Page 22

Twelve

R osie follows me out of the conference room and back to my cubicle.

Noah high-fives me. Enzo waves as he tears by on his scooter.

He might mean late, I’m late for a very important date or surf’s up .

I slap my palm against Noah’s and say nothing to Enzo’s disappearing back.

I have bigger problems than my nonexistent communication skills.

I slump down into my desk chair. It has been a thousand hours since I last sat here. “How do I pitch this to Ozzy?”

I grab a whiteboard and wait for inspiration to strike. Any. Minute. Now. Rosie drops onto the yoga ball across me.

“Are you dating him?” she squeals. “I need updates! A relationship status!”

Relationships move at light speed in Rosie-land.

“Who’s Pandora dating?” Noah follows her in.

I fake intense interest in the whiteboard cradled in my lap. “No one.”

“Ozzy Wylder,” Rosie says.

My face burns. “Am not. Can we focus on the real problem here?”

“I heard there’s a TikTok of you two devouring each other on a beach,” Noah offers.

What?

Not only did I not consent to any recording of beach time activities, but the news of my algorithmically perfect match with Ozzy has traveled faster than data packets on the internet.

Rosie’s still spouting questions. “Was there actual mouth-on-mouth action in this alleged video? Or was this ‘devouring’—” her air quotes are so exuberant that Noah has to lean back “—taking place on a southern continent, so to speak?”

“Jesus! No!” I’m appalled my coworkers think I would make a sex tape and share it with the internet.

“I would totally be up for some geographical adventuring with Ozzy. He’s built. He’s hot. Even if he totally sucked in the bedroom, I could just look at—”

“Just stop.” I do not want to discuss Ozzy’s dick with Rosie, even if I can provide valuable eyewitness testimony about its magnificence. “My having slept with him has nothing to do with this road trip!”

“You had sex with Ozzy?” Noah’s shock is palpable.

Rosie has follow-up questions. “Did you take photos? Does Neoprene downplay or in any way exaggerate his goods?”

“Do the insides live up to the packaging? How did the two of you meet?” Noah wants to know.

My stomach clenches. Rosie makes a “give it up” gesture. Or maybe it means “come on”? That there’s a fly in the room? Whatever. I don’t speak hand. “He lives next door to me.”

There’s a moment of silence while Rosie and Noah consider the intersection of my sex life with Ozzy’s. Noah’s dumbfounded, leaning toward incredulous, which is not flattering.

Rosie gets out her phone and taps with the determination of a woodpecker drilling into a pine tree.

“This is the Ozzy Wylder in question, correct?” She holds her phone up.

On her screen, #SexGodOzzy—yes, he has his own ridiculous hashtag—flies across the surface of the ocean.

Dark board shorts hang low on his lean hips, his chest is a naked masterpiece of muscles and ink, and a terrifying mountain of water rises behind him.

Personally, I’d be curled up in a ball preparing to die, but he’s laughing.

Foamy bits of the wave wet his hair. No big deal.

Also, I suspect he’s inhuman. Possibly an alien warlord checking out Earth as a possible conquest.

“The world couldn’t handle two of him. Yes.”

Noah looks impressed. “ You know him .”

“I do. I believe I mentioned he’s my next-door neighbor.”

“You had sex with him.”

“Inappropriate.”

“Wow.” Rosie makes a sucking sound. “You told me you did, so technically you started this conversation.”

“Can you just help me figure out how to convince him to go on a road trip with me?” Noah opens his mouth. “Bribing him with sex is not an option.”

His face falls.

Rosie scratches something off her whiteboard.

“Professional options only, please.”

Rosie sighs. “Well, I guess you could always just talk to him.”

Stalking Ozzy is harder than you would think.

Plus, once I find him, I tend to want to kill him (except when I’m riding him like my own sex stallion but…

details). I could knock on his door. Text.

Move into the mail room, order him something perishable, and wait for him to collect the lure.

The next step, however, would have to involve either casual conversation or groveling.

Mulling over my (non)options, I head out onto the balcony. Everything is in its place, my outdoor egg-shaped chair buried beneath a stack of pillows. My spider plant has sent its babies through the railing and into Ozzy’s territory. It may be taken hostage. Sent running back for the border…

As if I’ve conjured him up, Ozzy saunters out his slider door. Maybe stalking isn’t as hard as I think?

Our eyes meet. Mine dive south, checking him out.

Tonight, he’s wearing faded blue jeans and a battered green T-shirt advertising a taco stand somewhere I’ve never been.

He heads toward me confidently, as self-assured here as he is on the water.

And in bed. And up against his wall. I tell my brain to stop it. He’s my nemesis.

He stops just before the half wall that separates our spaces and holds up a whiteboard that’s shaped like an apple. There are two annoying perky green leaves and a stem on top. On it, he’s written: GROUND RULES, PLEASE .

Yes, in all caps.

The neon green marker clashes with the red of the apple outline.

I open my mouth. Come on out, words. Please be sharp and witty.

Instead, I’m silent. Befuddled.

I blame Ozzy.

When I fail to respond to his written overture, he erases the words with the hem of his T-shirt. I barely resist the temptation to admire the V-cut that his industrious scrubbing exposes.

Ozzy writes, the muscles in his forearm flexing. Then he writes some more. He’s recreating that famous, never-ending Russian novel about a French invasion gone awry. Congressional budgets are shorter. Finally, he finishes and holds the board up for me to read:

You declined further personal contact with me. You said to never, ever speak to you again. As a modern male with excellent boundaries and listening skills, I am honoring your demand for silence and a cessation of spoken conversation.

Oh.

He adds a smiley face. He has excellent writing skills. The letters are strong and uniform. I’m sure he was the handwriting star of his fourth-grade class.

He’s never going to let me live this down. “I take it back.”

I identify the grin that lights up his face as evil genius . What will he do? More to the point, what will he say?

He nods. Agreement is good. “Great.”

“Okay.” I am a pirate, and he is the ship I’m boarding. I’ve dropped the plank between our two vessels and now all I need to do is walk across it. Easy-peasy.

He spins on his heel and saunters back toward his door. What?

“That’s it?” I need more words. Nouns. Verbs. I’d even take an adverb.

“Yeah.” He waves the hand holding the whiteboard. I need Rosie here to interpret. Is he giving me the bird? A mutant peace sign? Jazz hands? The slider door closes behind him. The music starts up again.

Executive summary: that did not go well.

I retreat inside and tap ChatGPT about possible next steps (grovel, the chatbot suggests), reject said steps (write a note of apology, it suggests), and then check in with Rosie for an alternate opinion ( why is he not speaking to u?

she texts back, followed by: what did u do?

). Neither computer program nor human has a flattering opinion of my people skills.

I guess it’s true that I alienate people with my imitation of a hedgehog. Still. It’s not them, it’s me.

Think, Pandora, think .

An idea pops into my head. A wonderful, awful, terrible idea. It costs me thirty bucks and it’s worth every penny. Imperfect soundproofing and my overfamiliarity with Ozzy’s music? Correlation. Loud music resulting in my desire to seek him out and yell? Causation.

I barely resist the urge to fist pump as my newly purchased Wagnerian opera soundtrack floods my loft. The windows vibrate. The floor shakes. For good measure, I sing along with Isolde. Take that, Ozzy Wylder. I’m loud and annoying, too.

This is exactly what Shonda would do. She’d 10,000 percent sing like nobody is watching.

Listening. Whatever. My knowledge of opera is limited to the look-inside option for Opera for Dummies but…

this tune isn’t bad. Almost catchy. I can’t dance, but I do some lunges and perform a stretching video I downloaded years ago but never started.

I bounce up and down. Throw my arms up in the air.

My heart thanks me. My lungs wheeze. It’s possible Ozzy texts.

Knocks on my door. It’s impossible to hear anything.

Seven long arias later, Ozzy starfishes on my slider door.

Gotcha . He catches my eye and sinks to his knees.

He’s pleading. Or praying dramatically. According to the internet summary, Isolde is either scream-singing about her love for Tristan or (my personal opinion) she has the world’s worst head cold.

The aria is all hacking, nasal syllables.

I make Ozzy suffer an additional thirty seconds before I pause the music (also, we do have a noise ordinance in the building).

I open the door. “Yes? Am I allowed to speak to you, your highness?”

He’s shaking his head. “You have shit taste in music, Panda.”

Imagine that. “Did you enjoy it?”

Now the look he sends my way is positively aghast. “Were you killing a legion of very sad Germans in here?”

Isolde was opining on Tristan’s sexiness in a foreign language. I’m not a heathen—I’m a monoglot.

I break out my best haughty tone. “I love opera. I plan on listening to it whenever I’m working.”

Subtext: you heathen.

Now Ozzy looks pained. “You work like twenty hours a day.”

I smile. “Yep.”

He deflates visibly. He’s got the picture.

Imagine the horror, Ozzy. Emotionally tormented sopranos assaulting your eardrums every waking moment.