He must have been at work the day that she had moved in because he had totally missed the moving truck and all the moving activity. He noticed her in the elevator one afternoon, carrying a shopping bag, and was surprised to see her get off on the same floor as him and walk down the same stretch of hallway. She was his next-door neighbor.
He found himself staring while she found her keys in her purse and stuck them in the door to let herself in. She seemed oblivious to him. Something about the way she looked struck him as 'young and innocent.' He went inside his own apartment concocting a story about her, how she was a grad student who moved to New York from somewhere out in the Midwest. She went to NYU and studied something like... political science, he decided. She'd done Model UN and Debate team and has had the same boyfriend since high school and they were trying to make it work long-distance now that she was in New York. That was the girl next door to him, in his imagination.
He saw her again the next day, she was leaving when he was coming back from his run. She looked much the same as the day before - nondescript jeans and t-shirt, shoulder-length hair in a ponytail, little or no makeup. She wore a pair of Chucks and a crossbody purse. Something about her entirely generic outfit suggested 'old fashioned' though, the cut of the jeans, the way the t-shirt was tucked into them, almost as if she stepped out of the early nineties. Maybe that's what the kids were wearing these days, the cyclic nature of fashion coming back around.
She was pretty but young. Definitely too young. Oh and of course there was that long-distance boyfriend back in her Midwest hometown that he'd created.
The third time he ran into her was at the mailboxes downstairs. She stood there with the box open, an envelope open in her hand, looking over some sort of letter that was making her frown.
"Crazy bills?" He asked her, trying to strike up a conversation. He was a pretty social guy. She didn't react right away, then looked up at him, her grey eyes wide and glassy.
"I'm sorry, were you talking to me?" There was some tiny speck of an accent in her voice, but it didn't sound MIdwestern.
"Yeah," he smiled at her. "I just asked whether those were some crazy bills." She looked down at the letter she was holding, then folded it back up, shaking her head.
"No. Crazy other things," she replied, her voice quiet. She turned to close her mailbox.
"I've seen you around a few times, you're right next door to me," he told her. "I'm Adam." He stuck out his hand. She switched her keys to the same hand with her mail and shook it.
"Tessa," she told him. They walked towards the elevator together.
"Where did you move here from?" He was still expecting her to say somewhere out towards the Heartland, so her reply was surprising.
"PA," she told him. The look on his face must have been a confused one because she clarified "Pennsylvania." He had understood her the first time, he was just surprised by her reply.
"Yeah, that's... not that far at all. Where in Pennsylvania?" The elevator had arrived and he gestured for her to step in.
"South Central PA. Near Lancaster." The way she said the name of that city was different than he'd heard it pronounced before and emphasized her accent somehow.
"And your accent?" He asked, without beating around the bush. He was curious.
"It's a South Central PA accent," she smirked at him. Oh, he liked that smile, that was a nice smile and it made her eyes lighten a shade.
"I had no idea that was a thing," he shook his head. "Did you come out here for school?"
"No," her smile disappeared. "Just... life, change." She looked down at her hands, or maybe at the mail in them. "I'm way too old for school anyway," she muttered. Ok, so he was wrong on the first two counts of his invented story. But how old could she possibly be to make her think she was too old for school?
"I don't believe it," he told her. "You don't look any older than twenty-three." She looked up at him wide-eyed again, as if he was crazy. The elevator dinged and the doors slid open on their floor. She didn't react right away so Adam gestured with his hand towards the door. She stepped out.
"Are you making fun of me?" Her voice was soft, her eyebrows drawn together. She made eye contact and then looked off down the hall towards her apartment.
"No! No, not at all," his own brow furrowed too. "I honestly thought you're... in your early twenties. I'm sorry if that came out wrong." They stopped at her door, having already passed his.
"I'm thirty-two," she didn't look at him when she said it, focusing on finding the right key in her hand and opening both locks. He'd been wrong about this as well. Nothing about his concocted story about this woman turned out to be correct.
"I'm thirty-five," he told her, shrugging. She gave him a sideways look and nodded, her lips pressed together. She raised her hand in a brief wave and disappeared inside her apartment, closing the door.
If he was wrong about all the other things, he guessed there wasn't a long-distance boyfriend back home either.
****
Tessa collapsed on her bed, covering her face with her hands. That was absolutely exhausting. Having conversations with people, especially male people, handsome male people, who were tall and fit and had dimples, took a lot out of her. His comment about her age left her completely dumbfounded. Why would he possibly think that she was that young?! There was the possibility that he was trying to flirt, but... no, that wasn't a possibility. He wouldn't flirt with her.
She realized that she still had her mail in her hands and tossed it on the floor. She wasn't in the right headspace to think about lawyers and mortgages and Felix right now. And yet thinking about the hot neighbor next door seemed to be just as anxiety-inducing.
He was handsome, really handsome, like the protagonist in a romantic comedy handsome. He had auburn hair, cut short and neat, parted on one side. He was probably six foot tall and athletic looking, though there were no bulging muscles anywhere, just a lean, toned body. He could pass for younger than thirty-five, as he claimed to be, but his eyes gave away his age a bit. The lines at the edges of his hazel eyes that made him look kind and wise and like he could see right to the bottom of you, was what flipped his appearance from boyish into mature.
Adam was a sophisticated New Yorker and she was... plain, stupid, naive, a complete doormat from Pennsyltucky. This has been drilled into her head over the past thirteen years and there was too much evidence now, after all this time, to support that. She imagined the types of women he must date. An image came to mind of a tall, confident businesswoman, some sort of executive in a skirt suit with perfectly tanned, shapely legs stemming from a pair of three inch heels. They probably went to cocktail parties and fancy restaurants and kept things casual, seeing other people. She imagined now that smart, sophisticated people didn't get duped into staying in long-term relationships that went absolutely nowhere, they just dated around, had hot, satisfying sex, and moved on. But she was neither smart nor sophisticated.
On Friday night, Tessa was downstairs, in the building's basement, doing her laundry. She figured it was probably the best time because no one else would be wasting their Friday night on chores. They'd be out to dinner or movies or vegging out with their families in front of their TVs, relaxing at the end of the workweek. She checked it out last Friday and as she predicted, she had the laundry room all to herself. She sat on the floor, with her back to one of the dryers, and read a George Kingsley novel. She always had some kind of a rich Wall Street executive as the main love interest, a man who's always been too consumed in work to have a relationship, but his mind was changed when he met this particular intern, or that quirky barista, or the smart and sexy CEO of a rival company, or the crazy popular actress whom he didn't recognize because he's never had time to keep up with pop culture. They were fairly predictable and the men in these stories were always tall, rich, and handsome, but despite the lack of variation, she kept coming back for more and more of these stories.
She came back again this Friday, loading a washer with clothes and another with her sheets and towels, and sat down on the floor with her paperback. She was in the middle of a steamy sex scene where Lucas, the rich, sexy lawyer who never had time to go out with the same woman twice, was delivering orgasm after orgasm to Isabelle, a lawyer from another firm who had a ballbuster reputation. Tessa didn't hear Adam come in and jumped when he started talking.
"I've always thought that the ones where they have the guy on the cover wearing the suit and tie are a good deal classier than the ones where the guys are shirtless, with those oiled up pecs and six-packs." He was grinning at her while loading his laundry into the washer. She gaped at him silently, not knowing what to say. Her face felt heated with embarrassment. "Is it good?" She nodded. He finished loading the washer and set it to run. "Can I see?"
Tessa stuck the post-it note she'd been using a bookmark into the book and handed it up to Adam. He slid down to the floor next to her, almost too close, nearly touching, and looked at the back cover. His eyes moved quickly over the lines of text as he read. He opened the book where she had placed her bookmark and Tessa wished the floor could open up right then and swallow her up. His eyes flew over the page, widening a little and he drew his bottom lip in between his teeth.
