out in the depth of it, the one that resonates somewhere below my sternum no matter how much I want to be unaffected by it.
“I can tell time. Right now,” I pause, “I know it’s time for you to get out of my doorway and march your ass back to your freshly vacuumed floors.
” My hands find my hips, my chin comes up, and I lift taller on my toes.
This is the stance I have developed specifically, for this specific man, in this specific doorway, for this specific fight.
(We do it regularly.) To communicate ‘I am not even slightly intimidated by you’ in a way that I feel is mostly convincing. (I don’t think he agrees)
“Oh, so you just don’t care that other people exist. Got it,” he says in a patronizing tone.
“I am painfully aware you exist. I mean, it’s nearly midnight and you’ve decided now is the perfect time to deep-clean your floors.”
“My cleaning is your issue?” he says. His dark eyes narrow and the thick lashes drop. He’s repeating it to sound ridiculous, because we both know it’s not just cleaning, and we know he’s doing it with the full intent of enraging me. (And it’s working.)
“The aggressive midnight cleaning is the issue, yes,” I say.
“You know, I watch a lot of Dateline. Late night cleaning is usually a sign someone is trying to get ahead of an investigation, ya know? Clean up a crime scene. Can be verryyy suspicious,” I stress.
“By the way, I haven’t seen Claire in months, hope she’s okay. ”
The picturesque blonde-bobbed woman who didn’t actually live here, but I saw frequently enough the first weeks I moved in, to know that she didn’t like chit-chat, all I got out of her was her first name and career.
(Same as him, except I only got his name because I once got a piece of his mail, and didn't open the mailbox again for three months after that.) It’s a wonder they didn’t work out.
“Do I need to be concerned or did she realize your personality leaves something to be desired?”