Room-maid(5)

“Uh, no. Go ahead.”

Well, what else could he say? No, creepy older woman with an inappropriate crush on me, put that back?

“Aw, look at you as a baby. So sweet,” she said. Lacking the strength to intervene and not wanting to participate in her invasiveness, I stayed put. Even though I desperately wanted to stand next to her and see all the pictures of him. I bet he was adorable.

She went on: “Oh, what happened here?”

Now I got to feel jealous as he stood close to her, in order to look over her shoulder. “The brace? One of my legs was shorter than the other and they had to lengthen it. Bunch of surgeries throughout my childhood. I still have some metal parts in my leg that set off metal detectors, but on the positive side, it’s aiding me in my quest to become a modern-day Frankenstein.”

The humor in his voice melted something inside me and I found myself saying, “No way. You should aim higher. Bionic Man. Cyborg. RoboCop.”

His attention was on me, his eyes sparkling with delight, and it was like all the air had been sucked out of the room. I couldn’t breathe. “I could have used that kind of optimism when I was a kid. Back then I was just mad about always being picked last for PE.”

I’d pick him first for PE. “They didn’t let you join in any reindeer games?”

He grinned. “Nope.”

Maybe this penthouse was deceiving and Tyler was more of an underdog than I’d thought. Having never been an underdog until recently, I felt an unexpected kinship for him.

Frederica put the photo book back on the shelf. If I moved in here, it was going to be the very first thing I’d be borrowing. Just for . . . informational purposes.

Tyler gestured toward the couches. “Should we sit? And can I get you something to drink?”

“Aren’t you sweet and so well mannered,” Frederica cooed as we sat down. “Your mama raised you right.”

A strange, haunted look flittered across Tyler’s face, then was gone just as quickly as it had appeared. “At the moment I have water and some kefir. Maybe some orange juice.”

“We’re fine,” she assured him. He sat down across from us and I tried to tell myself to look away from his face, because it was like staring into the sun. Like how every time there’s an eclipse scientists are constantly warning the public not to stare at it so as to not go blind, and everybody stares at it anyway.

Or how that woman in the Bible got turned into a pillar of salt because she couldn’t stop looking back.

That was me. About to be blinded and salinated.

“So I should probably tell you a little about me. I’m twenty-six years old, work in finance, am relatively neat, enjoy making lists, and travel more than I’d like. Because it takes me away from this good girl. This is Pigeon.” The dog was lying on the floor next to his feet, intermittently whimpering but stopping when Tyler petted her head.

I wondered why she hadn’t challenged us when we came into the penthouse. Didn’t dogs usually bark at strangers?

Tyler smiled at me and it was then I realized that if I didn’t say something soon, he was going to throw me out for being a quiet weirdo and I’d lose this apartment. I needed to speak. I cleared my throat and settled on, “Is she okay?”

“Pidge is just anxious around people she doesn’t know. The shelter I adopted her from thinks she was abused in her last home. It takes a while for her to warm up, but when she does, she’ll be the best buddy you could ask for.”

Why did the idea of him rescuing and loving an abused dog make my heart heat up and glow like a five-hundred-degree oven?

“That’s one of the reasons why I wanted a roommate. So that Pigeon isn’t left alone for four or five days at a time. I’ve tried taking her to a kennel or a doggy day care, but she’s terrified of the other people and the other dogs. She needs someone here in her home, where she feels safe.”

“You wouldn’t have to worry about that,” Frederica said. “Madison is not the kind of girl who will be out all the time. She has a serious boyfriend, Brad. They’re high school sweethearts.”

I tried not to flinch when she said that. It was sort of technically true, I reminded myself. Brad and I were high school sweethearts, and for all I knew, he might think we were together and he was still my boyfriend. Even though we hadn’t spoken in months.

“In fact,” she continued, “we’re all expecting an announcement from these two any day now.”

Again, still true. My mother had decided that once I graduated from college, Brad and I should get engaged. From what I’d heard last, she was still waiting for that to happen.

I couldn’t miss the relief that was evident on Tyler’s face. “That’s great!” I wondered if it was great because it meant I wasn’t going to throw myself at him, like that girl from college. Although now that I’d met him, I felt very empathetic toward her. I wondered how many women he had to fend off on a regular basis.

Probably thousands.

Then, as if to answer my unasked question, he said, “It’s important that I have that boundary established with whomever I share an apartment with. That we agree to be roommates and friends and nothing more. I was in a bad situation when I was younger that got worse and worse, and I don’t want to go through that again.”

From what he was saying, the last thing he needed was another woman throwing herself at him. I decided then and there that I would put my shallow, massive, and recent crush aside so that I could live in this apartment. It was close to my school, and an actual penthouse with no vermin and still-living people in it. I could control my starved hormones that, given the weird and limbo state of my last relationship, seemed to be desperate for affection and attention.