Charlotte

In the end, the futon was my downfall.

It wasn’t having my sister leave for parts unknown.

Or giving her most of my money.

Or moving out of the condo I loved so much, only to move to this shithole apartment, where there was a good chance I was going to get knifed before I even got my stuff in the door.

So far, none of that had made me so much as swear. Much less cry. Or scream.

That stuff is just my life. It’s the shit that happens to me. Part of being a twin to my sister.

But this futon…

This futon was a punishment from God. It was the universe laughing at me.

It was stuck in the door of my new apartment, folded up like a taco. An immoveable, three-thousand-pound taco.

And it wasn’t moving.

This is just what you get for not hiring movers. Or having a boyfriend. Or anyone really, who could help move a girl with five boxes, three garbage bags, and a futon mattress to her name.

Oh, and several thousand dollars in computer and drafting equipment. All sitting safely in the corner of my apartment. I moved Izzy in first (yes, I named my system. It seemed only right, considering how much time I spend with her) and threw a sheet over her. Paranoid about this new neighborhood, I locked up between trips to my rental truck to get the rest of my stuff. Which was now all sitting behind me on the cracked cement walkway.

Except for the current bane of my existence.

The futon.

Which, I’d like to point out, I got out of the back of the truck, dragged down the path from the parking garage to this point, actually folded it up like a taco and got it halfway through the door.

But now my shaky-exhausted-unused-to-this-amount-of-work (any kind of work actually that doesn’t involve a mouse, a pencil or a stylus) muscles had given up.

And to add insult to injury, my hair was getting in on the joke, by pulling out of my hair elastic and headband to pop up in white-blond corkscrews and fall into my face. It was sticking to my neck.

It was making me crazy.

Everything. Every single thing was making me crazy. After two weeks of keeping my shit together I was going to lose it. Right here.

Stop. Charlotte, you can do this.

I gave myself a little pep talk and swallowed down the primal scream of “WHAT THE FUCK HAS HAPPENED TO MY LIFE!”

“Come on,” I muttered and put my back up against the futon. I put my back against it and pushed. And got nothing. Got nowhere.

Exhausted, my legs buckled and I barely caught myself against the futon before landing flat on my butt.

I turned and pushed my face and hands against the futon, stretched my legs out behind me, and pushed with all my not-inconsiderable weight.

Suddenly, it bent sideways, throwing me nearly into the wall, and then lodged itself, half in my door and half against the metal staircase leading up to the second floor of the apartment building.

Nope. No. I wasn’t going to cry. Not over this.

I just needed help.

And if the thought of actually having to talk to a human to make that help happen, seemed to me to be worse than the futon nightmare, that was just my damage.

You have to get over this, my sister used to tell me. The world is full of people. No one lives a completely people-free life.

The only people I used to need were my sister, the girl who made my afternoon coffee at the coffee shop on my old corner, and the fantasy of one of the guys down at the organic fruit stand near where I used to live.

But now they were all gone.

I needed new people.

And the fact that I had to find those people here, at Shady Oaks, this end-of-the-road place… well, it made me want to howl.

The small outdoor courtyard I was currently trapped in was empty. The three stories of balcony loomed over my head, the chipped paint a kind of nondescript beige. The pool in the middle—filled with a half-foot of last year’s dried-up leaves and a few hundred cigarette butts—had a few busted-up lawn chairs sitting around its edge, but no one was sitting in them. The laundry area beneath the staircase directly across the courtyard from me was dark and quiet.

My new apartment was beneath the other corner stairway, a weird little shadowy enclave of privacy that the superintendent said leaked—but only when it rained.

The superintendent was more funny sob, than funny ha ha, if you asked me.

I’d never actually met the super, if you could believe that. Everything was done through email. Which at the time had seemed ideal. Now it seemed…sketchy.

Shady Oaks was a ghost town.

Normally I’d love that. But today, today I just needed a little help. Today I needed a flesh-and-blood person.

And of course there was no one.

I gave myself exactly a three count of pity. That was it. That was all I got.

One.

Two.

“What’s going on?” a voice asked. A male voice. And I leaned away from the wall and looked around my futon mattress to see a … guy.

Like a guy guy. A hot guy.

A man, really.

A very sweaty man. His frayed gray tee shirt where it stretched across his shoulders was black with sweat, and it poured down his face. He was my height, maybe a few inches taller. Which in the world of dudes made him kind of short. But he was thick and square, giving the impression that he was taller than he was. And bigger.

Did I say big?

While I watched, he lifted the bottom edge of his shirt and wiped his forehead, revealing that even his six-pack abs were sweating.

“You gonna move this thing?” he asked, scowling at me while I stared at his abs.

I blew a curl out of my face and tried for my best cheerful tone. I even smiled.

“Trying to. But I think the futon likes it here.”

“I can’t get into my apartment,” he said. Ignoring my joke, he pointed at the door next to mine, the door he couldn’t get to past the futon barricade.

“Oh,” I said, inanely, trying not to stare at his sweat or his body. “We’re neighbors.”

“Yeah. What are you doing with the futon?”

“Well, you’re welcome to try and reason with it, but I’ve found it very disagreeable—”

“You moving it in or out?” he asked. My charm completely not charming to him.

“In—”

With one hand—one hand—he shoved the futon into my apartment. After it squeezed through the door it flopped open in the middle of my white-tiled kitchen.

I leaned into my doorway.

“Wow,” was all I could say.

“You want it there?” he asked.

“In my kitchen?” I laughed. “While I can appreciate the commute for coffee—”

Sweaty grumpy guy had dark brown eyes—Pantone color 0937 TCX, if I was being exact—set wide in a flushed face, and I only got a glimpse of them before he was inside my apartment.

Without asking, he just stomped right in.

“Wait…what?”

“Bedroom?” he asked.

I blinked at him, thinking of my livelihood under the sheet in the corner, and if he tried to rob me I wouldn’t be able to stop him.

I wouldn’t be able to stop him from doing…anything.

And I’d had that fantasy about the guys at the fruit stand locking me inside the store with all of them. But this was not that.

This was Shady Oaks, and a burly stranger just walking into my apartment like he had that kind of right.

“Do you want this in your bedroom?” He said it slowly, like I was an idiot.

“You don’t have to do this.”

“You can’t do it.” His eyes skated across my body, taking in my paint-splattered overalls and the hot pink tank top I wore underneath it.

He couldn’t see that my tank top had Big Bird on it. But he looked at me like he knew.

He looked at me like I had a sign that said 185-pound weakling on it.

“I’m putting it in your bedroom.”

And he took the futon by the corner, like the hand of a misbehaving child, and dragged it through my shabby kitchen, past the living room with its bank of barred windows, and then into my bedroom. I followed but stopped in the living room by the sheet-covered Izzy, as if to keep her calm, or to stand in his way in case he tried to touch her.

I could just see the shadow of him in my bedroom as he all but tossed my futon onto the floor.

Funny how he was doing a nice thing, but still I managed to feel both threatened and insulted.

Deep breath, Charlotte, I told myself. Deep breath.

He was out a second later, standing in the doorway of my bedroom, thick and square. His damp shirt clung to every muscle. And he had…he had a lot of muscles. Thick round knobs of them. Lean, hard planes of them. He was made of muscles.

He’d been running, or working out or something. He wore running shoes and athletic shorts that were frayed in the same well-used way his shirt was. White earbuds had been tucked into the waistband of his shorts, and dangled down by his…well. Shorts.

His black hair was buzzcut short, down practically to his scalp. And his face, now that the flush was gone and the sweat had slowed down, looked like it had recently taken a beating. His eye was dark and his lip had a cut. His nose looked like it had been broken a few times.

He carried himself like a guy who lived in his whole body. Like every molecule was under his control. I lived in exactly 12% of my body. I wasn’t even sure what my hair was doing.

“You done?” he asked.

“Moving?”

“Staring.”

All the blood in my body roared to my face. My stomach curled into a ball like a wounded hedgehog trying to protect itself from further harm.

“Thank you,” I said, staring intently at the edge of a tile in my kitchen. It was chipped, the white enamel long gone. “That was nice of you to help.”

“No big deal.” He stepped into the living room and I went back against the wall, giving him a wide, wide berth. Wanting to keep as much distance between us as I could.

He stopped. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“You think I’m going to hurt you?”

“I’m not sure what you’re going to do.”

He made a grunting noise and stood there like he was waiting for me to look at him, but I did not. I burned under his gaze and fussed with my sheet, wishing Izzy was set up so I could just work, instead of… this.

Instead of being human with humans.

And then he was gone. Leaving behind the smell of man. And sweat. And it was not a bad smell. It was just different, and it did not belong in my space.

I folded forward at the waist, sucking in a breath.

Jeez. Wow.

That dude was potent.

And I was pretty much an idiot.

I walked into the bedroom and used all of my strength to slide the futon out of the middle of the room and against the wall. There was another thump in the living room, and I realized with my heart in my throat that I’d left my door open. I ran out only to find my sheet still over Izzy, but the rest of my stuff had been brought in.

Two big boxes and the garbage bags.

He’d moved the rest of my stuff in and then he left.

That was…nice.

Unexpected and nice.

Neighborly, even.

I thought about knocking on his door to say thank you. It was what I should do. It was the right thing to do. Neighborly. It was what my sister would have done.

My sister would have gone over and thanked him and then probably screwed him.

But I was not that person. I was the opposite of that person.

Silently, like he could hear me—and maybe he could, I had no idea how thick these walls were—I stepped to my door and then shut it.

And then locked it.

And chained it.

Taking a deep breath, I turned and looked at my new home, with its chipped tile and the barred windows. The bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. Outside, there was a siren and a dog barking.

Next door, my neighbor turned on his stereo, answering the question regarding how thick my walls were. Paper thin.

For a moment the grief and the panic and fear were overwhelming. Tears burned behind my eyes and I couldn’t take a deep breath. But I pushed the panic back. Smothered it. Just set it aside like a bag I didn’t want to carry anymore. I had so many of those kinds of bags, all along the edges of my life.

I closed my eyes and searched for calm.

Deep breath, Charlotte. This is not so bad. This is not forever. This is not permanent. This place is not your world.

I opened my eyes and took in my new home again, with my rose-colored glasses fully in place.

It wasn’t so bad here. The hardwood floors in the living room and bedroom were nice. A coat of paint. Some curtains to hide the bars. My coffee pot. Izzy up and humming in the corner.

It would feel like home. It would.

I could ignore the neighbor. I was good at ignoring actual humans.

As bad as this place was, and it was bad, I had to remind myself that it was actually perfect.

Because no one—even if they were looking—would find me here.

And my sister was okay. She was safe.

Which was all that mattered.

Pick up Bad Neighbor