AS I EXIT MY BUILDING ELEVATOR AND HEAD TO MY APARTMENT, MY mind is somewhere else. Two blocks away, specifically, still in the Zelda conference room at Catapult Games.
What exactly happened back there?
As I approach my apartment, I’m pulled back to the present when the door across from mine opens. It’s Free Hugs Guy’s apartment. Who is actually Hot Neighbor Guy. Who has a name: Charlie. I’ve lived a few feet away from this guy for nearly six months and have barely seen him, but now, after all the awkwardness of last night, we are about to get a hallway run-in. Excellent.
I am prepared to give him a pleasant but non-committal nod of acknowledgment when, it’s not Charlie who steps out into the hallway, but instead, a woman. For a moment, I wonder if I’ve made a mistake. Did I get off the elevator on the wrong floor? Am I somehow confused about where my door is? No, that is Charlie’s door.
And the woman is gorgeous—beautiful in that classic way that is universally, undeniably attractive. Brunette, slim, in possession of remarkably poreless skin with the kind of dewy glow that would look slimy on me if I attempted it. She slings a large leather tote over her shoulder and turns back to the door, where Charlie leans against the frame.
Charlie—who I kissed last night, who gave me some small flutter of feeling, who kissed back—now, just a handful of hours later, has a girl leaving his apartment. They stand and stare at each other a moment, and I can almost see a wave of unspoken words rushing between them. It’s evident this is not someone he just met.
Stepping closer to my door and them, I find she smells of jasmine. I likely smell of Jack Palmer’s meatball sub.
“Goodbye, Charlie,” she says, her voice narrow and possibly a bit sad.
“Bye then,” he says, his voice clipped, but with a ripple of emotion brimming in its delicate sternness. I look up to find his expression firm and fragile at once.
I make brief eye contact with her, then him. They watch as I fumble with my keys and step into my apartment. I glance back at my door after I’ve closed it, wondering what I just stumbled into.
I haven’t yet changed out of my interview clothes when there’s a knock at my door. I can’t help but groan. I’ve left the rest of my day open, my first priority sleep to recuperate from the emotional roller coaster of the last several hours.
When I open the door, Charlie stands in the hall. He’s wearing a gray T-shirt and jeans that are, once again, the perfect amount of loose. His tee has three periodic table elements: bromine, uranium, hydrogen. They spell out BrUH.
“Here’s your sweatshirt,” he says, arm outstretched.
“Thanks,” I say, holding it up against myself. “Although it’s probably too stretched out for me to wear again.” I don’t mean it as a compliment, but his smirk tells me he takes it as one.
We stare at each other for a moment, but he makes no motion to leave.
“Do you want to come in?” I’m not exactly sure why I offer. Perhaps my inhibitions are lowered from lack of sleep. Or maybe it’s sheer curiosity about who Charlie actually is.
He enters and stands in the center of the room, scanning the space before turning to face me again. “It’s the same layout as mine, just reversed,” he says. This notion feels somehow more personal than it likely should.
Charlie leans forward and jiggles both sides of Finn’s face, who has planted himself at his feet. “Hey again, buddy.” Finn smiles and grunts happily. Most people would stop there. But then Charlie gets down on one knee, bends to eye level, and lets Finn lick his nostrils without hesitation.
“His name is Finn,” I say.
“Yeah, I caught that. Last night.”
It occurs to me that there are two versions of last night. One where we sat as neighbors on the curb until four a.m. because of a fire alarm. The other where I kissed him at the bar. The thought of the latter makes my skin prickle with embarrassment.
“Who’s he named after?” Charlie asks, now flipping my dog’s ears back and forth, to Finn’s moans of delight.
“What makes you think he’s named after someone?”
Charlie gives me a look that reads like stop it.
“Fine.” I fiddle with a lock of hair. “He’s named after a character on an old TV show I used to watch as a kid.”
“What was the show?” Charlie’s face takes on a sort of wayward grin, his dimple sinking deeply into his cheek, somehow knowing there’s an embarrassment factor associated with the answer. “What was the show?” he repeats, this time in a lower, slower tone. He stares at me and I’m the first to look away.
My right eyebrow twitches. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” I say in defeat. “Riley Finn.”
“There it is,” he says, clearly proud of himself. His mood is noticeably lifted from a few minutes ago, with the brunette in the hallway. He rises from the floor. “You look . . . put together,” he says, giving me a once-over. “Why are you home instead of”—he looks me over again—“assisting customers with their banking transactions?”
I look down. I suppose I do look like a teller in my black pantsuit.
“I had an interview. I’m in between jobs right now, if you must know.”
“Ah. Did you lose your last one for taking too long to react to a fire?”
“Very funny. Actually, I figured out quickly that engineering is not my thing. Quitting was the only way to force myself to pursue my dream.”
“Which is?”
“Video game design.”
Perhaps I imagine it, but he seems to be holding back a compliment.
I glance at the specks of white paint across the front of his jeans and BrUH T-shirt. “And what about you? Are you an artist? Or is the paint splatter just some new LA hipster look?”
He looks down at his jeans, then back up at me, and smiles.
Don’t do that, I want to tell him. Don’t try to disarm me.
“I was actually painting Mrs. Crandall’s kitchen.”
Right before or after you had a visit from the mystery brunette? I want to ask.
“What, are you trying to swindle her out of the insurance money by charging her to paint?” I say instead.
“Are you always like this?”
“Like what?”
“Negative. Hostile. Impulsive.” He says the words flatly as if stating facts.
Impulsive. I can’t help but assume it’s a reference to the kiss. The heat rises to the tips of my ears and my palm instinctively cups my tightening neck.
“You look stressed. Do you need an adult coloring book?” he asks, in a faux-sympathetic tone.
It would do me no good to tell him I have a drawer in my nightstand dedicated to this particular hobby.
What I want to say, what I should say, is I’m just trying to make sure you know I have absolutely no interest in you. I can’t. Oh, and that kiss was a one-time thing, and had I realized you lived across the hall and had a mystery woman-friend, I would have chosen my target more wisely. Though given he just called me negative, hostile, and impulsive, I doubt he’s particularly fond of me either. “I’m simply a realist.”
He squints at me and then stares for a moment as if his eyes are an x-ray machine, scanning for an image that computes. “For the record,” he says finally, “I went over there to check on Mrs. Crandall when she got back from her daughter’s, and the guys who were painting—the professional, paid-by-the-hour painters she somehow found within hours—they were taking their sweet-ass time and being sloppy at that, so I grabbed a brush.”
“You did?”
He nods, while I catalog his survival instincts. Care for others could be his downfall at the world’s end. “Oh, well, that was . . .”
He crosses his arms, presses his lips together. “You can’t do it, can you?”
“Do what?”
“Give me a compliment.”
I bite the inside of my cheek. He’s razzing me like he’s known me long enough to know I’m not particularly easy to earn a compliment from.
“Okay, well, thanks for returning the sweatshirt.”
“There’s something else too,” he says with some newfound urgency. He pulls out a folded piece of paper from the front right pocket of his jeans. Despite his generally calm demeanor, there’s a slight tightness that overtakes his jaw. Is Charlie nervous?
“What’s this?”
“It’s a ticket,” he says as I scan the document. “For a weeklong trip to an all-inclusive resort in Turks and Caicos.”
I examine the creased receipt in my hand for another moment, then regard him again. “These words mean nothing to me.”
He feigns annoyance. “Let’s go to Turks and Caicos.” He says it as if he has just suggested we go to the mailbox or to paint Mrs. Crandall’s kitchen.
Finn, disloyally, has stationed himself against Charlie’s right side, his errant golden hairs pressing into Charlie’s pant leg.
“You’re inviting me on a trip to Turks and Caicos?” I ask in my most questioning tone.
“Yes.”
My throat constricts in response to the emotions wrestling one another inside me. Intrigue. Excitement. Fear. Confusion. Ultimately, skepticism wins out, pinning all other feelings to the mat. “Why? We barely know each other. And you basically just told me you don’t even like me.”
“I didn’t say that.”
I consciously blink at him.
He raises himself onto my kitchen counter with barely any effort, the action both distracting and impressive. Finn follows, shamelessly licking one of Charlie’s dangling ankles.
“This seems like about the right time to get a restraining order,” I say.
“Which would be difficult because I live across the hall—”
“Okay, come on. What’s this about? Is this some kind of dare? Did Mrs. Crandall put you up to this? Is she gonna burn down my apartment while I’m gone?”
He cocks his head. “Is that a ‘yes’?”
“No part of what I just said insinuated a yes. Explain yourself.”
He slides off the counter and makes his way over to my couch and plops down, seemingly unable to stay in one spot for long. Finn joins him, placing his face in Charlie’s lap, and Charlie begins circling between Finn’s ears with his fingers. Finn’s eyes roll back in satisfaction. “My girlfriend dumped me. Two days ago. The day before the fire alarm, actually. So yeah, it’s been a great forty-eight hours all around. That was her.” He points lazily at the front door. “She stopped by to get her curling iron and sleep retainer.”
I raise my eyebrows, and he offers a meek smile.
“It feels really good to tell you about her retainer.”
I can’t imagine someone like Charlie—objectively attractive and so seemingly confident—finding himself dumped. And his willingness to admit it so freely catches me by surprise. There’s also a weird sense of satisfaction that the brunette is a former versus current flame, which nags at me. “I’m sorry.”
He stares at me with weakened resolve.
“Can I ask what happened?”
He shrugs. “Basically, I asked her if she’d started packing for our trip and she said ‘I can’t do this’ and I thought she meant the trip—like there was an issue at work and she couldn’t take the days or something—but then she was sure to clarify that the ‘this’ in ‘I can’t do this’ was us. She couldn’t do us anymore.”
I watch as he runs his pointer finger along the seam of my couch cushion.
“That’s heavy,” I say, joining him on the couch. That traitor Finn remains with Charlie instead of shifting to my lap. I can’t help but think about Zane and the disastrous way our relationship ended, and I feel a pang of empathy for Charlie.
“Yeah. So anyway, I’ve paid for this trip and can’t get my money back, so I figured I should still go. At first, I thought I’d take a buddy and drink, hook up—”
“I’m certainly not—”
“No, not you. I don’t mean hook up with you.”
“You don’t have to sound so disgusted.” I think of the kiss and imagine him wiping his mouth in revulsion as soon as Tess hauled me away.
“I just meant I was gonna take a guy friend, meet girls there. That was the original plan.”
“Charming.”
“Okay, you’re missing the point here.” He pulls his phone from his jeans pocket, taps at the screen then holds it up for me to take a look.
“Brooke Brady,” I say, reading the name on the social media page. The profile picture is of the beautiful brunette from the hallway, her ample chest clad in a crocheted bikini top, and a gorgeous sunset behind her. She’s holding a drink with a neon yellow straw in a giant fishbowl glass, smiling generously at the camera.
“Yeah, but look at the most recent picture,” he says.
This one is a close-up selfie of her and a handsome older man, who looks to be in his late forties, his salt-and-pepper hair gelled back in a suave pouf reminiscent of Jack Palmer’s. Charlie speaks the caption aloud. “The best love grows with time. I didn’t know the love of my life was here all along.”
Oh dear, he’s memorized it.
I’m grateful that I surreptitiously blocked Zane on all social media within hours of our breakup.
“Her coworker, Spencer. The guy she’d go to happy hours with and work late with and insisted for our entire two years together that she didn’t have feelings for. She waited exactly one day after our breakup to post this.”
“Ouch. Do you think they were sleeping together while you two—” His eyes narrow and I stop talking. “Sorry.”
He clears his throat. “Right, so I saw this, and I thought, what would piss her off more than if I took another girl on the trip that was meant for her? If she saw me posting happy vacation pics with a new woman? And then just now she saw you in the hall, so she knows you’re my neighbor, which would make her wonder if I was cheating on her the whole time too—” He springs from the couch, clearly amped as he relives it all.
“Wait, you want me to go on this trip with you so you can make your ex-girlfriend jealous?”
“Yes.”
“For what purpose? Do you want her back?”
“Hell no. Not after this bullshit.” He raises his phone into the air. “She wasn’t a great girlfriend, now that I look back on it. I should have seen the red flags.”
“Tell me the red flags.”
“Why?”
“So I can gauge if they’re legit or if you’re simply bitter.”
“I’m not bitter.”
I cross my arms and he concedes. “Fine. For starters, she could never just stay home. We always had to be out, doing something ‘exciting.’ Like, can’t you ever get takeout and watch a movie on a Tuesday night?”
He waits for me to confirm this as a neutral assessment. When I don’t, he continues, his face reddening a bit. “She’s lactose intolerant. Did I really think I was going to live the rest of my life with someone who can’t eat cheese?”
“That’s not her fault,” I say.
He releases a breath in concession.
I note that he had thought about spending the remainder of his days with her, but try not to linger on it. I allowed myself to feel that way, just once. I’d watch Zane play “getcha” with Finn at the park across the street, moving back and forth like a receiver juking their defender, thinking he’d make a good father. Look where that got me.
Now Charlie is pacing my apartment, the list spewing out of him. “She never came fishing with me. Not once in two years. Despite the fact that I went out to so many ‘hot new clubs’ and ‘it’ restaurants for her.” As soon as he reaches the front door, he turns and walks back. “And she doesn’t read. Like, ever. I don’t trust people who don’t read.” We both instinctively look over at my bookshelf, full from top to bottom, which, if he stepped closer and really examined, he would see is organized by category, then color, with two full shelves dedicated to post-apocalyptic romance.
Now he steps over to study the lineup more closely. My chest tightens. It’s oddly intimate, having someone scour my bookshelves, like they’re viewing my DNA under a microscope. He settles on a hardcover, presses his index finger into the top edge of the spine, and pulls it back at an angle. A recent commercial fiction bestseller, not in my post-apocalyptic romance section.
“The ending of this one sucked,” he says, then presses the book back into place.
I open my mouth to argue the review I hadn’t asked for but find I can’t. He’s right. The ending did suck.
I envision his nightstand covered in a messy stack of novels and it’s . . . intriguing.
He sits back down on the couch, sighs in defeat. “Fine. I want her back. There, I said it. Does that make you more inclined to come?”
“Why would you want someone back who cheated on you?”
The words ring hollow though. I know why.
Because ninety-nine percent of him knows he deserves better. That it’s not healthy or logical or at all intelligent to want to go back to someone capable of such disregard. That in his head, he knows this person isn’t right for him. That he should have more self-worth. But the other, nagging one percent tells him what they had was so special—too special—that he will never find a love like that again. And that one percent is a tiny eyelash stuck in his eye that leaves the other ninety-nine percent forsaken.
That inside your feeling receptors, the need to be chosen is a cloud cover over all rational thoughts.
Charlie, as I expect, does not answer.
These are not things easily articulated to a virtual stranger.