When No One Is Watching(27)

I have to wear flip-flops when I head into the shower, but I also don’t feel as if the pounding spray is reminding me what a loser I am. If I needed a reason to start hitting the gym daily again, I guess I’ve found it.

Or maybe you’re trying to lose the dad bod for a certain neighbor.

I ignore inconvenient thoughts of Sydney while showering in public, then towel off and head to my locker. The elastic of my boxers has just snapped around my waist when I whip my head to the right, my body reacting to some disturbance in the force before my mind does. There’s a guy sitting farther down on the bench where I’ve laid out my clothes, looking up at me with a goofy grin—he has trendily messy hair and thick stubble that makes me itchy just looking at it.

I look away from him and grab my gray sweatpants.

“Hey, bro,” he says. “You live on Gifford, right?”

I glance at him out of the corner of my eye and realize I’ve seen this big head and square jaw before. “Yeah. You worked at the real estate place, right?”

“Right.” His smile grows wider. “I was just office staff back then. Made copies of your papers and stuff while you were closing on the house. Full-fledged agent with all the benefits now, though.”

I slip on my T-shirt, partly to mask what is probably a look of pure WTF on my face. That was one of the things Kim had liked about me at first that had later grown to annoy her when we went to her fancy work parties. “Can’t you even pretend to be interested? You’re so bad at faking! Like, god, have you ever even won a poker game?”

I’d turned my face away from hers without answering, and she’d assigned her own personal meaning to that, as people generally do. Who needs pretending when people do your work for you?

“Um, good for you,” I say to my weird locker room buddy who’s making me reassess my newfound fitness goals. “Congrats.”

“You like your job, man?” he asks.

“I like it well enough,” I lie.

“If you’re looking for something on the side, I can get you in at my agency. We have the lockdown on this neighborhood, and with VerenTech moving in? It’s gonna change everything.” He mimics an explosion with a loud kaboosh. “You ever see pictures of an atomic bomb drop? Not the mushroom cloud, but that energy rippling out, completely changing the landscape? That’s what VerenTech’s about to do here.”

“You know that isn’t a good thing, right?”

He chuckles. “Depends on who you ask. Get in now if you want that good money, bro. I can hook you up.”

He hands me a card, which I take with pinched thumb and forefinger because he’s sitting here in tightie-whities and I don’t know where he pulled it from.

The card has a weird font that’s supposed to be trendy but just makes it hard to read: William Bilford, Real Estate Master, BVT Realty.

“Yeah. Thanks. I appreciate it.”

A couple of Black dudes walk in from their shower and William Bilford turns back to putting on his clothes, winking at me as he does. I guess this is what happens when you stop skulking in your room or walking the streets when no one is around—you run into some really weird people.

I tuck the card into the pocket on the side of my gym bag, then make my way back toward Gifford Place, walking slow and taking everything in. It’s slightly less humid than when I went in—the telltale puddles show it rained sometime during my workout, and there’s a light breeze coming down the street, cool on my wet scalp. The sounds of this larger street amplify whatever feel-good hormones the treadmill has pumped into me: the squeal of a bus’s brakes as it screeches to a halt down the street, the flap of a pigeon’s wings as it takes off after stealing a bread crust from a small brown bird, the roll of tires on wet asphalt.

I almost stop walking as it really hits me: I’m in a good mood. Despite the weird night I had and the fact that my maybe-ex-girlfriend/co-homeowner is clearly stepping out on me. The basic facts of my life haven’t changed, and even if I don’t feel like shit, I’m still a piece of it, but I don’t really care about that right now. Because—

I spot Sydney through a gap in the foliage that clings to the chain-link fence in front of the community garden that I’ve passed countless times. I’d checked out its value, wondering how it still existed in an area where houses would soon be on the market for a million-plus, but now I really see all the bright beauty of it. Sydney is on her hands and knees, her hair styled in long, thin teal-tipped braids cinched in a twist atop her head and her ass encased, barely, in denim shorts.

I should keep walking, but I turn into the open gate of the garden. Instead of approaching Sydney directly, I take a little turn around the place, checking out the various plots and what people are growing. Lots of tomatoes and leafy greens. A half-built henhouse. Flowers galore, and rows of cuttings waiting to be planted. I’m not super interested in plants, but it feels weird to walk up on her from behind. Now, as I make my way around a plot that seems to be growing some kind of frizzy lettuce, she glances up at me.

I thought gardening was supposed to be a relaxing hobby, but her mouth is turned down in a grimace so pronounced that it’s almost comical. Her gaze is hard, underscored by dark circles beneath her brown eyes, and it doesn’t soften when she sees me. She takes a deep breath and stands, revealing that her shorts are the overalls she was wearing at the corner store, with both straps buttoned over a black T-shirt. She strips gloves from her hands and throws them onto the ground next to the box she’s been working in.