Chapter 16: The Old Apartment

Thursday, 7:28 pm

I looked around my tiny apartment and suddenly found it very hard to swallow. I hadn’t spent a lot of time in this place since I’d signed the paperwork at YPV and bought Marduke, but despite that, it felt like I was severing the last remaining tie to my life before I found out about my grandfather. While I hadn’t been capable of buying a G6, I wasn’t broke either, and I was relatively happy. Things were better now, but immensely complicated.

“Is that everything?”

A couple of movers had accompanied me to pick up the remainder of my possessions after the bulk of stuff had been moved and had just finished loading the boxes in the truck. All two boxes. I felt it was unnecessary to waste their time, but Erin had assured me that at the rate I was paying them, they were happy to do it, and my time was too valuable to transport boxes from one house to another.

I reached out with my foot and slid the toe of my shoe into the mangled remains of the old couch the intruder had slit open like a hunter gutting a fresh kill. It had been where Helen and I fucked for the first time. Good times.

My phone buzzed in my hand, pulling me out of my journey down memory lane, and I glanced at it - Jessica again. I hit the reject call button and turned to the movers. “Yeah. I think that’s everything.”

The mover nodded. “Alright. We’ll go ahead and take it to the apartment.” He offered his hand and I shook it. “Thanks for your business.” I’m sure he was thankful ... I’d paid them four times their day rate to move a few rooms’ worth of belongings. He and his helper headed for the door, and I followed them into the hall to watch them leave. As they reached the stairwell, two people rounded the corner and headed my way - Jim and Phoebe Lucas.

Jim stood at an imposing six feet and four inches high, with blond hair, blue eyes, and a slightly weathered face that only seemed to make the man more handsome instead of detracting from his looks. He wore jeans, a flannel shirt, and his signature trucker hat. Phoebe looked lovely in jeans, a white button-down shirt, and a light navy jacket. Half her dark copper hair had been pulled back and kept in place with a silver clip to keep it out of her face. As they approached I got a small, tight-lipped smile from her. Jim, however, decided to have a conversation.

“You moving out?” he asked pausing at his door across the hall.

“Yep,” I said, “the place is pretty trashed, so I can’t exactly live here anymore.”

“Bet you can’t,” Jim said, and I noticed his words were a little slurred. “‘Specially now that you have all that money.”

Phoebe winced at her husband’s rude tone. She tugged on his arm and said, “Come on, honey. I’m sure Marcus is busy.”

Jim shrugged her off. “How much did you get? The news said you were a billionaire now.”

“I guess that’s about right,” I replied. I glanced at Phoebe and she gave me an apologetic look.

“Fuck. It’s the most useless ones who have all the luck,” Jim huffed.

“Jim!” Phoebe exclaimed.

I was a little surprised at Jim’s frankness. It’d always been Jim’s posture and tone that had given me the impression he didn’t approve of me, but he’d never said anything outright hostile. In fact, I’d be surprised if Jim said more than fifty words to me the entire time we lived across from one another.

My phone buzzed in my hand again and I looked at it. It was a notification that Jessica had left me a voicemail, which I knew it would be worth listening to because it was something she detested doing. Curious, I looked back at Jim, no longer interested in talking to him. “I don’t know what to tell you, Jim. Sorry I got lucky.”

I put the phone to my ear and started playing the voicemail. Jim glared at me with drunken, cloudy eyes for a moment longer, then turned to the door and tried to open it. When he failed to open the locked door, he turned to his wife, “Damn, woman! You couldn’t open the door while I was talking?” Keys in hand, Phoebe lifted them to the door while starting to say something, but Jim snatched them out of her hand and fumbled with the lock. “I always have to do everything.” It took him twice as long to unlock the door as it would have taken his sober wife, but the son of a bitch finally managed it. Phoebe threw an apologetic look over her shoulder before they disappeared through the door.

I turned from the doorway and paced the room as the voicemail played. “Hey, Marcus. It’s Jess. Listen, I know you don’t have any reason to talk to me. You’re probably still mad, and I understand. I just ... I miss you and I wanted to hear your voice. I’m sorry things ended the way they did. I ... can you please just ... can you just call me back? I miss you.”

Her voice sounded slightly rough like she had been crying, but despite my stomach twisting in knots after hearing her voice for the first time since I’d left her, I felt a little smile play across my lips. My post-breakup sorrow had been short-lived thanks to what happened after Jess and I parted ways, but it had been intense, and hearing that she missed me had given me a feeling of vindication. Still ... while listening to the recording, a small part of me felt nostalgic for the familiar. She had been a part of my life for a long time, and despite all the amazing things that had occurred in the last week or so, hearing her voice had felt nice. It was like spending the day at a theme park, and then returning home that evening to curl up on a comfy couch. I stared at the phone for a full minute as I contemplated calling her back.

“Sorry about that,” Phoebe said from behind me. I whirled to see the housewife standing just inside my doorway. She’d removed the navy jacket and held a garbage bag in one hand which she set down beside the door. “He drank a bit too much tonight.”

I glanced past her but didn’t see Jim.

“He’s on the couch. Probably asleep by now,” Phoebe said, anticipating my question. “He didn’t want me to come back out, but I told him I needed to clean up a bit and take out the trash before anything happened.” I assumed she meant drunken, sloppy sex with her rude husband.

“It’s not a problem.” I gave her a reassuring smile and asked, “You okay?”

Phoebe nodded. “Yeah. I just hate it when he gets like this.”

Remembering what I saw on her wrist the last time I saw her, I wanted to argue that he always seemed ‘like this’. Instead, I kept my mouth shut. It was obvious that Phoebe was uncomfortable with the situation, and I didn’t want to make her feel worse. “Seriously. It’s fine. We all get drunk. What about Nate?”

“Staying with my mom. Jim took tomorrow off so we could have an extended weekend. Saturday is our anniversary.”

“Oh! Um ... congrats,” I said.

She gave me another tight-lipped smile and took a few more steps in the room, walking past me as she took in the chaos that was my apartment. The police had finished their investigation, but I didn’t want to hire someone to clean it up until I’d had the chance to remove all the stuff I wanted to keep. Everything left behind would be trashed.

“Thanks,” she said in a quiet voice. With every passing moment, she seemed to get more and more upset. “So, you’re leaving?”

“I am,” I said. “I bought an apartment.”

She finally turned away from the mess and looked back up at me; I could see the unshed tears in her eyes. “That’s good.”

“Hey, you okay?”

Phoebe suddenly dashed forward the half a dozen feet between us and threw her arms around my chest, hugging me tight as she buried her face in my chest and openly sobbed into my shirt. I hesitated, unsure of how best to help my soon-to-be former neighbor, and then I wrapped my arms around her in a loose hug. As I squeezed her arms reassuringly, her grip on me tightened, and her shoulders shook as she wept. Unsure of what to say, I simply rubbed her back as we stood in the middle of my wrecked apartment.

Nearly five minutes must have passed in silence save the sound of Phoebe’s muffled weeping. Eventually, she lifted her head off my chest and sniffled. She slowly opened her eyes and kept them fixed on the large, damp spot she’d made on my shirt and said, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.” She hiccuped once, and then deigned to look up at me. Her brown eyes flickered back and forth between mine and she pursed her lips between her teeth till they disappeared completely, another sign that she was upset.

“It’s okay,” I said and reached up to wipe away a few fresh tears already slipping down her blotchy cheeks. I brushed them away with my thumb and was suddenly very aware that I was holding a beautiful woman in my arms. Her face was dangerously close to mine as we stared at each other. Her eyes were liquid brown pools filled with sorrow, gratitude, and ... something else I couldn’t quite identify. It would be all to easy to-

She stood up on her toes and pressed her lips to mine. It wasn’t a volcanic kiss threatening to burn my face off like Erin’s, or dripping with seduction and lust like Helen’s. It was a simple, sweet, closed-lip kiss that lasted all of maybe five seconds before she slowly pulled free. All those feelings I’d seen swimming around in Phoebe’s eyes were replaced with one - horror.

“Oh fuck!” she exclaimed and backed away.

“I-”

She cut me off, “I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to do that!”

“No,” I said, “It’s okay. It was an accident. I shouldn’t have-”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, cutting me off again. “I...” She bit her lip and looked around the room. “Oh god...”

“You don’t have to say anything,” I said.

“You’ve just always been so nice to me,” she replied. “Jim is all I’ve ever had, and he’s...”

“I get it,” I said when she didn’t complete her sentence. Jim drank a lot, and I’d always suspected that he was low-key misogynistic and disrespectful. If they were starting an anniversary weekend like this, he was probably worse than I’d originally imagined.

“Look,” I said. “You and me ... we’re fine.”

She stared at me and crossed her arms over her chest, rubbing them as if she were cold. She appeared to calm down enough to keep her tears in check. “Good. Thank you.”

“Are you okay? I mean, really okay?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said after a moment. “The last couple of years have just been hard. Since Nate, I don’t...” She looked down at the floor. “I don’t think Jim realized what fatherhood was going to be. I don’t think he likes it very much. I don’t think he likes us very much.”

I had no freaking idea of what to do for this woman. I was about to walk out of this building for the last time, and she was starting to give me the impression that I was the closest thing she had to a friend. “Do you need a place to stay?”

Phoebe shook her head. “No. I’m not in any real danger. I just ... I just wanted to apologize for Jim’s behavior and say thank you.” She tittered and swiped at her cheek as another wayward tear fell. “I guess I just got a little carried away.”

“No. That’s okay,” I said. “Look, if you say you’re fine, then I believe you, but if you need anything at all, please give me a call. You’re losing me as a neighbor ... not as a friend.”

A single sob burst from her and she contained the rest as her face contorted in another fit of crying. I stepped toward her and hugged her close again, stroking her red-brown hair as she pressed her face into my chest once more. “I mean it. If you need anything at all, I’m just a phone call away.”

Phoebe nodded into my chest and we stayed like that for another minute before she pulled away. She looked up at me again with those big, liquid eyes, and I thought she might try to kiss me again. Eventually, she did lift herself on her toes, but this time it was to plant a kiss on my cheek; her lips lingered there for several long moments before she lowered herself again.