No One Knows Us Here(19)

I wanted this apartment more than I had wanted anything in a long, long time. I wanted it for my sister, to give her a second shot at a childhood, the childhood I’d never had. I could picture her having friends over, me wearing an apron, pulling a batch of cookies out of the oven. I would do that. I would do that for her. I could do that for her, if I lived here.

I wanted to fling my arms around Alejandro and dance him around the room. But I was getting ahead of myself. Showing all my cards. I narrowed my eyes and tried to come up with something critical to say about the place. “Let’s see the kitchen,” I said, all business.

“Six thousand,” I announced after touring the rest of the apartment.

“What?”

“I want six thousand a month.”

“Done,” Alejandro answered. He responded so quickly that it made me feel stupid, as if I’d settled for much less than expected. He held out his hand, and I shook it.





CHAPTER 8


Three days after I moved into my new place, I locked myself out. I had woken up in my bed in my new room, the one at the end of the hall. So far, it was the only furnished room in the apartment. I had no dining room set, no couch. I didn’t even have a chair. Over the next week I’d need to fill the apartment with rugs and paintings and furniture, to make it feel lived in, the kind of place a teenager could grow up in. I should have leaped out of bed and got cracking. That’s what I told myself. Still, I lingered under the warmth of the covers. It was so difficult to get up without a schedule to adhere to, a clock to punch in the morning.

I had quit in a blaze of glory. I signed for the lease of the apartment before even agreeing to the terms of the job with Leo—of course I did—and then I marched straight over to La Cuisine and announced “I quit!” in that triumphant way people do in the movies. Maybe I expected everyone to cheer. No one even heard me. I had to track Rick down in his office, and he didn’t seem that surprised or broken up about me leaving immediately. Don’t you need two weeks’ notice? I asked him. He said not to worry about it.

Margorie, at least, had delivered with an appropriate reaction. I was leaving, I told her down on the sales floor. I was moving up in the world, working for Lookinglass. It was true, I decided. More or less. She had yelped and screeched and then gripped me by the shoulders. Then she had frowned. She had asked what, exactly, I would be doing at Lookinglass. I hadn’t hammered out the details, I answered breezily. They were giving me time to move into my new place first. Margorie’s frown deepened, and I quickly made up something about getting an advance on my first paycheck.

I could have told her the truth then, right at the beginning. Margorie, of all my friends, would have understood. She wouldn’t have tried to talk me out of it, this whole sugar daddy arrangement. She might have even encouraged it. I didn’t, though. I liked the lie better. The idea of it.

A quick shower revived me somewhat. Wearing nothing but a short, thin bathrobe and a towel wrapped around my head, I decided to throw in a load of laundry, just to feel productive. Ten thirty on a Tuesday. No one would be around hogging the machines. The apartment building was dead quiet.

When I returned from the basement with my empty laundry basket, my door was locked, my keys somewhere inside. I spent a few futile minutes jiggling the doorknob before admitting it was useless. I couldn’t leave the apartment building with wet hair, barefoot, in a mini-robe. And even if I could leave, there was nowhere to go. It was raining outside, coming down in sheets.

I bent down at my waist, letting the towel fall into the laundry basket. My hair hung in wet strands.

Carl and Jessica, the apartment managers, lived on the first floor. I went back down there, pounded my fist against their door like a madwoman, and then rested my ear against it, listening. No one answered.

I couldn’t think of anything to do but sit on the lower steps of the lobby and wait for them.

A good forty-five minutes ticked by, affording me more than enough time to take a thorough inventory of every architectural detail of the lobby, before someone finally walked in.

I stood up on the bottom step and adjusted my robe.

He looked familiar, like someone I already knew, someone I should recognize, a long-lost friend or an obscure celebrity. I supposed it was because we lived in the same building. We must have already crossed paths.

I couldn’t help but notice that he was incredibly good-looking—good-looking in a tortured artist sort of way, with dark circles under his eyes and a fine line already forming between his eyebrows, though he was young. My age.

He walked right past me, almost brushing the satin sleeve of my robe, absorbed in his own thoughts. I had no choice but to follow him up the first flight of stairs and into the stairwell at the second floor. I thought of calling out to him but couldn’t figure out what to say.

At the fourth floor—my floor—he exited the stairwell. In the hallway, he stopped in front of the door to the apartment next to mine and took out his keys.

“Hi,” I said before he could disappear.

His head turned toward me in slow motion. At least that was how I remembered it, the way you tend to remember monumental events, like a car crash or the moment before death, when your entire life flashes before your eyes. There was something soothingly monochromatic about him. Gray T-shirt, darker gray sweater, like something a kindly grandfather might wear. Gray eyes. Nondescript brown hair, the color of dust.