Page 15

Nine

W ater balloons were a bad idea, but Ozzy’s kiss fried my logic circuits.

I will cling to that belief until I’m dead. One kiss does not a peace agreement make. Blah, blah, blah.

Ergo, I’ve filled a ridiculous number of balloons with water.

It turns out that they’re surprisingly heavy and even more awkward to transport, which leads to my current predicament.

Instead of conveying them upstairs and positioning them above Ozzy’s door, my miscalculations regarding weight and size have run me aground on the door to the mail room.

Someone should have sanded it, but did not, and now I’ve impaled my water balloons.

There is water absolutely everywhere.

I’ve run my Titanic up against an iceberg and it popped.

I mop the flooded mail room floor with maniacal determination because the sooner I finish here, the sooner I can go lie down and pretend that today never happened. I’m erasing this Friday from my memory banks.

“This is unexpected,” Ozzy says from somewhere behind me.

I jump and water droplets fly everywhere. We have to stop these water-based meetings. “I live here.”

“So you do.” He has a box tucked under his arm.

His hazel eyes scan the mail room, come to rest on the puddle I’ve mostly but not entirely cleaned up, check out the voluminous stack of used paper towel I’ve deposited in the trash can.

ChatGPT was not wrong when it admonished me to stick to pranks that were easy to clean up.

“Water balloons?”

I shrug. Duh would be a syllable too far.

“We may have gone too far.” He makes it into a statement and not a question.

He’s not wrong, but I decide to disagree just on principle. I shake my head, which compounds my water balloon misjudgment because my wet hair slaps my cheeks. I regret my poor life choices.

“Can we declare peace? I’d like a peace treaty.”

I summon up enough energy to glare in his direction, but the flame of my wrath has been extinguished by all this water.

Oblivious to my discomfort, Ozzy shakes his head, taking in the disaster I’ve created. He says something to himself that I don’t catch, then sets his package down on the counter. He looks at the floor. “Do you want some help cleaning this up?”

My face burns. I’m spontaneously combusting.

I opt to lie. “I’ve got it.”

To prove my point, I restart my mopping. I liberated my cleaning equipment from the maintenance closet, but it has so far proved inadequate. Pieces of broken water balloon are everywhere. It’s rubber carnage.

I imagine what the condo board will say when they pop in for their L.L.Bean catalogs and vitamin deliveries. I won’t get evicted, will I? I work a little faster. A good engineer can obfuscate her bugs. I’m hoping the same principle applies here.

“What happened?” Ozzy asks, grabbing the other mop.

I refuse to confess. Once the deluge is gone, it’s as if it never happened. “Is anyone coming?”

He disappears, presumably to check the lobby.

When he returns, he offers up a “No.”

He mops alongside me silently. He knows, though. I can tell, even though he doesn’t say a word. I’m sure he’s gloating. He’ll kick the bucket of dirty water over when we’re finished and rub it in that my prank has backfired. That I’m the loser.

Or not. He mops, I mop, and all he does is empty out the bucket. I don’t ask where. I can’t afford to care.

When he comes back the last time, there’s a squishing sound.

“Uh-oh.” He holds up a sodden messenger bag. My bag. “Is this yours?”

I wish it wasn’t. I wish my bag was upstairs, or at least on the nice, dry counter next to Ozzy’s box. Which is, I realize, addressed to me. It has air holes and is labeled Live Poultry. I can feel my shoulders slump.

I’m hoisted by my own petard. Unless there’s been a technology miracle, the questionnaire responses that I spent the last two hours collecting furtively outside the corner market are gone. I was offline and the data will not have synced to my cloud account. All that work is gone. Poof.

“Uh.”

I sink down onto the mail room floor. I want a do-over on today. I don’t want to be sad. I won’t be sad. I’m manifesting it into existence.

“Hey.” He crouches down beside me, and his shoulder nudges mine. He is warm and solid. I am ridiculously mad that he is not soaked.

I ignore his one-syllable overture. I require full sentences.

“Truce?” He extends a paw. Waves it in front of my face.

I consider my options. “Do you admit defeat?”

He snorts. “Are we fighting?”

“Yes,” I splutter. I wish I sounded cooler or more put together. I’ll take things I’ll never be for two hundred dollars, Alex. “Do you pay no attention at all to what’s going on around you?”

He ignores my question, hopping to his feet. It’s a miracle my abs don’t hurt just watching him.

“Come on.”

“Excuse me?” I would never move again but leftover water has seeped through the seat of my yoga pants.

“Come. With. Me. Why are you so difficult?” He waves his big paw at me again.

He believes he is a motivational speaker.

That it’s a miracle I don’t throw myself at him and declare my undying love for his thoughtful words.

For insisting on these conversations. Breathing on our shared balcony— why, what reason does he have for torturing me like this?

It’s against the Geneva Conventions. Desperate, I launch my nuclear arsenal.

Pew-pew-pew. Our condo disappears beneath mushroom clouds of toxic smoke.

Radioactive particles. Fission byproducts.

Ozzy is unfazed. I get to my feet, mostly because my butt is wet.

He sighs dramatically. “Why are you fighting with me?”

Because he started it.

“We’re not. I barely know you exist.”

He levels a look at me. It’s part smirk, part warm amusement, part annoying. I can’t decide which part I hate most, but they’re all in close contention. “Sure you don’t. You’re mad at me about the Miles To Go kiss.”

Boom . Whoosh? Does a nuclear bomb make a sound when it lands? I’d google, but I am floored. Ozzy grabs the remnants of my water balloon monster and tosses them into the communal trash can. I let him.

Because…

He remembers…

The kiss.

I am not a stranger. He did not forget me. The ground shifts. The mail room’s second-rate laminate flooring is pulled out from under me.

He scans my face. “Did you think I forgot?”

Again: Duh?

I don’t know what to say here. Fortunately for me, Ozzy is already talking. It’s a miracle he paused for breath long enough to kiss me.

He shakes his head. “Wait. Did you forget? You did.”

His lips turn down. He looks away, frowning at the hapless wall of mailboxes on the other side of this too-small room.

He blinks slowly, speech drying up, and I feel him pulling away.

He looks…hurt? It’s not an expression I associate with Ozzy.

He’s not supposed to know what it feels like to be on the outside, looking in.

From my point of view, I’m the injured party here.

We kissed each other, but he’s the one who walked away.

If he’s known all along who I am, what we did together, why hasn’t he mentioned it before?

He frowns. “I thought—”

Whoops. Did I say it out loud?

His face flushes. He tries again. “I thought you didn’t want to talk about it.”

“Wow. There is something off-limits in your conversational arsenal.”

He gives me a look. “Did. You. Forget?”

I shake my head.

He asks the obvious question. “So why didn’t you mention it?”

Our kiss looms between us. It’s growing bigger, deeper, hotter with each passing second. By the time I reach the safety of my condo, it will be Godzilla-sized.

I grab my poor bag and trudge out of the mail room. Ozzy follows. Is this a draw?

Am I conceding defeat? Is he ? Nothing about this feels the way I expected it to.

I spend the yearlong walk to the stairwell rehearsing my answers to his question.

Oh—that kiss? It was so long ago, such a solitary, unimportant kiss, so short!

Kisses are like shoes: I have so many! Believable?

Not so much. I imagine my next kiss and how the person I kiss will be all the things Ozzy is not.

I’ll kiss someone softer, curvier, who fits into my arms?

My imagination wraps us around each other and she’s so into me and me into her.

She’ll be nothing like Ozzy. We’ll kiss in the car or the park, in front of my door when she drops me off after our bookstore date or on my sofa like regular people do.

There will be no sand, no ocean, no barbarian rushing out of the darkness and overwhelming me with his Ozziness .

People won’t wonder why she’s dating me. We’ll match.

When we reach our floor, Ozzy pushes the door open and holds it.

He doesn’t move. He’s glued to the door like the sexiest of doormen.

“You hate asking for help.” Amusement fills his voice. “No. You hate needing help.”

He’s right.

Just to prove him wrong, however, I march past him. My messenger bag bangs soddenly against my hip.

Ozzy looks concerned. “Do you want some rice for your electronics?”

What I really want is an Apple Genius Bar, but it’s far too late. “How do you know I have electronics inside my bag? It could be anything! Tampons, library books, a teacup poodle.”

He smirks. “You’re more connected than a cyborg, Dora. I’m surprised you didn’t short-circuit when you got wet.”

He makes an unattractive popping sound. Flares his fingers out. Is that me meeting a wet demise like the Wicked Witch of the West? He’d make a terrible charades partner.

“I have funeral arrangements to make,” I tell him.

My tablet requires a ceremonial burial and a panicked replacement.

“Our kiss wasn’t that bad.” His shoulders hunch. “But I won’t mention it again.”

It wasn’t bad at all, even if it wasn’t much longer than the walk to my front door.