Bad Neighbor

by Molly O'Keefe

  Only I was lying.

  My parents were doing just fine in a condo outside of Miami.

  They didn’t know I’d sold my condo and given the money to my sister so she could go underground. My parents lived a very separate life than me and Abby. It had always been that way. They were a unit, and me and Abby were a unit. We joined up every few holidays, but that was it.

  “Anyway,” Simon said, “I’m going to need your help finishing this bottle.”

  Oh, God. It was so kind. He didn’t want me to be embarrassed by not having any money, but he still wanted me to relax and have a few drinks.

  “I don’t believe that for a minute.”

  “Share it with me anyway,” he said, his shoulder bumping mine. I waited for a zing or some kind of internal alarm. The kind that happened around the fruit guys.

  And Jesse.

  No zing, just a kind of…awareness. Of a person so close to my space. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t crave it either. I didn’t feel electrocuted by his skin. But he was attractive in the same way I was attractive. Unnoticeable initially. Quirky, if you liked us. Flawed, if you didn’t.

  We matched.

  Jesse and I were worlds apart. We didn’t even make sense. I wouldn’t know what to do with him and he wouldn’t know what to do with me.

  Across the table, Stephanie waggled her eyebrows at me and I realized this was a setup, and I didn’t even have it in me to be irritated.

  I blushed but managed not to tilt my head forward so I could hide behind my hair. “I would love some wine, thank you.”

  It briefly occurred to me that I could probably break Simon over my knee if I had to, that’s how much smaller he was than me. And of course as soon as I had that thought I was sure I would have a glass of wine too many and actually say it.

  Which was how my social anxiety worked. But Simon was a good talker and we discussed work for a while before our food showed up.

  What I ordered happened to be a giant plate of potatoes, which were more than delicious. Especially washed down with Simon’s wine.

  Jesse who? I thought as I flipped my hair and attempted my best flirt.

  And it must have worked, because outside of the restaurant after Stephanie and everyone had filed off into their Ubers, he asked if he could call me.

  “Anytime,” I said.

  “No.” He was blushing, which was sweet. “For a date. Can I call you for dinner or drinks or something?”

  “For a date! Yes. Yes. Of course. That would be…lovely.” Lovely sounded lame, even to my ears.

  But in the cab ride home he called—not texted, called.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t wait. Want to meet for coffee next week?”

  “How about next Wednesday?”

  “You tell me where.”

  And because the only coffee place I knew was my old afternoon iced coffee hookup, I gave him that address.

  “It’s a date.”

  A date. I hung up my phone and pressed it to my chest.

  I had a date.

  The cab dropped me off in front of the crappy half-stucco wall that separated the majestic paradise that was Shady Oaks (note the sarcasm) from the relative squalor of the neighborhood, and I felt a little bit like Cinderella after the ball, rolling up in my pumpkin coach to my bed of ashes.

  “Really?” my driver asked, taking in my glittery shirt and rocking boots. “You live here?”

  “Home sweet home,” I said. I thought of Simon and the people around that table eating octopus and drinking Campari and sodas like they were water, talking about theater and restaurants and work. I would get back there. I would. This was just a…speed bump. A minor setback.

  This was not my life. This place. Jesse. Not for me.

  My advance check would come in the mail soon and I’d be gone.

  And all of this would be a memory.

  I paid the cab driver and walked through the rusted gate into the courtyard. The edge of the pool was a relative party tonight. A few guys were sitting in folding chairs, and all of them looked similar. Brothers, I thought.

  The black girl who’d witnessed my scene with Jesse was there. Everyone turned when I stepped up.

  “Hey! It’s 1B!” they cried. “Come have a drink.”

  “I’ve already had a few,” I said.

  “Perfect,” one of the men replied. “So have we.”

  “Thanks, but I’m for bed.”

  I stepped past the pool toward the shadowy corner where my apartment was when I heard someone from the pool jogging to catch up with me. It was the girl from the other day.

  “Hey,” she said. “I really hope we didn’t embarrass you the other day.”

  “No, that was—” already taken care of by Jesse. “Nothing.”

  “Look, I know you’re new here and you keep to yourself, but someone probably should have told you. He’s really trouble.”

  “Yeah, I’ve gathered.”

  “And whatever shit he’s running in the basement. Just…”

  “What’s he running in the basement?”

  She glanced back behind her at the group and then leaned forward. “I heard it was illegal gambling.”

  “Jesse?” With the frayed shorts and the tool kit? That didn’t seem to fit.

  “Whatever it is,” she said, “just… stay clear.”

  Something about this woman’s good intentions pissed me off. I didn’t need anyone telling me how to live my life, but I thanked her anyway and continued back into my shadowy corner of the world.

  It was dark so I didn’t see the guy standing outside the basement door until I was practically on top of him.

  “Jesus!” I screamed.

  The guy took one long look at me. My sparkle and my hair. My shoes.

  “Entrance is in the parking garage.”

  “Entrance for what?” I asked, edging toward my door.

  “Oh, you live in 1B?” he asked. “Charlotte?”

  “How the hell do you know my name?”

  “Jesse told me.”

  “Jesse? Who the hell are you?”

  “Security,” the guy said. My eyes adjusted and I finally soaked in the details of him.

  Dude was big. In all possible ways.

  He wore a black tee shirt and a black leather jacket over it.

  I didn’t have to be told that he probably had a gun under that jacket.

  “Security for what?” I asked. My back against my door. I was trying to get my key in without looking. It wasn’t working.

  Big man held up his hands as if to show me he had no weapons. “Consider me security for you,” he said.

  I heard the sounds of people and music coming through the door behind him.

  The door that said: Basement. Keep Out.

  The door Jesse made me promise to stay away from.

  “What’s going on down there?” I asked.

  “I mean this with all due respect. But what’s going on down there’s got nothing to do with you.”

  What the fuck with people tonight?

  “I could just go down to the parking garage, couldn’t I? Find out for myself.”

  “Yep,” he said with a nod. “You could. Or you could go into your apartment. Make yourself some cocoa and just rest easy knowing I’m standing here and I’m on your side.”

  “I don’t drink cocoa.”

  “Okay, you could do a bowl of heroin and call it a night.”

  “I don’t do heroin either,” I said with a laugh, which made him smile, a flash of white teeth in the darkness.

  “Well,” he said, “I figure most of us are somewhere in the middle.”

  “You’re really here for me?”

  “I’m here to make sure no one comes up those steps.”

  “And Jesse—”

  “Hired me to be here. Yep.”

  Oh, that shouldn’t matter. That shouldn’t do anything to me. Shouldn’t make anything ping or get hot or feel good.

  I looked through the open arch
way to the patch of grass and the low-rise parking garage in the distance. I could go find out what was happening in that basement, but what would be the point?

  This wasn’t my world. I was only visiting.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the security guy.

  “Nick.”

  “Thanks, Nick. I hope no one comes up the stairs.”

  And I went into my apartment and shut the door on this world.

  Chapter Six

  Charlotte

  I was having a sex dream. With Neil Patrick Harris. It was full of mixed messages.

  But I woke up with a start when there was a loud, hard thud against my door.

  Nick. I thought, my heart in my throat. Someone must have come up the stairs.

  I fumbled for my glasses and put them on so I could see the clock. It was five a.m. I nearly screamed when there was another thunk.

  I scooted out of bed, pulling down the men’s flannel shirt I was wearing to sleep in, and I ran to my door to peep through my peephole. All I saw was the back of someone’s head.

  And the sound of a key going into my lock.

  “Hey, Jesse,” a woman said. “Your key doesn’t fit.”

  “This isn’t his door,” I yelled through the door, but the sounds of the key scraping at my lock didn’t stop. So I undid my chain, my bolt, and then my lock, and pulled open the door only to have Jesse and a black woman stumble into my apartment.

  The woman barely caught Jesse before he was on the ground.

  “Sorry,” she said, and I had an impression of a beauty like a knife. Sharp features and dark eyes, but I barely paid attention.

  Jesse had been beaten. Badly.

  He was bleeding. Big drops fell in splatters on the white tile of my floor. I wasn’t sure where he was bleeding from, because he wouldn’t lift his head. His hands curled up against his chest were both raw and swollen. Fixed into fists.

  “Oh my god,” I said, and grabbed a dishtowel and put it under water. “What happened?”

  He lifted his head at the sound of my voice and I pressed the cold dishtowel to his face. His nose was where the blood was coming from. His eyes were dark purple with bruising.

  Pantone color: 19-3218.

  “Sorry,” he murmured. “Mistake.”

  “I’ll say,” I said.

  “Great,” the woman said. “You got him. You did great tonight, Jesse. But you’re no fucking good to me like this. Later.”

  She put his key into my hand and vanished. Just vanished. Leaving me at five o’clock in the morning with a pummelled Jesse.

  “I just need you to open my door,” he said, lifting his swollen hands. “I can’t…”

  “Of course,” I said, made more panicky by his calm. Like this was no big deal. A thing that always happened to him. “Can you walk?” He was leaning against my doorframe, and I held my hands out wide like I would catch him, or carry him if I had to.

  I couldn’t. There was no way I could, but there was no telling my adrenaline that.

  “I can walk,” he mumbled through his beautiful split lips. But he wasn’t too steady on his feet. A problem he solved by keeping one shoulder against the wall, dragging himself against the building to his door. The wall was stucco and I winced, imagining how that hurt. But maybe he was so hurt that little thing didn’t even register.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled. “For bothering you.”

  “It’s okay, Jesse.”

  “It’s not.”

  My hands were shaking and it took me a second to get the door open. But once it swung open, he lurched inside, swallowed by his dark apartment.

  He left the door open and I still had his key in my hand.

  I could set that key down on his counter and just close the door behind me when I left. Or…

  The sun was coming up, the violet sky turning mauve along the edges, and I looked at the round edge of the sun just visible over the parking garage in the distance and thought about concussions. And that actress who hit her head and everyone thought was fine but then she died. And I thought of his hands, so bruised they were useless.

  It wasn’t like I really had a choice. Not if I was a compassionate human. I simply couldn’t let him be here alone, so I went inside the apartment, closing the door behind me.

  I found him in his bathroom, fumbling with a bottle of extra strength Motrin.

  “Here,” I said, quietly into the hush of his bathroom. “Let me.”

  “Go home,” he said.

  Ignoring him, I took the bottle from him and shook out two pills, thought about it and added a third, and then put them in his ruined hands. He swallowed them dry.

  “You should go to the hospital, Jesse.”

  “Why?”

  “You could have a concussion.”

  “I could.”

  “And you don’t think the hospital will help you?”

  “I either have a concussion or I don’t.”

  He was saying it like it didn’t matter, and I realized I had my hands pressed to my chest because it hurt me to see him so hurt.

  “What can I do for you?” I asked.

  “Go home.”

  “I’m not going to just leave you here.”

  “I want you to leave me here.”

  “That’s probably just the traumatic brain injury speaking.”

  His ruined mouth gave the impression of a smirk and he stepped toward me, which was so weirdly shocking that I jumped out of the bathroom. He stumbled across the hall into what had to be his bedroom.

  In the dark I heard the springs of his bed catch his weight. I went into the kitchen and opened his freezer, hoping for a few icepacks, and found a freezer stacked with frozen blue pouches.

  I took out a few but couldn’t find any dishtowels to wrap them in, so I carried them—so cold they hurt my hands—into the bedroom.

  His bedroom was dark, but the slice of light from the hallway cut across his body where he was lying on the bed, his feet still on the floor, staring at the shadows on the ceiling. He wore his workout clothes again. A gray shirt and a pair of ratty shorts. On the leg of the shorts it said in very faded red and yellow lettering: Iowa State.

  Iowa State like the University?

  “Jesse,” I said. “I have some ice packs…”

  He rolled his head toward me and again, even half obliterated by swelling and bruising, I could feel his gaze. The heavy weight of it. Like a hand against my skin. “Where do you want them?”

  I saw that he wanted to tell me to leave. The message was in his body. It was something he exuded. Leave me alone, every muscle and tendon and bruise and blood smear shouted. But I stood in the doorway and I didn’t listen. Because he was hurt. He was hurt so bad.

  Finally, he sighed, exhaling so deeply his body deflated further into his bed.

  “My hands,” he murmured, lifting his fists and setting them down again against his chest.

  I put one on each of his hands. He hissed and then sighed like it felt good. “Do you want one on your face?” He nodded. “I couldn’t find a towel or anything. You should wrap it so it doesn’t hurt. A tee shirt or something…”

  “Charlotte,” he said, again so calm. So quiet. “Everything already hurts.”

  I nodded like that made sense and placed one of the squishy blue icepacks over his nose, covering his eyes. He hissed again and then sighed.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  In the silence I could hear him breathe. I could smell his sweat.

  “What happened to you?”

  “I got the shit kicked out of me.”

  His dry tone startled a laugh out of me. “Did you call the cops?”

  He shook his head, dislodging the ice pack, and I put it back into place. I was standing awkwardly over him, aware with every breath of the scent of him coming up out of his sheets. Something warm and manly, but also blood. And sweat.

  The smell of a man and something gone a little wrong.

  “No cops.”r />
  “Don’t you think you should?” I asked. “Call the cops?”

  “No. I don’t. Go on back to your apartment,” he said, all prickly again. “I’ll be fine.”

  I shot him a completely incredulous look that he couldn’t see. Because there was no part of him that looked like he would be fine. Not without serious medical help.

  “You’re acting like this happens to you all the time,” I said, shifting one of the ice packs on his hand, tucking it a little into the hole between his thumb and fingers. Finally I gave in to the inevitable and I sat down on the bed next to him, and it was like sitting down next to a fire. I was careful, so careful not to touch him but it didn’t matter. He burned so hot I was scorched anyway.

  “How do you know it doesn’t?”

  I thought of his bruises on the day we met. His broken nose.

  Clearly he fought. A lot. Like… I mean, it seemed ridiculous, but my whole life had sort of turned into the ridiculous lately—but was this his job? “I don’t think you usually get the shit kicked out of you.”

  “Feels like it.”

  “Is that…in the basement…is it some kind of…one of those fight club things?”

  “No.”

  “Why are you lying?”

  “Why are you pretending you care?” he shot back and I blinked at him, startled he had the energy to be so angry. And then… I realized he didn’t. He wasn’t angry. Not really. He could barely hold on to his scowl—he just didn’t want me asking questions.

  And I didn’t want to look too hard at why I cared.

  “How does the other guy look?” I asked, reaching forward to shift the icepack to a better spot over his eyes.

  Again, that shadow of a laugh. The slight grimace of a smile.

  “He’s not conscious.”

  “I take it that means you won?”

  “Doesn’t it look like it?” he asked and I laughed, surprised he could still be cracking jokes when he had to be feeling like road kill.

  “Did you at least make some money?” I asked. “That’s how those things work, right? You nearly die but you make a bunch of money?”

  “How would you know how those things work?”

  “Television tells me how most things work.”

  His chest lifted again in a weird hurmphy laugh. Without defenses, he found me slightly entertaining. It was a strange thing to realize.