“I, um, changed banks,” she told The Landlord. “I forgot to let you know. I’m really sorry.”
He nodded unsmilingly. “Give me your new details and I’ll get going.”
Autumn nearly sighed with relief. This was manageable. “No problem, just let me get a pen and—”
Just then, Courtney Barnett stopped singing about how she was a shitty gardener and the apartment went quiet, quiet enough for a low but very audible coo to emanate from the bathroom.
Autumn’s heart stopped. There was no need to wonder if The Landlord had heard the noise. He turned his head in the direction of the bathroom, his nostrils flaring slightly, as though he could smell the rental violation. One of the birds, probably Harvey, let out another low coo.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
The Landlord was suddenly bigger and even more menacing than before, and not in a sexy porn comic way. A ‘start looking for a new place to live, bitch’ way. His broad forehead crumpled into a frown and he turned to look at her with sinister slowness. “Ms. Reynolds, are you keeping pigeons in this apartment?”
She was going to be homeless. She was going to have to live in a Super 8 motel and get stabbed in the laundry room. “Um, what?”
“Pigeons.” The Landlord’s expression was stony. “Are you keeping pigeons inside this apartment?”
A new Courtney Barnett song started playing, but it was an instrumental and not nearly loud enough to cover the sound of the pigeons which were now cooing in harmony like they were Alvin and the fucking pigeon Chipmunks. Autumn’s heart raced and she wished she hadn’t drunk so much Mountain Dew spiked with gin. She was getting lost in The Landlord’s oddly hypnotic eyes. She’d thought they would be dark like his hair, but instead they were a very pale brown. What was that color even called? The lighter chocolate bit inside Mars Bars? Bright tan bark?
The Landlord decided not to wait for her answer. He strode over to the bathroom door and flung it open to reveal, of course, the pigeons. The pigeons were a new thing. A couple of days after Ian received his fateful nudes, Autumn had been walking down the street to her apartment trying not to explode-cry when she spotted Harvey. He was fluttering across the ground, his right wing stuck out at a funny angle. Something or someone had broken it, which meant he was only hours away from death. She knew that no one would notice or care, and even if they did, they couldn’t do anything about it. But she could. She wrapped Harvey up in her jumper and carried him home. There she set his wing and left him to stomp around the bathroom like a tiny, feathery general. Watching him had made her smile for the first time in ages. She knew she couldn’t keep him, he was a wild bird who needed to return to the outside world, but thanks to her, he would return. That knowledge, and Mountain Gin Dew, had been all that got her through the week. She rescued Birdman and then Pigioto next, the maximum amount of birds she could safely keep in her tiny bathroom. And sure, they were gross New York pigeons but they’d made her feel so much less alone. She hoped that would continue to be the case, seeing as all four of them were going to be chucked out onto the street.
So, do something, you drunk moll! Save them again!
Autumn rushed to The Landlord’s side and tapped his bicep. Even in her panic, she couldn’t help admiring the definition, the firm swells of muscle. “Excuse me, sir, I know this seems really fucked and you can chuck me out if you want to, but please, please don’t hurt the pigeons.”
The Landlord blinked at her in a kind of angry surprise. “I’m not going to hurt the pigeons. I’d never…” He cleared his throat. “Ms. Reynolds, why are you keeping pigeons in your bathroom?”
“Call me Autumn. Or Autie. That’s what all my friends call me. Or at least they do in Melbourne. I don’t have any friends here. Except the pigeons. But they don’t really talk. I mean they don’t talk but—”
“Autumn. Why are there rabid pigeons shitting in your bathroom?”
The guy did commanding very well. It was no surprise she’d slotted him into her sex-comic. She also liked that he hadn’t said ‘my bathroom’ even though it was so much more his than hers. “Pigeons don’t actually carry rabies, that’s a myth. I’m a vet.”
“I’m aware. I wasn’t, however, aware vets took their work home.”
Fucking touché. Autumn felt slightly ashamed. Ian had always acted like The Landlord was a Lurch-style dummy, and that impression had clearly rubbed off on her. Now that she was interacting with him, it was clear that wasn’t true. The way he studied her with those strangely beautiful eyes said a very sharp mind worked beneath them.
Whelp. Smart and fucking humongous. Where had she gotten off turning this guy into a porno comic character?
All over his face, Autumn, old chap. You know that.
“Ms. Reynolds…?”
Right, the fucking pigeons. “It’s, um, a side project. Of sorts. Pro bono, that kind of thing.”
The Landlord looked her up and down, no doubt taking in her ratty hair and general aura of spackiness. Autumn waited for him to shout, to snarl, to tell her she was a gross failure who needed to GTFO yesterday and wouldn’t be getting her deposit back. Then the lines around his eyes and mouth softened. “You okay?”
Autumn was all set to say ‘yes, if you don’t throw me out of the building’ but something about his voice, the sincerity of the question, made the backs of her eyes burn. She turned away from him, unwilling to add ‘crying in front of a guy I drew sex pictures of’ to her list of failures.
“Forget it,” The Landlord said in his rumbling voice. “None of my business.”
Autumn, who was wiping her tears away, snorted. “I am literally keeping wild pigeons in your building, I’d say it is your business. And I’m sorry for being such a mess, I’m just having an emotional ripcord moment.”
“I…uh…”
“I broke up with my boyfriend,” she said, for reasons she didn’t understand. “Well, he broke up with me, sort of. He cheated on me.”
“Your boyfriend cheated on you.” The Landlord’s voice was flat. Emotionless. As though he could understand exactly why Ian would do such a thing. After all, she was a crazy pigeon lady, holed up in a batshit apartment. Completely understandable.
Autumn wanted to stop talking but instead she did what she always did when she felt cornered—she tried to be funny. “Yeah, he had sex with some groupies from his improv comedy troupe. That’s a thing, allegedly; girls who are attracted to men who pretend to be chickens for lols.”
The Landlord was giving her nothing, but that had never stopped her before. “The groupies are called chucklefuckers, which I think is kinda sexist. I mean, they did bang my boyfriend on a pile of old rugs in an improv comedy theatre, but that’s on him. He was the one with a girlfriend and, trust me, I’ve seen Ian’s comedy—it’s way more likely they fucked him because he has abs.”
The Landlord’s eyes darted to the door. “Right.”
Autumn knew she needed to stop, but she couldn’t, she just fucking couldn’t. “Ian tried to use the fact that the girls were ‘groupies’ as an excuse for cheating, but I think that’s bullshit. If a hot guy came into the clinic and offered to go down on me because I untangled his Pomeranian’s intestines or whatever, I wouldn’t be like ‘ooh he’s a furry-fucker—or whatever you want to call people who are sexually attracted to vets—I’d better take him up on the offer! Couldn’t possibly say no.’ Ian was just being selfish, the way he was when he said we should move to New York together then refused to get a job because improv comedy is just so much more important than splitting rent.”
As soon as she said this, all the funny wooshed out of her. She remembered afresh how much it hurt to come home to an empty apartment, to head out to the improv theatre and see Ian flirting with the comedy groupies. To remember the way she’d pushed her jealousy down because he couldn’t help being a handsome guy and of course he would never do anything.
“We were in a new place and he didn’t have the guts to admit he wanted new women,” she said, more tears
welling up in her eyes like dew drops. “Or maybe he was just sick of me and wanted me to keep paying the bills. I don’t know. I-I feel like I don’t know anything anymore, about myself or anyone else.”
She looked up at The Landlord, hot water spilling from her eyes. “That’s why I brought the birds home, I wanted to help something. I wanted to feel like…I wanted to feel useful.”
The Landlord stared at her, unblinkingly for what felt like a very long time. Then he cleared his throat once more. “Look…I’m sorry that happened to you.”
Autumn sniffed back more tears. The enormous man in front of her didn’t sound insincere, but it was obvious he was very uncomfortable—and why wouldn’t he be? “I—um, I know getting cheated on doesn’t mean it’s okay to keep the pigeons inside or not pay my rent, but can I please keep the birds in here until they’re healed? It should only be another day or so.”
The Landlord sucked his lips into his mouth. Very full, pleasant lips, she couldn’t help but notice. Then he gently closed the bathroom door and turned to face her. “Give me your new bank details and I’ll leave. Whatever happens next is up to you. I won’t be back unless there’s another issue with your billing.”
Autumn grinned. “Thanks so much…”
Shit. She didn’t know his name. Shiiiit.
“Munroe,” The Landlord said, the perma-scowl sinking his face back into a familiar grumpiness. “Blake Munroe.”
Autumn felt like this would be a bad time to tell him her brother once had a pet snake called Blake. Blake the Snake. “I just kind of think of you as ‘The Landlord.’”
The scowl grew deeper. “Bank details?”
“Fuck, yes, of course.” Autumn dashed over to the coffee table and picked up her notepad, her brain brimming with embarrassment. The guy listens to her whine about Ian, throws her a bone about the pigeons and she lets him know she’s forgot his fucking name and internally calls him ‘The Landlord.’ How was he to know she meant it in an impressive way? He probably thought she was a prissy bitch on top of someone who got cheated on at improv theatres.
She scrawled down her new bank number and BSB as quickly as possible, tore the page out and gave it to him. The hand that took the folded up piece of paper was as huge as the man himself, thick-knuckled and scarred. Autumn imagined it closing around her throat and felt a sizzle of arousal zap through her. She quickly glanced away.
Let’s not make this weirder, bitch.
“Thanks,” Blake Munroe said and gave the bathroom door a sidelong glance. “I’ll let you get back to your patients.”
“Cool,” Autumn said weakly. “You know, you might not have to deal with me and my pigeon bullshit for much longer. I’m not sure what I’m doing vis-à-vis this apartment, but my work visa is running out and I’m very unmotivated to renew it and continue living in the huge barbershop of horrors that is New York.”
“Right.” From the look on The Landlord’s face, he did not give even one shit, and Autumn watched in numb horror as he stomped out of her apartment, taking the last dregs of her dignity with him.
Slightly dazed, she walked over to the bathroom and checked on the pigeons. They were still cooing cheerfully, testing their healing wings and dipping their beaks into the Tupperware container she was using as a water dish.
“That was great, wasn’t it, guys?” she asked. “Being single is awesome. I am definitely not going to die alone.”
Birdman crapped on the side of the bath. Autumn felt like that was all the answer she needed and closed the bathroom door.
The realization of what she’d done didn’t come at once. It returned slowly, slithering into her brain, not unlike the former snake named Blake. She was lying on the couch, replaying the clusterfuck that was her encounter with The Landlord, when a simple question arose. Had she written her new bank details down on the back of one of her sex drawings?
No, she thought at once. That would be insane. It had been a blank page, she was sure of it. Completely and utterly blank.
Although…
Her notepad lay on the coffee table, innocent as a newborn lamb. Autumn snatched it up and flurried through the pages. She’d drawn about a third of her sex comic, five pages in total. She counted them; one, two, three, four—
“Oh my God! No. No!”
Page five was missing. It was missing. All that remained were tattered little pieces of paper in the spiral, showing where she’d ripped it out. Panic flooded her body like rain, filling her to the brim with chaos.
“Oh God,” she said aloud. “Oh Christ, what the hell am I gonna do?”
She bent down and did the only thing she could think of. She picked up one of the whipped cream cans, pushed the tab down and sucked back some of the nitrous. “Fuck!”
CHAPTER 2
She didn’t even know his name.
Blake gave a sour grunt and limped into his apartment, rattling the door on its hinges with the force of his slam. Once inside, though, his shoulders slumped. What the hell had he expected? The afternoon he showed the tiny Australian and her Prince Charming boyfriend with the sociopathic stare the apartment, Blake was sure he hadn’t spoken much, except to amaze them with his knowledge of where the bathroom was located. Or how to turn the radiator knob. When did he ever talk? His vocal cords were still reeling from the exchange in Autumn’s apartment and that had lasted all of five minutes.
Still…it could have lasted a little longer and he wouldn’t have minded.
Blake looked down to find his left hand covering the spot where she’d touched his arm.
Disgusted with himself, he whipped the shirt over his head and stomped through the hallway leading to the back of his apartment. He came to a stop beneath the silver pull-up bar mounted in his bedroom doorway and kicked off his shoes, throwing himself into a set of twenty pull-ups. Finding methods of exercise that didn’t include leaving his apartment was nothing new, but this—this intense need to blow off steam was only six months in the making. And it had everything to do with the girl, damn her.
Their verbal exchanges had been minimal, but the day they’d met, Autumn had managed to communicate everything about herself without saying a single word. Their apartment had been receiving a fresh coat of paint and repairs that day, leaving tools and buckets strewn every few yards. Blake’s limp, combined with his abnormal size, made navigating the cluttered apartment difficult. He’d watched in stunned silence, though, as Autumn moved gracefully in front of him, toeing items out of his path, silently making things easier for him. Caring for a stranger without thinking, or asking to be acknowledged.
It had annoyed the living shit out of him. Where did this girl get off giving him the assistance he didn’t ask for? Why couldn’t she ignore the limp like everyone else? And yet from that day forward, every time he saw her, he ached a little. A lot, eventually. Blake didn’t want to be fascinated by the girl who’d cleared a path for him. Especially now that he knew she tried to save everyone—including the flying rats of New York. It wasn’t a surprising discovery. She always held open the door for her neighbors. Never failed to assist the older tenants with packages or laundry bundles. Always with a smile and an encouraging word. He hated himself for coveting another man’s girlfriend. The very idea of unfaithfulness struck too deep a cord from his past. But he continued to watch. To need.
Pointless.
Even if he wanted to stop her from going back to Australia—which he didn’t—such a thing was impossible. She was afraid of him. When he’d walked into her apartment, she’d stopped breathing, froze the way a forest animal did when they sensed a hunter watching them through a scope. They probably heard that rapid tick at the base of her delicate neck in New Jersey. This kind of reception was nothing new to Blake. He was a big motherfucker with a distaste for people he didn’t mind showing on his face. Par for the course in someone who didn’t leave the confines of his building during the day. No, he’d been built for night and that suited him just fine.
Now, Autumn…she’d been buil
t for the daytime. Looked like she’d been spat out by the sunshine with her long golden hair and an accent that called endless beaches to mind. Lazy barbeques, flip-flop tan lines, kangaroos. She would have to put in contact lenses if she wanted to wear sunglasses. Those big purple specs were cute—even if they barely had room to perch on her button nose—but they couldn’t be practical on an Australian beach. It wouldn’t matter what she wore, though, nothing could detract from her beauty, the welcoming glow that didn’t dissipate one iota as it travelled through the peep hole to his starved eyes. He’d never been drawn to a woman to the point of suffering, but somehow this tiny girl managed to pack a wallop. One that left him dazed whenever they crossed paths.
Blake realized he’d gone well past twenty and let go of the bar. Sides heaving, he dropped forward and rested both hands on his knees. God, what he wouldn’t give to stop mentally waxing poetic about the girl upstairs. She’d obviously only felt safe that first day because her boyfriend was there. Being one-on-one with him had distressed her, and therefore conjuring up fantasies where she smiled and touched him was pathetic.
It was a lot like telling someone not to think of a polar bear. Immediately, all they could think about was white fur and big teeth. Blake, though?
He went back to imagining Autumn on the beach. Only this time, his gargantuan hands were sliding the bikini strings free of their knot, loosening the triangles of her top. She turned to him on her knees in the sand and climbed onto his lap, no wariness in her big green eyes whatsoever. Just anticipation. Trust.
There’s no one here but us, she whispered, cupping her tits. No one to see me ride you.
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