Bang. Bang. Bang.
She stared at the door. He always knocked the same mechanical way, always did his rounds in the same efficient but thoughtless pattern: first floor, second floor, third floor, zigzagging back and forth across each hall.
She looked down at the meager pile of money on the stained card table. She had been practicing the story. It hadn't been hard. It was true after all.
There had been panicky moments in the past, of course, as each month drew to its inevitable close, but something had always popped up, she'd always found an extra shift or some piece work on the side. Her mama had called it the grace of the angels and had crossed herself each time she used the phrase. Nikki had spent most of her adolescence rolling her eyes at her mama's tearful invocations of the Almighty. She'd had no time for her mama's forlorn Jesus, but Nikki had nonetheless caught herself murmuring the words more than once recently.
She wouldn't be thanking them this month. However they were supposed to be protecting her, they surely had been asleep at the wheel. After the tailpipe had finally succumbed to the slow creep of rust, she knew it was going to be tight, but Valeria's tumble had sealed it. Three stitches to close up her chin and the clinic only took cash, the cash that was quite noticeably missing from her kitchen table.
Bang.
"Hello, Nikki? It's Jimmy. Are you home?" His voice was even and not unfriendly.
She got up and walked to the door. Pausing to check herself in the mirror, she gave a practiced smile. It didn't echo in her eyes. She sighed. She certainly wasn't that glittery adolescent any more, with a spangly phone cover and dazzling lettering across her chest to match. Sure, she could still squeeze into her high school jeans, but when she did so, it was out of necessity rather than joy. She hadn't bought herself anything new in over a year, and while Carla was always generous about passing along pieces left in one of the dryers, especially girl's stuff for Valeria, it was hard to feel special wrapped in something a stranger couldn't even bother to remember.
She opened the door slowly.
"Hi Jimmy."
"Hey, Nikki." He gave her a warm smile. He always did. He was tall, blonde, dressed in a blue blazer and button-down shirt, like a prep school kid who got off at the wrong bus stop. She usually felt a little of tinge of young, dreamy excitement at his smile, a little of that old sense of possibilities and horizons and impossible dreams. That blazer had been places she'd never go. Seeing Jimmy was the closest thing her little tenement life had to a brush with celebrity. He owned the building, along with two around the block. He had inherited them from his father, along with his father's habit of collecting the rent personally from each and every tenant. Known by everyone in the neighborhood, he sponsored the rec basketball team and held an annual Christmas party for his real estate brethren at Bracci's. The following day the neighborhood teemed with whispered stories from the wait staff about the night's scandals.
"Can I come in?"
She opened the door and let him in. He brushed by her, squeezed together in her narrow hallway, his chest touching hers. The fleeting touch would have ordinarily given her goosebumps, but there was no sense of excitement today. Instead, she was filled with a quiet dread. She had never been short on the rent before, and while Jimmy was apparently a swell guy who would buy the basketball team pizza after every game, he was by all accounts from the neighborhood whispers, an absolute stickler for the rent.
He walked into the kitchen, all of three steps, and stood rather awkwardly there, as he always did. Nikki made a special point of scrubbing the kitchen the day before rent was due. Her kitchen was tiny, but it was hers, and she certainly was not going to give her mama, God rest her soul, the satisfaction of seeing Jimmy the neighborhood big man grimace at a greasy stove.
"How have you been, Nikki? How's Valeria? I ran into Carla yesterday, and she said Valeria had some kind of accident?"
Nikki looked at him. She was relieved that he already knew about the injury. It should make her story that much more believable. She was also puzzled. She had watched him enough in the neighborhood to know that he didn't ask after every tenant's kids, and yet every time he came in here, he asked about her and Valeria. It was crazy, and it was sweet, and part of her desperately wanted to see something there, but she was a girl at a laundromat with a kid and he was, well, Jimmy, and that was as far as she ever let that silly fantasy go.
"Yeah, she did. She fell off a dryer while singing that song from Frozen. She was hopping from one machine to the other, and she tripped and hit her chin on the way down. We spent the afternoon at the clinic getting stitches, but she's fine. She was actually excited this morning to show off her Elsa bandaid to her classmates."
"Well, that's good to hear, Nikki. I was genuinely worried."
Nikki smiled. Not a single person on her floor had stopped to check in on Valeria, and yet here was Jimmy, worried about her daughter. A bubble of possibility floated up. She waited for him to say something else, anything else, but he simply looked at her expectantly. The bubble popped. Of course, this was just another business transaction along his busy, shabby route.
She picked up the money from the table. She turned to him and put it in his hands, her well-rehearsed words spilling forth.
"Jimmy, I love living here, but I have had a bad month with my car and with Valeria's accident, and it was just one thing after other." The words came faster. " I don't have the rent. I..."
She choked on the words, a harsh cry erupting from her throat. All the stress of the previous week came out in a hot stream of unrestrained sobs. She was scared and ashamed, and above it all, tired. Tired of fighting and fighting and seemingly unavoidably losing. Tired of the slow realization that each day only found her stumbling farther behind her fast retreating dreams. She found herself collapsing forward into him.
He caught her. His awkwardness disappeared, and he wrapped his arms around her. His words were gentle and reassuring.
"Nikki, Nikki, Jesus, it's okay. C'mon, it's okay."
Her head was buried in his chest. She looked up at him. She had always thought of him as generically handsome, but she'd never really looked closely at him. What was the point after all? But now she was looking up into deep blue eyes, and their expression was not one of irritation or condescension but of tenderness. A man hadn't held her with any kind of tenderness in years, and now in this most awful of moments, one that she already knew she would look back on with shame, she could feel the restrained strength of his arms supporting her. He swept her hair gently aside from her face, and she let herself collapse more deeply into his arms.
"Nikki, look I don't know what to say exactly, but whatever just happened, I'm not upset. Whatever I'm feeling, it's surely not that."
He paused. More quietly "I have thought about holding you for a long time."
It took her mind a few beats to comprehend the words. Could that be possible? She pushed closer, and she could feel him now pressed against her. The urgent pressure aroused a response in her, the feelings of anger and shame and frustration turning to a hot sexual desire she had not felt in longer than she cared to remember. Without quite knowing she was going to do it, she moved her hand down to his pants, caressing him through the fabric. His breath caught, and he pulled back. The confusion and tumult disappeared from her mind, and she knew exactly what she wanted to do.
She dropped to her knees.
Jimmy went to lift her back up.
"No, no, Nikki, you don't have to do that. Please. We can talk about the rent."
But his tented khakis betrayed his words. She looked up at him.
"No, Jimmy, I want to. I do."
He pulled her up nonetheless. He was stronger than he looked, and she relented. She stood up, puzzled and embarrassed.
