Bad Neighbor

by Molly O'Keefe

  Damn.

  No, hotter.

  Fuck.

  Yes, he would say fuck.

  He would turn around and push me down onto my knees.

  And I would go. Oh my god, I would go to my knees so fast I’d get bruises.

  This was worse than the fruit stand thing. So much worse.

  Or better? Whatever. It was sharper than that old fuzzy fantasy. This was bright and hot and so clear in my brain it ricocheted through my body.

  “What else?” he asked, coming into the room, and I jumped practically out of my seat.

  I was being an asshole, making jokes about him not reading and then fantasizing about having anonymous sex with him. These were new lows for me.

  “Nothing.” I wanted him out of there. Wanted him out of my space. Wanted to stop imagining what was underneath those athletic shorts.

  “The shower head?” he asked, ignoring my nothing, and stepped into my bathroom. I closed my eyes and put my head in my hand.

  While I’d been behaving like a total idiot, my computer had been booting up, and little alerts started binging all over the place.

  Updates and emails.

  A new Facebook message.

  My heart stopped and my blood went cold. Jesse in my bathroom all of a sudden ceased to exist.

  Only my sister Facebook messaged me, and she was far away. Supposed to be off the grid. Hiding. I was not supposed to know where she was, not for a few months anyway. Those were her rules, not mine.

  No, I thought. No, Abby, don’t do this.

  I clicked through my screens, opening up Facebook, and saw that I had a message request from someone using the name Cheetara.

  Goddamnit.

  It could only be my sister and a shitty code.

  We’d been idiots for reruns of that old Thundercats cartoon.

  “Hey.” Jesse startled me from thoughts of my sister and I stood up, clicking shut the message request. I hadn’t accepted it. But I hadn’t rejected it either.

  Because my sister was a selfish princess.

  But I was a fool.

  “Jesse!” I said too fast. Too bright. My hands were shaking. Everything was shaking and I would have given everything, nearly everything I had left in my life, for him to walk across that room and hug me.

  Just hug me.

  Because I was scared and I was really…really…alone.

  “You okay?” he asked. “You look…scared?”

  “I’m fine,” I told him, attempting to laugh, but he clearly didn’t buy it.

  “What happened?” he asked, looking around like there was some bad guy in the corner of my room he would protect me from.

  “Nothing,” I whispered, feeling myself splinter at the edges. The pressure finally too much for my rose-colored glasses. “I mean…my life happened. My life just keeps on happening.”

  It was too much. I was saying too much. I pressed my lips together, keeping everything inside.

  “Life does that,” he said, and I laughed and then swallowed it when it turned into a sob. I turned away, so embarrassed, so completely embarrassed to be breaking down in front of him.

  “Your shower head is fixed,” he said, like he knew if he pushed me I’d crack. And there was no coming back from cracking at Shady Oaks. If I fell apart here, I didn’t know how to put myself back together. I had no resources. No secret stockpiles of strength and good humor and foolish optimism.

  I took a deep breath and then another, and finally when I had myself in hand I turned to face him, the awkwardest smile ever glued to my face.

  “How much do I owe you?” His face was literally unreadable and I had no idea what he was thinking.

  Probably something along the lines of: oh, get me the fuck away from this crazy lady.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Well, that doesn’t seem fair. I owe you something.” My skin got hot as I thought about getting on my knees in front of him. I would do that now if he asked. I wanted him to ask.

  I would do anything he asked, that’s how much I ached for some kind of connection. Some kind of real. And his eyes widened, his face tightened, because he knew it.

  My loneliness was in the air. My desire. My grief.

  Please, I thought. Please touch me.

  “Stay out of the basement,” he said, and I jerked at his words.

  “That’s it?”

  “It would mean a lot.” He opened my door, and outside I saw that it had started raining. Droplets splattered against his shirt as he stepped outside. “And…you could show me that picture you’re working on. The woman hiding in the park.”

  Jane Austen in Hyde Park.

  I very nearly gasped.

  And then the door was shut and he was gone. And my apartment seemed very empty. And I felt very alone. My face burned, my body ached.

  I collapsed into my chair and clicked open Facebook again so I could stare at my sister’s message.

  How like her. How fucking like her. To not play by the rules, or to think that the rules didn’t apply to her. Sure, I could rip my life apart and give her just about everything I had, with the express understanding that she…LIE LOW!

  And within a week she’s on Facebook.

  This wasn’t lying low.

  This was going to get us both found.

  And both of us killed.

  Chapter Three

  Jesse

  Idiot. What a fucking idiot.

  I put my tools back in the cupboard underneath the sink in my own kitchen and called myself a few more names.

  This whole fucking thing worked because I talked to no one. Looked at no one. I let people watch me out of the corner of their eyes and whisper about me behind their hands to each other.

  I pretended I didn’t know the rumors. Didn’t care about the rumors. I fucking cultivated the rumors.

  That I was trouble. Dangerous.

  In a place full of people hiding from something, living on the dark edges of the world so the shit they did wouldn’t get noticed, I stood out.

  I stood out as someone nobody wanted to mess with.

  And that suited me and my boss just fucking fine.

  But Charlotte…

  She was like a piece of dandelion fluff. Fuzzy and scattered.

  Light as goddamn air.

  Soft. I didn’t have to touch her to know she would be soft. Her skin. Her hair. All of her.

  She had fucking bumblebees on her curtains.

  And something had happened while I’d been in the bathroom. Something that made her want to cry. Something that hurt her.

  And I should not give a shit. Not giving a shit was the thing I excelled at.

  But I came out of that bathroom and saw her big blue eyes filled with tears and… I gave a shit.

  This world, this place—it was going to chew her up. And for a moment there… a moment, I’d wanted to stand in between her and everything Shady Oaks would do to her. I wanted to stand between her and whatever had hurt her.

  And she knew enough to be nervous about me, but she couldn’t quite hide her fascination. Whatever she’d been thinking about me while I’d been in her bedroom—it had been hot. She’d been blushing so hard and so red, all across her cheeks and down her neck. I wanted to unbutton that pretty pink shirt she wore and see how far down that blush went.

  Jesus God. Her skin would be soft.

  And I hadn’t had anything soft in my life in a real long time.

  And that, that right there was a problem.

  Because I’d stopped wanting soft. Stopped even thinking about it. Forgot it existed.

  It was a problem because I didn’t know who the fuck that Jane Austen woman was. And I didn’t give a shit about a garden, but I wanted to see that picture.

  And I really, really wanted to touch Charlotte’s skin.

  Soft, and all its temptations, moved in right next door.

  My cell phone rang and I grabbed it from the windowsill over my sink, dove on it actually, relieved to have som
ething else to think about besides Charlotte.

  Unknown number.

  All the people who called me called from unknown numbers, and when I called them that’s how my number showed up. Because that’s how people like us worked. With phones we could throw away. With people we would betray in a heartbeat if we had to.

  Because all of us were unknown to each other. Fucking dark shapes in the darker lives we lived. And I’d gotten to a point where I didn’t fucking care about it. Didn’t care about who I’d become.

  And then goddamned soft moved in.

  “Yeah,” I said into the phone.

  “He’s in.” Sal, my boss, said back, and I felt an unparalelled spark. A wild fury. An adrenaline rush that got me hard.

  “When?”

  “Saturday. End of the month.”

  Two weeks away. “That’ll work.”

  “He wants to go against you.”

  “That was the idea.”

  “Jesse, you know I don’t argue with the way you run shit, but this guy…he’s pretty real. And he’s the tip of the iceberg. You say yes to this fight and hold your own, there’s going to be a line of guys looking to fight you.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  I could hear everything Sal wasn’t saying. I could hear how he doubted I could fight and win against this guy, much less the lineup of even more legitimate guys that would come behind him. I could hear that he worried about me.

  And I didn’t need anyone worrying about me.

  “You get some openers and I’ll set it up,” I said.

  “Your brother isn’t going to—”

  I hung up and went into my bedroom to change into some new workout clothes. I’d call David, see if he wanted to spar. If he couldn’t get us into his gym, I’d open up the basement.

  In my bedroom, it occurred to me that my apartment was the exact same as Charlotte’s. The layout, anyway. Open kitchen, tiny living area with the windows. Bathroom off the dark bedroom.

  Even the bars were the same.

  I had a king-size bed and a couch up against the wall in my bedroom for the shit I liked to do after a fight, and I had a TV in the living room with another couch against the wall. Otherwise I hadn’t done shit to my place in the two years I’d been here. The walls were dingy. My curtains were old sheets.

  She’d painted her walls yellow. The color of sunlight.

  We had the same apartment, but hers was worlds away.

  And it needed to stay that way.

  Chapter Four

  Charlotte

  The fruit stand thing was this:

  A few blocks from my old place on the corner of California and Powell, there was this organic fruit market and it was run by these brothers. Three of them. Maybe they weren’t brothers, but for the purpose of my fantasy they were. I didn’t know their names, but I had their personalities all mapped out.

  The big guy, he was the boss. The brother in charge.

  The middle brother, thin and elegant with a beard and the smile that cut right through it—he was the charmer. An almost pathological flirt. It didn’t matter if a woman was young or old, skinny or fat—if she had a vagina, he flirted with her.

  And the youngest brother, he was quiet. But a troublemaker. He never weighed anything. Always charged people too little for what they were getting, and when Boss Brother called him out on it, he only shrugged.

  Little brother didn’t give a shit.

  At first I went to this fruit market just for the fruit. They sold cheese, too, and some fancy meats, because that was the kind of neighborhood I lived in. And then I started noticing how hot they were. And then I couldn’t stop noticing how hot they were. And I wasn’t alone. The shop was full of women all the time—not just for the cheese, if you know what I mean. And I just imagined that these fruit stand guys got tons of action. Like all the action. Like maybe the fruit was just a coverup for some kind of hot fruit-related sex ring.

  And then one day, middle brother called me darling. Actually, he said, “Can I get you anything else, darling?” and it was so loaded, his smile so suggestive, that he could really only be talking about one thing.

  Of course I stammered and stuttered and looked anywhere but at him, said no thank you, despite wanting it, despite having dreamt about it, put my fingers between my legs imagining it, and I practically ran out of there.

  But after that, all I could imagine was one day going in there and the fruit stand being empty. Just me and the brothers and the over-ripe peaches. And I would be wearing that summer dress I love, with the bodice that doesn’t let me wear a bra, and I’d flip that Open sign to Closed and turn the lock on the door. And that lock would be so loud all the brothers would stop what they were doing and look at me.

  “What are you doing?” Boss brother would ask, all grumbly and angry.

  “I think I know what she’s doing,” Charming brother would say, and he’d be right, because he started this with that beard of his.

  “Finally,” Bad brother would say, and he’d just strip off his shirt.

  After that it was a kind of…whatever I wanted hodgepodge of internet porn and romance novels until I got off.

  The Fruit Stand fantasy had sustained me for years. It was a little secret shame, a gang bang fantasy I could never say out loud, I couldn’t even look directly at.

  It was a secret. My secret. Hot and private.

  And my Bad Neighbor fantasy had the potential to be so much better.

  Because I could make it real. Because it wasn’t the hugely unlikely event of taking on three men in my sundress, it was just me flirting with my neighbor. And my neighbor flirting back.

  I mean, I was no dating genius, I had no powerful understanding of men, but he’d been flirting. He’d indicated a certain amount of interest in me.

  I just had to be bold, wild. Brave.

  To put it bluntly—I had to be someone else entirely.

  I had to be my sister.

  The third day after Cheetara reached out to me, I was eating my lunch—Froot Loops with a side of baby carrots—and staring at that message request.

  Three weeks ago, she came to my condo in the middle of the night, frantic and wild and so scared I thought she might vibrate out of her skin. She was so scared that when she told me she had to leave town, that she was in danger and she needed enough money to stay gone for a long time, I didn’t hesitate—I called my real estate agent and told her I had to sell the condo. Fast.

  Abby and I moved into a crappy hotel by the airport while we waited for the sale of the condo and all the paperwork to be finalized. Abby found me Shady Oaks by basically looking out our hotel room window, and when the condo sold we bought her a new car and off she went.

  And I came here.

  And it felt, right now, like I was missing a body part. That’s how much I missed her.

  But, still I hadn’t accepted the friend request—because that would be crazy.

  But I hadn’t rejected it yet, either. Because I was lonely. And I missed my sister. And I really, really wanted her to tell me to go have crazy fruit-stand sex with my neighbor.

  When we were kids and we’d played Thundercats, she’d been Cheetara because Cheetara was the only girl Thundercat, and my sister always liked being the only girl in the room.

  I was Panthro. Because I was serious. And fixed shit.

  Of course, the shit I fixed—it was hers. A life she broke and I put back together only so she could break it again.

  My own life, I couldn’t figure out.

  Work, yes. In three days I’d finished the rough of Jane Austen in Hyde Park (I’d used the Serpentine Lakes). But in three days I hadn’t left my apartment.

  I was great at work.

  Terrible at life.

  So, I stared at that message request and had an imaginary one-sided conversation with my sister.

  “I need a reason,” I said out loud. “A reason to knock on his door.”

  No. You don’t. You just need to go over there and mak
e it clear you want to have sex with him.

  I wiped the milk off my chin and counted the reasons why I couldn’t just go over there and do what so many women my age were able to do.

  “One: I am way too awkward for that shit. I mean… he’s beautiful. I’m not exaggerating. Two: I’m probably thirty pounds overweight. And he’s like the fittest person I’ve ever seen in real life. And third: my sex life has a real Where’s Waldo vibe to it.” (My sex life being Waldo).

  “And finally, he’s run hot and cold with me and yeah, maybe he was flirting but he’s also been pretty insulting. It’s not like I’m sure if I went over there and said take off your clothes, he’d say yes.”

  I said all that out loud.

  He’s a guy. He flirted. He’ll say yes.

  “Oh!” I said, lifting my dripping spoon in a Eureka moment. “I could break something in my apartment and have him come over and fix it.”

  Really? You want to be the damsel in distress. Again? You’ve done that twice.

  “Good point.” I mean, I was a damsel in some distress, but I didn’t want to go around advertising that fact.

  I needed to think of it as thanking him for fixing my stuff. Moving my things.

  A thank you.

  I dropped the baby carrot I was eating and sat up.

  Perfect. A Thank you.

  Sure, upon first meeting Jesse made me feel vaguely threatened and insulted. But since that meeting he’d been nothing but kind. And helpful. He fixed stuff. Moved my things. That was owed not just an apology, but perhaps a homemade dinner.

  Guys liked homemade dinners, all the sitcoms said so. And I happened—thank you, Mom—to make a pretty great baked ziti.

  And Jesse seemed like the kind of guy who would like a baked ziti. And a six pack of beer. I thought about baking a pie, but I couldn’t bake pies and that seemed a little too eager to me.

  “Thank you, Cheetara,” I said, determined not to worry about my sanity.