No love lost, chapter 1
Summary: The nightmares have become something more. While you slowly get acquainted with your new life, you develop strategies to help you remain sane.
Pairing: Frankie Morales x fem!Reader (OFC)
Rating: Explicit 🔞
A/N: Happy Frankie Friday, Orange besties 🧡 Can we pretend this is my humble contribution to Frankie February? I wish I had more time to play... 🧡 Unbeta'd, so there might be a lot of Frenchness scattered. I'm still setting things up, so please, bear with me. Chapter 2 is already on its way 🧡This one goes out to all the BFFs 🧡
Word count: 6.1k
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Chapter 1: Walking With A Ghost
Rita wasn’t lying. It is a nice building. A nice building with overall decent tenants in a rather pleasant neighborhood. In direct contradiction with all your childhood memories.
After a month living here, you have a near-comprehensive grasp of who lives where in the brick rowhouse, progressively getting acquainted with your neighbors, inserting yourself seamlessly into the timeline of their coming and going. Your humble contribution to the wider choreography of the Hoboken urban ballet.
In the evening, coming home from work, you frequently run into Jason and Michael, the newlyweds in 1B, interrupting their mailbox make-out session as Jason dashes out to meet his husband. They have what Jules’ romance books call an “endearing grumpy-sunshine dynamic.” Which, in this precise instance, translates to Michael grunting his greetings while Jason beams at you with a cheerful Hello. The kind of couple you could find irritating if you were sore about being single. Which you’re not.
In the mornings, you leave shortly after Kate Parker, fifty-something-year-old, single, living across the floor from Rita in apartment 3A. Kate owns an impressive pantsuit collection, one for each day, in every shade and color, that she pairs with a matching pashmina worn over a long camel coat with padded shoulders. On her way to the train, she stops at the Dunkin' Donuts on Newark Ave to grab her morning coffee, so you usually catch up with her by the time you both reach the Hoboken Terminal. When your eyes meet on the HOB-WTC platform, her face lights up with a friendly smile that you’re more than happy to reciprocate, a natural interaction that comes without any of your usual social awkwardness side effects.
Silent as a mouse throughout the week—you suspect her to work with some insane NYC corporate schedule—Mrs. Parker blasts 80s British pop on her stereo every Friday night, culminating with Total Eclipse of the Heart drunkenly sung at the top of her lungs. This BBC karaoke session is now a staple in your weekly routine. Something absolutely no one in the building has ever complained about, except for the asshole in 2B.
You’ve only crossed his receding hairline a handful of times, but your dislike for this pale-faced finance bro was immediate and epidermal. The man is so full of himself, he can’t even be bothered with a brisk nod in your general direction. He has yet to acknowledge your presence, when everyone else has welcomed you in one way or another, at the best of their respective social abilities.
On numerous occasions, you’ve found the door to the laundry room not only unlocked but wide open, blocked with the first available object in the room propped as a doorstop—once, your Joy Division t-shirt—and even though you can’t prove it’s him, a gut feeling has you absolutely certain that this contemptible, selfish little man is the culprit.
Rita thinks it, too. Her validation, to your surprise, makes up for the small tear in your treasured t-shirt. Her attention is like a warm, unexpected sunray on a dreary winter day, her affection freely offered.
In the very first weeks, she would open her door to salute you on your way up or down. Your conversations centered around the life of the building, minute details of great importance you hadn’t figured out based on your sole observations.
For instance, the fact that Jason, who works entirely remotely, volunteered himself to act as a stand-in super when the official superintendent vanished without a trace a year or so ago. Every week, rain or shine, he takes out the roll-away dumpsters on trash day and lets in the bald, portly man who empties the washers and dryers in the basement laundry room. He collects packages for the other tenants, all this for free, Rita insists. And as far as you can tell, with good grace and an unwavering smile. Because apparently, that’s the kind of person he is.
For the more technical issues, though, such as a cracked windowpane, a broken AC, or a clogged sink, Francisco is your man, Rita tells you with her trademark cheeky wink.
Francisco.
The man named Frankie.
The day after you met, when you pushed your old mattress down the stairs, you made sure to check the DYMO label on his mailbox: bold black letters that spell MORALES.
Somehow, learning his full name has only raised more questions. And every time Rita pronounces it, which is often, shivers jolt down your spine like electricity.
Francisco brings her groceries and stands in line for her at the pharmacy to fill her prescriptions. Francisco takes her upstate New York to the cemetery and helps her clean up her parents and brother’s grave. Every other month, Francisco drives her to Connecticut to visit her great-niece. Francisco always makes sure there’s an extra blanket for her legs, and a pillow to wedge between her frail back and the seat of his pickup truck.
Francisco—Frankie to you, apparently—leaves early in the morning. You can hear his front door closing as you roll out of bed, eyes dried out by the lack of sleep, legs sore from your nightly unrest.
Once, you met him in the hall. His mailbox is right above yours. You were nervously scanning a letter from an estate administrator when he walked in, crisp wind and dead leaves swirling in around his tall figure. His face was tucked in the shadow from the brim of his hat, shielding his eyes against the harsh neon light, but you caught a glimpse of the crease dipping his brow. He muttered an apology as he reached up for his mail, his arm surging forward right by your head, and you took in his scent, cold air, amber, leather.
You carried it with you all the way to your apartment, pretending not to care, leather, amber, cold air. Your heart thrumming loud in your ears, falling in rhythm with his steps as he climbed the stairs behind you.
Another time, you walked in to find him engaged in a friendly chat with Jason and Michael, a warmth and ease to his demeanor, a cheerful timbre to his round baritone that kept resounding inside your chest all evening.
Beyond that, your encounters have so far remained few and scarce and revolve essentially around Rita, the old lady’s landing being both a common ground and a meeting point.
You’re not so naive as to believe she hasn't noticed your avoiding glances, sinking almost as low as your voice whenever he shows up. You just hope he hasn’t.
Because no matter how good a case she makes for Francisco, or even Jason, you’re having a hard time processing the notion that a man can be reliable.
It’s been five years since Jules got married, and you’re still expecting Anthony to eventually trip and fall.
And if Jason looks harmless enough, there is something far more complex about Frankie. An underlying darkness, something guarded and wounded. Brewing anger, fierce and dangerous, that only you seem to perceive.
Not a threat. A contained explosion. A vertiginous precipice.
Drawing you in like a magnet. Jolting electricity all over your body whenever you hear his name, every time you’re in his vicinity.
What truly scares you is how much you relish it.
Whatever veiled piece of him your instinct latched onto stands in stark contrast with the wholesome light Rita paints him in. But you have to take her word for it because she won’t elaborate beyond the radium or her interaction with him. You know virtually nothing about the man, not his relationship status, where he comes from, or what he does for a living. Rita might know everything about everyone in the building, but she never treads beyond the line separating the useful facts from the personal ones. She doesn’t trespass on anyone’s privacy. The rule is tacit, but firm.
There’s also the possibility that she might not fully trust you yet. Either way, you’re not the kind to pry. Not for lack of curiosity. Your mother smacked the questions out of you a long time ago.
You listen and gather what you can, but you remain quiet. You don’t ask about 2A and her young son, their blank mailbox, and their hushed murmurs and fleeting looks that scream domestic abuse survivors. You don’t ask when Rita instructs you to never, under any circumstances, answer anyone’s inquiry about them.
You don’t ask about 1A, the only unit that no one in the building ever mentions. You don’t even know whether the place is rented or vacant. There’s a half-rolled sticker with the name Crain on the mailbox, but the shades are perpetually drawn shut, the peephole is covered with brown tape, and you have yet to see anyone walking out that front door. The place raises your skin in goosebumps, more shivers running down your back every time you pass it on your way down to the basement laundry.
The wrong kind of shivers. Decidedly not the Francisco ones.
You simply don’t ask. Especially because now, Rita frequently invites you in when she catches you on your way up from work or your weekend errands. You won’t jeopardize the moments you share with her in her colorfully cluttered living room.
You’d like to think your impromptu visits soften her solitude. Truth is, she’s the one entertaining you. In her presence, you allow yourself to be carefree. Tucked between two heart-shaped frill pillows on her blue velvet couch, basking in her delicate lily of the valley fragrance, you forget to be wary. Her wit is the kind of sharp you wish you possessed. With kindness, with infinite patience, she listens to your hesitant silences, never brisk, never judging.
She indulges you with stories from her past. Anecdotes about growing up on 112th Street before the neighborhood was even named Spanish Harlem. About her parents, both music hall artists who wouldn’t let her skip school to follow them on tour, but instead left her with her aunt, no matter how intently she begged and how hard she cried. About how it was all for nothing in the end, because she still became a dancer. And not just any dancer. The best dancer on Broadway, she winks with delightful sass.
Over freshly ground coffee and flaky, creamy quesitos, she confides her love life and her many affairs, what she calls the heyday of her Broadway years. How she made more money than she could ever spend but still spent it all anyway. How it felt to have so much when her parents had had so little. How she paid for it all in sweat and blood, her thin legs now reshaped by pain and rheumatism.
Listening to her vivid tales feels like leafing through a picture album with yellowed photographs and smiley familiar faces. Some days, her likeness to your grandmother makes the corners of your eyes prickle. Your sparse and overused memories of her slowly disintegrating, only tied to a fading reality by thinning tendrils.
But unlike your grandmother, Rita was born and raised on Manhattan Island, and purposefully chose Hoboken, NJ, to spend the winter of her years. This new paradigm eases your own broken dreams of living on the other side of the river.
Day after day, the longing for your bygone New York City life ebbs away. There's no more objective, factual reason to sustain your regrets. Life is better here, in many aspects.
Even in the declining autumn light, your apartment is bathed in bright daylight from noon till sundown. A welcome contrast with the narrow-windowed, slanting-floored cupboard you rented in Greenpoint. Anthony knows his job, you have to give him that.
The rent puts about the same monthly strain on your budget as your previous place did, but your new place is larger, with a long tub in the tiled bathroom, and a separate kitchen. Not that you use it to cook, but the extra storage is perfect for your ten thousand mugs. The built-in shelves in the living room and the spacious bedroom closet are their own perks. Your books, your clothes, your vintage cameras and thrifted photographs, your collection of calaveras in all shapes, sizes, and colors… the sum of your life, all your belongings that had fit neatly in taped and labeled cardboard boxes inside Jules and Anthony’s garage, have now found their places, collecting dust as if they’d always been here. A comforting permanence.
There’s also a special spot for the rectangular military-issued tin box. The one you didn’t really want but still took away from your father’s furnished shabby apartment before that clearance company emptied it. An unlikely nook, behind a hatch and a tangle of drainpipes, concealed under the bathtub. With a bit of luck, one day soon you won’t even remember placing it there. You’ll forget about its existence.
The four floors worth of stairs are probably doing wonders for your butt cheeks. The street is quiet, lined with Norway maples. There’s a bodega open 24/7 just around the corner that sells fresh fruits, in case you ever decide that your body is a temple. For the time being, they sell your favorite Pringles flavor and a good michelada mix. Even the commute to the ICP’s library is shorter than when you lived in Greenpoint.
Perhaps Hoboken wasn’t such a bad place to return to, after all. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad place to grow up, either. Maybe your family had been the bad place all along.
And for the first time since those heavenly days of college when you shared a cockroach-infected dorm room with Jules, things are beginning to feel like home.
If it wasn’t for that one tiny problem.
At night, everything is different.
In some ways, changing your mattress worked. The nightmares are entirely gone. But what replaced them is far worse.
When dusk is done, when obscurity has swallowed its grainy colors, when the streetlights blink to life, shadows emerge.
That’s when it appears. Make itself known. Shifting behind furniture, stirring in muffled silence, following you from room to room, no matter how many lamps you leave on, watching you as you try to go on with your life and you know it’s always here.
The white sheet, the gaunt figure.
A diffuse shape in our peripheral. Filling up the shadowed corners of your rooms. Standing tall behind you across the bathroom mirror while you lean down over the sink to wash your face before bed, scurrying away in a flurry as soon as you stand up, a clear rustle of fabric that swallows all the other sounds. A presence as you lay in bed, sleepless, powerless, you feel it move in the darkness. In the eerie quiet.
You don't look over your shoulder. You never look over your shoulder. If you start turning around, it’ll become real. It’ll be the end.
Instead, you whisper. Words like a talisman, an incantation to defeat the absence of sound, and defy the isolation.
The man named Frankie is on the other side of the wall, you murmur, pretending to hear his breathing through the eight inches of brick and sandstone that separate you.
Some nights, exasperation overcomes fear. Fed up with waiting for a rest that won’t come, you get up and go sit on the green chair Jules got you as a moving gift. The velvet upholstery catches at your folded knees. With your elbows resting on your bedroom windowsill, you peer out at the street and into the night that’s never as dark as your own apartment. The streetlights bathe your face in diffuse orange, your own private nocturnal sun.
Some nights, you get to see him. The man named Frankie. Francisco. His door opens and closes stealthily. Wouldn’t you be expecting it—hoping for it, really—you’d never hear it. Ears perked up, you follow the discreet downward stomp of his boots on the stairs. A minute or so, and he steps out of the building, into the night, onto the concrete sidewalk, Standard Heating Oil cap and Sherpa-lined trucker jacket. He crosses the street with a sure gait, and climbs into the red pickup truck that’s never parked too far away.
An old model. FORD, spelled out in chrome over the radiator grill. You’ve never cared much for cars, but you like the nostalgic look of this one. Maybe if you hadn’t sold your father’s Chevy, if you, too, had a red pickup truck that looked this solid and reliable, you’d take your ghost and your anxiety for a nightly drive, just like Francisco does.
He usually returns after a couple of hours, never later than 4am. His gait a little less determined, his steps a little more weary. Mission accomplished, you whisper, a weak smile tugging your lips. He’s tired himself driving. You’ve tired yourself waiting.
You watch as he crosses the street, lifting his hat and combing a heavy hand through his hair. Craning your neck, you pin your gaze on his tall silhouette for as long as physically possible before he reenters the building.
His ascent is slow and weighed. When you hear the door close on him, and only then, you crawl back into your bed.
There, buried under the downy comforter, you press your forehead and knees against the cool partition wall, against his bedroom, against the idea of him. You curl up in the smallest possible shape, so you can’t feel the mattress dipping when the shrouded gaunt figure sits on the edge of your bed to stand guard over your shallow sleep.
—
Halloween is when it really begins. When the balance is tipped and everything shifts.
For most of your life, the holiday has held a particular significance. Back in high school, where every social interaction revolved around sports, boys, or popularity, Jules and you had first bonded over a penchant for gothic literature, dark humor, and spooky shows. Shared tastes that effectively set you apart, and in which Halloween played an important part.
Over the years, it became a celebration of your friendship, akin to an anniversary. From trick-or-treating to séances to horror movie marathons, you’ve done it all, always in thought-through matching outfits.
Incidentally, it is the one occasion on which Anthony doesn’t mind your presence. It grants him the tacit blessing to do what he does best: serve the bare minimum, handing out candies to the neighborhood kids, dressed in a lousy red cape and cheap devil horns.
On the following day, Jules and you visit the Hoboken cemetery to place flowers on her mother’s and your grandparents' graves.
But not this year. This year is all shades of different.
This year, your favorite holiday draws near like a palpable threat.
At work, your tiredness is becoming an issue, your attention waning, your productivity on a slanting slope.
Enoch is old enough to go trick-or-treating with his parents, and Jules has designed matching family costumes that leave you out of the equation. If there was any footroom left inside of you for one more tightly contained emotion, you’d be downright bleeding.
But you don’t resent her, not for one moment, even if this means the end of a tradition that spans twenty years of your relationship. You knew the natural order of things would eventually be altered back when they started dating, and you recognized she was falling in love. This is how life works, after all, and you’ve got enough maturity to acknowledge it: people around you keep moving onward with their lives, while you circle back to square one.
But you can’t stay alone at home, not on a night where the dead roam amongst the living. Not with the present… state of things.
As the day approaches, you consider using some of your PTO to get away, but your finances are still recovering from your recent expenses.
If you ask her, Jules will take you. Like the broken rescue puppy you’ve spent your whole life trying not to be.
You take the shot and swallow your pride, and on October 31st, you’re the one handing out candies on your best friend’s front porch, dressed in a red polyester cape and plastic devil horns.
Later, once Enoch is tucked into his crib, sleeping off his sugar high, when Anthony has gone down to his basement den to play fantasy football, Jules quietly walks into the guest room. Flicking the nightstand lamp off, she slips next to you under the fluffy covers of the queen-size bed. She doesn’t speak a word, only wedges her socked feet between your ankles as she spoons you, and less than five minutes later, she’s out and dreaming. You’re left alone with your thoughts, listening to her deep, steady breathing, your body curled against hers in lieu of a cold partition wall.
Exhaustion washes over you, a tide years in the making. Waves building up since the front door closed on your father on that December evening. Decades of pretending to fit in, of feigned strength and indifference.
You relent. Held by the one person who’s never let you down, who has stood by you through thick and thin, you close your tear-welled eyes. You breathe out, you breathe in.
The gaunt figure under its white sheet flashes behind your clenched eyelids. You wince, but quickly settle. You know it will not find you here. Tonight, you’re free from the primitive fear that creeps around you after dark. Free from the repressed grief that sticks to you like tar.
She’s with you, Jules is with you, lying warm and loose against your back, an arm curled around your waist, making sure you get some rest and reprieve. Standing by you through thick and thin.
Lulled by the rise and fall of her chest, you doze off, at last. The following morning, she gets up stealthily and makes sure you get a late lie-in. By far the best slumber you’ve had since you’ve answered that phone call from the Hoboken police precinct.
When you get home, in the afternoon, November’s raining sleet over your neighborhood’s streets, the bleak sky hanging low. You rush up your staircase, light and easy, a cheerful spring to your steps, a whistled tune on your lips. Sleep does change everything.
Rita’s not here to greet you; she went to visit her family’s grave, chauffeured by Francisco, and they probably stopped by a coffee shop on their way back as a treat, like they sometimes do. With a bit of luck, they took a detour through East Harlem, and they’ll bring some of those delicious quesitos she keeps in a glass Tupperware in the refrigerator.
You feel it the very second you cross the threshold of your apartment. The shift. It’s in the air, in the light, in every dust particle drifting through the empty silence.
The part of your brain that’s designed for survival urges you to lock the door and run back to Jules’ home.
You step inside, stubborn, angry, shielded by denial. You know exactly where to go. You sense precisely what’s different.
In the kitchen, the melted snow falls oblique and icy against the rectangular window. The room is cold; your breathing comes out in white, steamy puffs of shaky air. A muscle in your calf twitches. Your shoulders tense, hands balled into fists, half rage, half defensive.
The military tin box is propped in the very center of the round kitchen table, under the yellow circle of light from the suspension you remember switching off before leaving. It’s open, the lid carefully placed alongside it, its contents displayed with a geometrical symmetry that would be satisfying in any other circumstances. The multi-tooled pocket knife with its carved wooden scales. The square leather wallet. The faded picture of five-year-old you in denim overalls and pigtails. The stainless-steel dog tags placed over their coiled chain. And this name you won’t speak, glaring at you in embossed letters.
Francis L. Reinhorn.
Your father’s name.
—
So what if you don’t sleep in your bed anymore? The basement laundry room is perfectly fine, and you barely sleep at all anyway. November is ticking away at light speed, December barreling towards you like a car crash, with its cohort of painful memories, and there's only so much you can deal with at once.
As far as you’re concerned, the basement laundry has only one drawback: the Crain unit is situated right above it, and you have to walk past it on your way down there. But then it means you’re not bothering your neighbors doing laundry at 2am. The rest of it is as good as any form of escapism will ever get: the bright synthetic lights that press the room empty of all shadows; the outdated beige washers and dryers lined against the wall with their low, droning rumble; the fragrant, humid warmth; the Formica folding table in the middle, where you lie down and scroll on your phone until your eyes drift closed with exhaustion. Everything concurs to give you an approximate feeling of safety, which is more than you currently dare to ask for.
Everything you own—clothes, underwear, towels, linen, and curtains—every single piece of fabric in your apartment has been washed at least once, if not twice, in the past few weeks. At this point, you can estimate the weight of a wash load by the sound the machine produces. You’re a grade-A expert in lint trap cleaning. It’s a budget, but it’s worth it.
The threadbare duvet cover you’ve clung to since college for strictly nostalgic reasons has found a new purpose. Whenever there’s nothing else to wash, it’s your go-to item. Inside the drum, it tumbles in hypnotic circles you follow through the porthole glass of the front-loading machine, a cotton candy pink cloud lulling you to a state of relative tranquility.
You don’t even put it away anymore. It sits in the baby blue plastic laundry basket by the living room door, next to the detergent bottle and a little purse of change.
Tonight, after vainly trying to focus on a History Channel documentary about the downfall of the Roman Republic, you turn off the television, add your outfit of the day to the basket and, ignoring the faint rustling sound coming from the kitchen, you head out to your laundry sanctuary.
Feeling bold, you blow a raspberry at the Crain’s black door and its blinded peephole, and hop rapidly down the stairs, the fabric softener’s artificial perfume growing stronger with each step.
The open door stops you in your tracks. You prick up your ears. All the machines seem off. It’s mostly silent, aside from the quiet and constant electrical whir from the overhead lights.
“Motherfucking 2B,” you grumble, stepping in cautiously, looking to your left, then to your right.
The bare-walled room is empty, save for a black rucksack on top of one of the machines. You pause by the Formica table, deciding whether to stay or retreat. Suppose you could close the kitchen door and give that documentary another try?
On closer inspection, the bag is spotted with brownish patches of discolored fabric. The single, wide shoulder strap is frayed, and the drawstring is a dirty shade of beige. Not exactly what you’d expect for 2B’s usual standards.
Placing your basket on the table, you walk slowly toward the old rucksack, pulse point pounding in your neck.
This is not 2B’s bag. You know exactly whose it is.
A garment spills out of it. A denim shirt with pearly press-on buttons gleaming under the neons’ artificial light. You’ve seen him in it. Francisco. The man named Frankie. You’ve seen the seams strain across his shoulders to contain the breadth of his frame. Hugging his biceps tightly when he crosses his arms over his chest, that gesture you can’t decipher—is he keeping you away, or is he holding himself in?
The cottony material must have been blue, at some point, and probably rougher. Well-loved, worn out, it is now a grayish shade of green.
How many years, how many decades has he owned this shirt for? Does it hold a sentimental value, or is he careful and meticulous with all of his belongings?
You think about his pickup truck, older than some of your coworkers, without a speck of rust on the red and white body. About the patience, no, the reverence in his tone when he addresses Rita. About the way he holds out his arm for her to lay on when he helps her down the stairs.
Does this gentleness apply to everything—everyone—in his life? The sensation of his hands hooking under your arms with controlled strength rushes back to you like a sudden flood. The touch, furtive but strong, has left what feels like a permanent imprint on your body.
You saw something in his eyes that very first day, when you finally dared to look up. Something in their black depth that talked of anger and unrest, raging like a thousand storms, unfolding like an endless ocean. Pulling you in like you’d willfully drown.
You recognize the impatience in his gait, the frustration in his movements as he goes out for a drive in the dead of night, trying to shake himself free of his nocturnal torments. There’s a kinship to your demons, a shared path of avoidance.
The ghost memory of his jacket makes your arms tingle. Its weight, its warmth, its worn scent, an empty shell bearing the evocation of his body’s solid presence. Your arms lift in an empty, yearning cradle.
Without a thought, without a glance around to make sure you’re still alone, you grab the shirt and burrow your face into it.
You breathe in, long and deep, the soft material brushing your cheeks. Leather. A wood-scented amber. The musk of his freckled skin.
You breathe in again, longer, deeper still. Fill your mind and your lungs with the idea of him. Rub your skin against the smooth cotton. A flash of cold, one of the pearly buttons.
There’s a motion, a tremor in the air behind you. A faint coughing, more like a throat-clearing sound.
You lower the shirt onto the bag, lightheaded, your body still processing another dimension of his person. Blood rushes down to your feet as you realize what’s happening.
Releasing your breath, you turn around to face your fate.
Well, not your fate. Your father had been adamant to communicate there is no such thing.
Frankie’s standing in the open doorway, holding a bottle of Tide. He’s wearing that Standard Heating Oil trucker hat you have yet to see him without, even indoors, even at night. Your eyes skitter over the expanse of his chest, down to his waist. His belt is undone, the large metallic buckle hanging limp. His dark eyes are trained on you, scanning your face for a meaning, for an intention.
“Hey,” you greet him, a poor attempt at casualness that your high-pitched voice betrays. “I like the smell of your detergent. What do you use?”
Flexing his arm, he lifts the bottle, label facing you, the plastic aggressively orange under the bright fluorescent lighting.
It’s the exact same brand as yours. Down to the specific fragrance. Your own bottle is glaring in plain sight in your laundry basket, on top of the table between you.
“Oh okay, cool. Thanks.”
You briefly consider asking him about a softener, but your tongue gets tangled, shame radiating in burning ripples from your neck up, because at the moment you might be more preoccupied by the fact that the rest of his body didn’t even budge when he lifted that 132 oz bottle. You’re once more thrown off balance by the density of him. By his carefully wielded strength.
He cocks his jaw, the corners of his eyes crinkling. Not quite a grin, but you can tell he’s made up his mind on how to handle whatever he just walked in on.
“Came all the way down here before I realized I forgot it upstairs,” he says.
Giving you some grace, then. You huff a thankful smile, legs wobbly, hands shaking.
“Rough,” you say. “Happens to me all the time.”
It doesn’t. You’re not sure why you said that. Once you’re down here, you don’t go back up before daybreak.
There’s one more beat, one last pointed look in your direction, and he walks around the table and towards the machines, thick thighs clad in beige denim, dragging your eyes down until you notice he’s barefoot. You avert your gaze, not sure what to do with it.
When he levels with you, he props the Tide bottle on top of the machine and proceeds to buckle his belt. There’s no clumsy hurry in his movements. His fingers are deft and precise.
You swallow audibly, shrinking away from the heat rolling off his body, from the proximity of his skin. You’ve never seen his naked arms before. He’s always wearing a thermal or a flannel, or a jacket of some sort, and from this close, you can count the freckles on his lean forearms. You can see the pilled fabric on his faded red t-shirt and count the circles on the target tattoo on his left thumb.
It makes you acutely aware of your own attire. Fleece pajama pants that lost their shape some time after Clinton’s second term, a beige sweatshirt with dirty cuffs, fuzzy socks, and a slept-in t-shirt, probably smelly. No bra, no panties, no makeup. Hair tied up in the messiest bun.
“Which one are you using?” he asks, tilting his chin toward the washing machines.
“Um, doesn’t really matter? This one, I guess?” you say, pointing to the one on your right, so as to let him have the one he put his bag on.
“Okay, thanks,” he says, nodding.
And then, he does this gesture, this thing you are certain means so much more than what it simply looks like: he lifts his hat, combs his fingers through his hair, and puts the hat back on. It eludes you for now, but you know it’s a key. The key to reading him.
He starts emptying the contents of his rucksack inside the drum. The shirt goes first, then some t-shirts in various colors, socks, another shirt in a surprising pinkish color, some black boxer briefs, and that's when you jolt and stop staring, snapping out of your stunned state.
Remembering the pretense under which you’re down here, you mechanically take your basket and mimic his movements, keeping your eyes trained on your load—the antique duvet cover with its girlish pattern of tiny pink flowers, a thermal, your socks, and mesh underwear—hoping he does the same.
He closes the porthole door gently, without a sound. The coins clink between his fingers when he rummages in his pocket to retrieve them, before he seems to think twice and stops himself.
Straightening to his full size, he faces you. You freeze mid-movement.
“Hey, listen, Leigh. You don’t mind me being here, do you?”
It is, you believe, the first time your name passes his lips. The first time you hear it in his smooth, low tone. Shivers buzz along your back, pooling warm and dense inside your belly. You’d remember such a delightfully unnerving sensation, had you already experienced it.
In turn, you straighten up. With a will of their own, your eyes dart to the dip at the base of his throat. More freckles are dusted there, resting in the cradle of his collarbone. You redirect your gaze to the dollar store clock above the entrance. Its metal hands point to 1.25 am. You’re not likely to get much rest, tonight.
“‘Course not,” you murmur, and perhaps it’s not entirely a lie. “Why would I?”
“Cause this is kinda your thing, now. Here, I mean. You have deserted the windowsill,” he adds, looking straight at you.
The silence that follows stretches like the rumbling thunder of an oncoming storm. Dozens of different answers shuffle through your brain for one that would be socially acceptable. Across from you, a mere two feet away, his body is like a mountain. Immovable. Rough and inaccessible. There’s not a hint, not a whisper of the softness he demonstrates toward Rita, of the amicability he has for Michael and Jason. There’s just blunt honesty. A direct gaze, dark, unfathomable eyes boring right through you.
“You’ve deserted your pickup,” you hear yourself say.
“Yea, I did. Decided to try something new.”
Your heart leaps inside your chest, pounding against your rib cage. You’re exposed, your darkest secret laid bare. In any other circumstances, his straightforwardness would put you at ease. Instead it feels like a dare. You don’t know that you should trust him; you don’t know that you should welcome him in this place, beyond the fact that he has Rita’s confidence. Rita is an 87-year-old despondent woman who needs his assistance in daily matters. And you don’t need anyone.
What you need is a hiding place, and some time to buy before you can figure out and deal with whatever it is that you're hiding from.
“You can stay,” you answer, your words so quiet they’re barely audible under the droning of the adjacent boiler room.
His face quickly disappears under the brim of his hat before he lifts it again, swiping his tongue over his teeth. Your eyes flicker with anticipation.
“You sure?”
This feels like a threshold. A contract. Almost a surrender.
A capitulation.
“I’m sure.”
****
Haven't read a fic in such a long time and just happened upon this. I'm very glad I did because it felt like a cool dip in a pool, the most refreshing writing. Can't wait to read more.
