Page 6

Four

A loud palm slaps against my door, interrupting my unpleasant discovery that someone on my engineering team has blithely checked his code in, wiping out my prior commit and introducing more bugs than a locust swarm in Egypt.

The rubber chicken of shame is coming for you, Noah.

It will be on your desk tomorrow, announcing to the whole TripFriendz world: I broke the build.

Slap.

Slap, SLAP SLAP.

From time to time, annoying sounds invade the cozy space of my loft.

Jackhammers, for instance, when the city decided to replace an entire sewer line at six in the morning.

The whine of the drone owned by the creeper from the penthouse suite.

The couple that enjoyed noisy sex, the more public, the better.

On a scale of overheard sex to rampant pneumatic tools, this, however, is a nine in terms of irritating. It sounds like there’s a battering ram working on my door, possibly an entire drum set that’s gone AWOL and is now banging out a percussive rhythm.

It morphs into an SOS, a pattern, three short taps, three long, and then three more short, the rhythm shifting smoothly into the shave-and-a-haircut earworm.

Ugh. I’ll have to reprogram my brain. Listen to some advertising jingles. If this is someone come to convince me that the end times are near and I need to repent, that someone and I are having words .

I stride to the door, mentally rehearsing ways to convey this sentiment. No, I do not need your salvation, thank you very much. Jesus and I have a prior understanding.

When I look out the peephole, an eye stares back at me. One beautiful, hazel eye with long, long lashes. OMG. I yelp, scrambling backward.

“Sorry!” someone—a male someone—shouts cheerfully. He backs up with outlandish thumping noises and then freaking waves at my door.

Ozzy Wylder is standing on—or at least adjacent to—my doorstep.

What the hell is wrong with him? Suggestions bubble up in my brain. He’s here for revenge. He wants to present me with the bill for his legal fees. He’s filming a stupid TikTok video.

I glare even though he can’t see me. It’s my default mode. I have resting grumpy face. “Go away.”

“Can we talk? I think we should talk! Can you come out? I’m not busy.”

This is irritating. And also, inconceivable.

I walk away. He doesn’t need my words—he has enough of them for both of us.

Point in case: he keeps on monologuing at my door. At the top of his lungs. “We need to improve our communication skills! This relationship isn’t working for me, and I feel like we should address my concerns. We should talk about this.”

He assumes I care about how he feels.

He’s so mistaken.

I throw myself back down on my couch. Remove my glasses.

Refocus on the screen of the laptop that I’ve been glued to so long that it has become an extension of my body.

Feet thud across the floor in the next-door loft.

The walls are made of brick, but somehow fail to mute the sounds coming from next door.

I need to introduce the topic of better soundproofing at the next condo association meeting.

More noise. Thumping interspersed with banging. Whistling. Ozzy lives life at full volume and likes singing about wieners. He’s deluded if he thinks I won’t complain. I slide back into my code and lose myself in the messy strands of Java.

Inked knuckles knock on the slider that leads to my balcony.

I know they’re inked because the brisk rat-a-tat-tat startles me out of my work and I inadvertently look up. Plus: memories. So much for me pretending that Ozzy Wylder does not exist.

The laptop threatens to slide off my thighs.

I make a grab for it, assessing my options.

I am curled up in a nest of pillows on my sofa, my spine bent in an S-curve that I’ll regret when I’m forty.

My live-work space is a baby loft, a tiny studio only slightly bigger than my TripFriendz cubicle, because San Francisco is expensive and it turns out that you cannot sell a kidney on the black market for rent money.

An Ozzy-shaped blob shouts enthusiastically at me through the slider. “I come in peace!”

Perhaps he would also like to sell me a nice bridge or his sea-view property in landlocked Missouri.

He takes a step back from the door, hunching his shoulders inward. It dawns on me that he is trying to look nonthreatening and small. The lion wants me to think he’s a harmless gazelle. A fuzzy kitten. A cute little bunny.

FYI: I was not born yesterday.

“What do you want?” I growl.

He waves enthusiastically. “To reintroduce myself!”

I narrow my gaze. I am a clumsy puffer fish, inflating into a spikey ball to deter a determined predator. “Go away.”

“Ozzy Wylder.” He rocks on his bare feet, grinning at me. “I just moved in yesterday.”

He fishes something out of his back pocket and holds it up to my slider door.

I put my glasses back on and determine the object is his driver’s license.

As the seconds tick by, I learn that he is six feet three inches tall.

He has blond hair and hazel eyes. He does belong to the fine state of Hawaii and if he dies, I have permission to harvest his organs.

It’s tempting to make good on that promise right now.

“You’re standing on my balcony,” I point out. “Get off my lawn.”

He blinks. My user input has startled him.

Is he nervous? Experiencing a nanosecond of vulnerability? Impossible. It’s just a system glitch.

“I live here, too.” He clears his throat. Resumes smiling because of course he does.

My laptop dings, announcing the birth of another software bug. I don’t have time for emotional connections. I have work to do before I head into the office. “No, you don’t. I believe we went over that earlier with the nice policemen.”

“Do, too!” He rocks back on his bare heels. Light blond hair dusts his feet. Apparently, I have a thing for feet. Ozzy’s feet, specifically. I stare and he wiggles his toes. He’s one big grinning sexual fishing lure.

I jerk my gaze away from his beautiful feet. Drag my eyes up his body because I will make eye contact if it kills me.

He’s fully clothed (disappointing) except for shoes.

A tear in one knee of his faded blue jeans frames inches of sun-kissed skin.

I want to lick him. The denim hugs his legs, his crotch, his whale of a surfer dick.

I may need a better sexual vocabulary, but I do not need a better imagination.

Do not sexualize thy neighbor. He is a pain in my ass, an interruption, a problem to be dealt with.

He holds up a sheaf of papers in his other hand. “I have a lease!” He is nice when he should be gloating. Or ignoring me. “Can I slide a copy under your door?”

He bends without waiting for permission, then frowns as the bottom of my slider door thwarts his stupid plan. My door is well-sealed against his intrusion. And also: ants. “Can we talk? I’ll buy you coffee!”

I glare some more. He beams back, brighter than a lighthouse. We are at an impasse.

My Roomba chugs obliviously between us, on a mission to eradicate dust and dirt.

Ozzy taps his chin thoughtfully. His driver’s license lies discarded on my patio table.

Whatever. Perhaps I can bore him into leaving. I return my attention to my laptop. Type a few lines. I’m so productive.

“We’re neighbors!” He points at his papers again.

Neighbor implies a degree of friendliness that I refuse to entertain. We merely share a border constructed from drywall, wood, and hostile intentions.

I look at him over the edge of my glasses. It is my patented irritated librarian look.

He grins. “We should hang out! Get to know each other!”

He speaks in exclamation points. Imagine being that positive.

How would it feel to be so confident that everyone you meet wants to speak with you?

If I were magically transformed into Ozzy for a day, I’d spend the first hour running up and down the beach like one of those nineties TV shows, effortlessly churning through the sand and flicking droplets of water from my chest. Then I’d randomly walk up to people—in the coffee shop, the produce aisle at the grocery, on the sidewalk—and chat them up.

Perhaps my mission to be a nicer, better person is misguided and people aren’t worth the effort and I can slink back into my ogre lair to live alone forever?

A girl can hope.

I shift my glare back to my laptop. Then I move two new bugs into my queue. I’ve resolved more tickets than my teammates this week and it’s still the weekend. There are zero boundaries between my work life and my (nonexistent) personal life, which is fine. I’m nothing without my job.

I whisper to my screen, “Remember my name.” Everyone else on my team uses cute nicknames like BugHugger and ByteFixer. I have spelled mine out. Pandora Fyffe fixed this.

Ozzy raps on the slider door again.

He’s persistent. He knows that I know that he knows he’s there.

There’s a one-way electric connection between his eyes and my belly.

I stare at the screen until he drops his hand.

Do I look as messy and disorganized as I feel?

My bun slides from its precarious perch on top of my head.

I haven’t showered in forty-eight hours and I can’t remember the last time I applied deodorant or brushed my teeth.

The door between us is as much for his sake as it is for mine.

I open up my text editor. I don’t need fancy software to do my job. What would Shonda do?

Shonda vowed to say yes for an entire year. My favorite word, on the other hand, is no. No, you cannot hard code values into the code. No, you may not sit there. No, you should not copy and paste from your last gig into our codebase because I do not endorse plagiarism.

“Can you come out to play?” Ozzy’s voice carries through the glass. I’m not sure I locked it, and my fingers twitch to check.

He waits. I wait. We’re attempting to out-wait each other and I am losing.