❛ he did seem like a menace to society. ❜ - isabel
dr. drew after dark. / accepting
He’s in the hallway, caught between door and frame, caught between many things these days. He’s doing more deliveries, more pick-ups too, not because money is especially tight – money is always tight – but because he’s sick of living on the breadline. It’s a decision that comes to him at 2am on a Monday while he’s just looking for a lighter and finds an old high court judgement instead. It sits with him for six days and weighs on him every night with the entire 580 metric tons of his apartment building before he feels constrained enough to do something.
The first real dent in his debts in years appears on a Thursday at shortly to 11:50am. It has him ignore Ryan smoking a blunt behind the Black Prince and buy a sandwich from Tesco rather than papers. The second comes on a Saturday, to which he calls Gina and goes for a walk around Regent’s Park with her. The third, in fivers and tenners only, crawls over almost two months and, between impatience and bad sleep, unearths all the other responsibilities he’s buried. From now on, he’s fixing things as they come within sight, which, more often than not, means tripping over them first.
At four o’clock in the morning, he can’t even remember how many times he’s looked up the wrong connection or time table within the last 24 hours alone, and it only helps so much that in this sort of business, no one’s gonna complain about a late order. It’s during one of those long evenings that he sees her outside their usual neighborhood for the first time: She’s two flights up saying goodbye to a young family while he’s climbing the stairs to deliver coke and weed to some 28-year old’s house party. They miss each other by a minute but meet again two weeks later at a gas station where he’s lighting a cigarette and she briefly waves at him from the shop entrance. The night they talk, he doesn’t feel like talking at all but the words spill out of him instead of something else.
“Hey,” he says after pulling the door shut and she says it back but friendlier before stopping to walk down the stairs with him. On the second floor, she asks him if he lives here and he’s glad to say that no, he doesn’t, and that’s the end of the story. Outside on the street glimmering from rain and motor oil, they have to part ways, so they do not move at all. Between his crossed arms and her dangling bag, he doesn’t know at what point they stop talking about the shit London weather and start talking about people they’ve known instead. And he doesn’t know why, or how, either, he suddenly starts telling her about Mark – about the funny, sanitized, unlikely version that is Mark – and wonders when he started doing so in past tense.
From the open window above, Stan is playing for the fourth time in a row.
She nods upward, smirking, and he just shrugs.
