Lost in the Pages: Mini Series
Apartment Neighbor! Jason Todd x Reader
The pipe burst on a Monday, which felt like something the Monday from hell would do.
You discovered it at 7 a.m. from the sound of water that was definitively coming from somewhere that it was not supposed to be coming from.
Then again from the sight of the bathroom ceiling doing something along the lines of drooping that bathroom ceilings should not do.
Then again, finally, from the super who confirmed in a weary tone of a man who had been fielding Fairweather Arms crises for eleven years.
He informed you that it was the unit above you, that the damage was significant, that they'd need to assess, that it would probably be — he paused, in the specific way that people paused before saying a number they knew you weren't going to like — a few days.
"How many days is a few?"
"Four to six," he said, "Maybe seven. The drywall's going to need to dry before we can—"
"Thank you," you stopped him, "I understand."
You stood in your bathroom doorway for a moment.
Then you called your sister, who lived in New Jersey. Then your friend Camille, who had a one-bedroom in the East Village. Then the hotel three blocks over, which had a promotional rate of two hundred and forty dollars a night, and you had a feeling in your chest that was specifically the feeling of a person doing math they did not like.
You were sitting on your couch staring at the wall when someone knocked on your door.
You opened it to find Jason Todd, in a gray t-shirt, holding two cups of coffee. He looked at your face. Then he looked past you at the general atmosphere of situation.
"Super called the floor," he said. "Wanted to give everyone a heads up in case of runoff." He held out one of the cups. "How bad?"
He absorbed this. "Hotel?"
"She has her boyfriend staying for the week."
"Ah." He looked at you. You could see him thinking — the particular quality of stillness that meant his brain was doing something — and then he said, with the careful, even tone of a man choosing his words with intent: "I have a couch."
"It's a good couch," he added. "I've slept on it. It's not a consolation couch, it's an actual couch."
"It's been three months," he stated. "We've had four dinners."
"Five dinners. You've met Roy. I've met Camille. I know you take your coffee with oat milk and one sugar and you know I take mine black and you've borrowed my copy of The Secret History and haven't given it back yet."
"I was going to give it back—"
"I know," he said. "I'm just saying." He met your eyes steadily. "It's a good couch and it's not two-forty a night."
You stood in the doorway for a moment.
"Okay," you said. "Yeah. Thank you."
The corner of his mouth moved. "Pack for a week. Don't underpack, it's not worth it."
The couch was, as advertised, a genuinely good couch. You could tell because it was the kind of couch that a person who lived alone had clearly thought about — not a couch acquired by default, not a couch inherited, but a couch chosen, deep-seated and substantial, the kind that held you rather than just accommodating you.
You were not the one sleeping on it.
This became clear on the first night at approximately ten p.m., when Jason emerged from the bedroom with a pillow and a blanket with the expression of someone who had made a decision and considered it final.
"What are you doing," you said.
"That's why I'm being a good host."
You looked at him. He looked back, patient, the pillow under his arm, and you thought about the next five nights and about the math of this, and said:
"Jason. I am not displacing you from your own bed for a week because a pipe burst."
"Your back will be ruined."
"Your back is not fine, you carry yourself like someone who's been compensating for a left shoulder since forever and you sleep in weird positions on that couch because I've seen you, at book club, in the armchair—"
"We're adults," you said. "It's a bed. I assume it is of reasonable size."
"A queen is very reasonable. We can share a queen like adults." You held his gaze. "Unless you have some kind of objection."
"No objection," he carefully said, in the tone of a man who had several objections that he was choosing not to voice.
"Then stop being a martyr and go back to bed."
Something in his face shifted. He turned around without further argument and went back down the hall. You followed.
The bedroom was — you took in, briefly, without making it a thing — deeply his. Books everywhere, two shelves' worth and then stacks on the nightstand and the dresser. A window that caught the city light. Everything neat in the specific way that suggested someone who could tolerate chaos in some directions but had made choices about their own space.
You took the left side. He took the right.
"Goodnight," he said, with the particular tone of a man who was going to lie very still and be very mature about this.
You woke up at 7:23 a.m. to pale November light and the awareness of two things simultaneously.
First: you were warm. Comprehensively warm, in the manner of someone who had slept genuinely well in a bed that was good and a room that was the right temperature.
Second: Jason Todd, who had gone to sleep on his respective side of a queen-sized bed and had presumably intended to stay there, was the little spoon.
You stared at the ceiling.
He was asleep. His breathing was slow and even.
He had, at some point in the night, migrated with complete unconscious commitment and was now tucked against you in a way that suggested he had located warmth and decided it was his. Your arm was around him. His hand was loosely over yours. His face, which in waking hours carried the particular controlled quality of someone who had decided long ago not to let everything show, was entirely slack.
He looked soft and unworried when he slept.
You stared at the ceiling for a long moment.
Then, because you were a reasonable adult and because you were not going to make this into something he'd have to navigate on insufficient sleep, you stayed exactly where you were and closed your eyes and went back to sleep.
He woke up first. You knew because you felt him go still — the specific stillness of someone arriving at consciousness and immediately performing an audit of their situation.
"...Hm," he said, very quietly, to no one.
You kept your eyes closed. Decided, as a gift to both of you, to be deeply asleep.
He was still for a moment longer. Then, with tremendous care, he extracted himself, clearly trying not to wake you, and you listened to him pad down the hall toward the kitchen, and then to the sound of the coffee maker beginning, and then to a prolonged silence that you suspected was Jason Todd alone in his kitchen working through some thoughts.
When you emerged, he had made coffee. He handed you a cup — oat milk, one sugar — with perfect normalcy and said, "Did you sleep okay?"
"Really well, actually," you said.
He nodded, and looked at his own coffee.
"Me too," he stated, in a tone that was very carefully just that.
The tips of his ears were slightly red.
You looked out the window at the Gotham morning and drank your coffee and decided that some things could be allowed to settle at their own pace.
The book club met on Tuesday.
You had known, going in, that Estelle had an information network that operated on principles you had never fully mapped. What you had not fully accounted for was the speed.
Estelle opened the door and looked at your face.
"I heard about the pipe." She stepped aside to let you in. Gerald assessed you from his radiator. "I also heard—" she paused, in the way she paused when she was choosing timing with intention — "that you've been staying in 7C."
"Two-forty a night, yes, Frank the super mentioned it to Helen in 6A who mentioned it to Dot." Estelle smiled with enormous serenity.
Dot and Miriam were already there. They looked at you with the expression of women who had information and were exercising considerable restraint in not deploying it immediately.
"How have you been," said Miriam, in a tone that meant something completely different.
"Fine," you stated, sitting down.
Phyllis arrived two minutes later, took in the room, and said "Has she said anything yet?" to Estelle before she had fully removed her coat.
"I know," said Phyllis, sitting down with the energy of someone settling in for something. "That's why I'm asking."
Jason arrived at 6:02, which was when you all heard the knock, and Estelle let him in, and he walked into the living room and found five women looking at him with varying expressions of avid attention, and he stopped.
You looked at him, with the expression of I have no control over any of this.
He looked back at the room.
"Okay," he said, with resignation.
"So," said Dot. "You've been cohabitating."
"How domestic," said Miriam.
"Five," you said, without thinking.
Everyone turned to look at you.
"...Not that I've been counting," you added.
"You've been counting," said Phyllis, with delight.
"The couch," said Estelle, who had poured herself a generous glass of wine and was already clearly enjoying this more than anything that had happened in months. "I said to myself — Estelle, he has a good couch. Very sensible of him to let her have it."
"I offered her the couch," Jason said, slowly, with the specific energy of someone choosing a word very carefully.
"Jason," said Estelle, gently, in the way that Estelle sometimes deployed gentle like a surgical instrument, "you're doing the thing where your ears get red."
The room looked at his ears.
His ears were, objectively, red.
"Very red," confirmed Dot.
"Extremely," said Miriam.
"We shared the bed," you said, because you could see him working himself into a full defensive posture and because the look on his face had shifted into something that was not quite comfortable and you had decided, three seconds ago, that this was more important than the conversation being uncomplicated. "Like adults. It was fine. Everything was fine."
Something in his face settled.
"Fine," Estelle repeated, in a tone of pure, delighted disbelief.
"The two of you," said Miriam, with a fondness that was somehow more embarrassing than the rest of it, "are going to kill me."
"Let's talk about the book," said Jason.
"We haven't poured your wine yet," said Phyllis.
"You need wine," said Estelle, and got up to get it, and the room rearranged itself around the familiar shape of a Tuesday, book club, 4B — except that when she came back and handed Jason his glass, she patted his cheek with the specific affection of someone who had decided he was hers to look after, and he let her, which told you more than most things had.
The book was Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, and the discussion that followed was good — genuinely good, the kind that went in directions you hadn't expected — and at some point in the second hour you and Jason ended up disagreeing about Ruth's relationship with impermanence in the way that you sometimes disagreed, which meant that neither of you was wrong but you were coming at it from different angles, and the room let you go at it for a while with the comfortable attention of people watching something they'd seen developing for months.
You were mid-point when Miriam refilled your wine without being asked, and you caught Estelle's eye across the room, and she gave you the smallest nod, the kind that meant she was keeping track of something.
After, in the hall — walking down, because the elevator was being the elevator —
"They're not going to let the bed thing go," you observed.
"They're not," he agreed, with the equanimity of someone who had made his peace.
"For the record," you said, on the third-floor landing, "I wasn't uncomfortable. If that's—" A pause. "I just wanted to say that."
He looked at you. The stairwell was doing its usual thing: bad light, old building, city underneath.
"Yeah," he said. "Me neither."
You looked at each other for a moment.
"Two more nights," you said.
"Two more nights," he confirmed.
"I'll leave the coffee maker on a timer," he offered. "You're up before me."
"I know I don't have to."
You looked at him: the soft look on his face, the white streak, the particular quality of the way he said things when he meant them without inflection.
"Thank you," you said. "For all of it."
And the thing was — you thought, walking into your temporary quiet of 3F — the thing was that he said it like he meant that too.
Two weeks later, Estelle mentioned to Miriam that Jason had started coming down to the third floor on Tuesday mornings.
"Just to walk up together," she clarified, to no one who needed clarification.
Miriam opened a very good bottle of wine.
Gerald remained indifferent.
