Author's note: This is a slower-moving, more character driven piece. There's some sex at the end, but it's mostly building towards the next two chapters. I'm writing each chapter from a separate point of view. This chapter is Robert's; we'll see the story from other characters' perspectives in subsequent chapters. Enjoy, vote, comment!
*****
It's good to feel worn out. It's good to be sweaty, too. If you're too tired to think, you're too tired to think about Beth...
"Don't tell her where I moved, dude. Bitch is crazy."
Clay's words echoed in Robert's mind, as he lay, exhausted and overheated, on his old four poster bed. Had Clay been joking when he said that? Robert couldn't decide, but he erred on the side of believing he had meant it. Clay was rarely serious, but he'd stressed repeatedly before hanging up that Robert was under no circumstances to tell the girl in B107 how to get in touch with him.
Robert laid stretched out on the firm, queen-sized mattress, which suddenly felt uncomfortably large and unfamiliar. There was a Beth-sized empty space on it. Robert was happy enough to have something strange and even a little dramatic just to take his mind off of
her
. Between the work-out he'd gotten moving his stuff back into the apartment and the new mystery girl, he could successfully go for almost twenty seconds without thinking of his ex. In the corner of the room, strategically placed behind the open closet door, was all that remained of her in the apartment, a box of things she'd evidently deemed unworthy of shipping.
Four year relationship? Now a box of junk.
When he'd first entered the apartment after a year away, he'd looked around. Clay had called him when Beth's bitchy friend Samantha came by to pick up her clothes, jewelry, and other valuables. Samantha, no doubt with an absurdly detailed list from Beth, had been very thorough, leaving nothing behind of Beth's except for gifts he had given her.
Once he'd brought his own boxes and suitcases back into the apartment they had once shared, he set about collecting those gifts, the traces of their relationship, in a big cardboard box that once held bottles of Johnny Walker Red. He hadn't been able to throw the contents away just yet, but he knew he would. For now he couldn't see the box, and that was enough.
He thought—how could he not?—about Beth, but, thankfully, he also thought about the girl from B107. It had taken him easily forty-five minutes to unload the Pathfinder and the little U-Haul pull trailer, and during that whole time, she'd stared him down from across the courtyard as if he had murdered her family. Forty-five minutes of moving, yet she stood outside the whole time, on the other side of the wrought iron railing that lined the pool area, staring him down. She looked like she was about to let him have it. At first, he searched his memories for her—had he done something really, really bad a long time ago to one of his neighbors? Hell, he'd barely even talked to his neighbors, and he hadn't set foot in his own apartment for over a year.
Fucking Clay. This was his doing.
Wendell Clay was Robert's college friend who had subleased the place for the past year. Robert figured him for the culprit almost immediately. Knowing Clay, that meant one thing: he'd fucked her, then probably dumped her or cheated on her. That's how he was back then, and that's how he probably still was. It was one of the reasons Robert hadn't much bothered to keep in touch with him over the years. Facebook, that great repository of dead friendships, had brought them back in touch for the purely mercenary purpose of circumventing the awful rental market in a town like Austin. Clay was loaded, like any self-respecting smug prick, and could afford to pay the luxury rent for the exclusive, campus-adjacent apartment all on his own.
Robert had always been the junior partner in his relationship with Beth, financially speaking; with her gone, even making the rent on the place seemed an uncertain prospect now. After a year in D.C. doing research for his dissertation and following Beth around to obnoxious networking events, he was glad to be home. Hell, they'd both known the relationship was on its last legs, and deep down, part of Robert was happy Beth had finally put a bullet in it, telling him a month before they were due to return to Texas that she wasn't leaving the capital, that she'd "made connections."
He'd made his own connections after that—connecting a little U-Haul pull trailer to his Pathfinder. Luckily, Clay had been eager to vacate the apartment and didn't mind Robert cutting short his stay there. Now, after getting the evil eye from some neighbor girl he'd never met, he could see why.
"I didn't fuck her, honest to god. She's just, like, obsessed with me. She's certifiable, so look out for her—like, don't get suckered by the tits, man," Clay had said, chuckling.
That laughter made it hard to tell just how serious he was. Robert had called him as soon as the unloading was complete. Mostly, he wanted to know why she'd be pissed at him for something Clay did. People move in and out of apartments all the time. You don't hold a grudge against the next guy that moves in if you had a bad neighbor.
Depending upon how much he wanted to believe Clay, his initial suspicions turned out to be at least partially true. Clay knew the girl, said he invited her over a couple of times "just to be a good neighbor." Then she started following him around like a lovestruck schoolgirl, and he had to cut it off. She was young—"like nineteen or something," and Clay wasn't about to have some college girl trying to become Mrs. Clay or anything. So he shot her down, and now she's pissed.
At least that was the story as Clay told it. Robert didn't buy it, though. The girl was hot: long, really shiny brown hair, average to tall, not skinny, but to Robert's eye well-toned and curvy in a way that made her look more like a woman and less like a girl. If a face can look adorable and completely pissed off at the same time, then she pulled it off. Clay was right about one other thing, too: he was suckered by the tits. He would have gotten a closer look had he not feared for his life.
Robert seriously doubted that Clay would've said "no" to a chance to fuck a girl like that, no matter how crazy she was. As he figured it, Clay must've laid it on thick to get the girl into bed and then dropped her. The "obsessive" stuff might have even been true, but taken out of context. In any event, Clay would have needed to do something pretty bad to the girl for her to take it out on the next guy moving into the apartment.
It was hot in the apartment; leaving the door open long enough in a Texas summer can strain the A/C to the breaking point, and it would be another hour or two before it got comfortably frosty, the way Robert liked it. Thinking about the girl, even under the circumstances, was stimulating, though, an excellent distraction. Because he didn't know any details, he could imagine, speculate, play detective. Anything but think about Beth or about his own uncertain future.
Maybe Clay got suckered by the tits. Wouldn't be hard...
The violent sun streamed through the broken blinds on his bedroom window (broken by Clay—he was sure of it) creating slanting bars of dark and white, like a piano, on his empty end table. You could see where Beth's jewelry box once sat by the hexagonal space that wasn't covered with a sheen of dust. They'd left most of their belongings behind before heading east, and besides breaking the blinds and more than a few of their drinking glasses, Clay'd been a pretty conscientious tenant.
Sometimes you just can't see what's broken until you take the time to really look around, though.
Even from the bedroom, on the opposite side of the apartment, he could hear the sounds of people laughing, splashing in the pool, talking to each other. He slowly rolled himself off the bed and walked to the living room window facing the pool. Peering through the blinds, he scanned the group of college kids hanging out in the water for the mystery "crazy" girl, but she wasn't to be found. Robert shook his head—the more expensive the complex got, the more it was filled not with young professionals or graduate students like himself, but instead with undergrads partying on mommy and daddy's tab. If it wasn't for his lease, he'd move—hell, he ought to sublet the place and leave the bad memories there behind.
Maybe soon...
***
One of life's little horrors is being interrupted in the middle of jerking off.
"Coming," Robert shouted, though, actually, he had been a minute or two from his climax.
There was work to do: shut down the window playing a clip of Tori Black taking a massive cock in her ass, quickly apply some hand sanitizer, then strategically place the waistband on his gym short to disguise his hard-on. Hopefully, it would be the apartment management people or the mailman, or something quick. Then it would be back to Tori or maybe somebody new.
The knocking persisted—crazy person knocking.
Definitely not the mailman. Could it be?
"Hey, do you live here?"
When your erection is being restrained by an elastic waistband, the sight of a hot, young co-ed, albeit one who might in fact be a crazy stalker, is not necessarily the best way to avoid an embarrassing boner incident. Up close, "crazy bitch" was even hotter than he thought. Her hair was pulled back into a long ponytail, so he could see her face better: light dusting of freckles across, long lashes around smoky, hazel eyes, and lips that didn't need any cosmetic enhancement to look inviting.
On the other hand, she's certainly playing to type as far as the mental instability rumors...
"What?"
"Are you Wendell's roommate or something?" she asked in a husky voice.
Robert didn't like feeling like he was on trial in his own place, though he did smile a little to hear Clay's real first name, which he knew Clay hated. It was especially nice in that sexy, smoky voice.
"Umm...this is my place. And you are?"
The girl seemed to recognize how she'd come off.
"Sorry...I'm Virginia," she said.
She started fidgeting a little, tapping her foot. She couldn't have known the nervous motion would cause her breasts to jiggle ever so slightly. For some reason, she didn't seem like the kind of girl who quite grasped her effect on men.
"Virginia, great. Nice to meet you," he said curtly. "I'm Robert, and this is my apartment. Clay's gone."
Robert was curious as to how she would respond. He was still trying to solve the mystery of "Did Clay and 'crazy bitch' have sex?" Her response was inconclusive: a knowing smirk.
"I knew it," she said. "Look, he's got something that belongs to me here. Can I come in?"
"He took his shit with him. If you left something—"
"Just let me look, new guy," she said with exasperation. "It'll take, like, ten seconds."
With a deep breath and some trepidation, Robert ushered her into his place. He even felt a little pathetic for not resisting; pretty girls could get away with murder with him. She made a beeline for the bedroom, as he followed her.
"Did you find a stuffed dolphin on that end table? No way would he just take it with him."
Robert was about to say "no" when he recalled putting a plush dolphin in the box of Beth's stuff to throw into the dumpster. He fished it out, handing it over.
"Found it there and figured it belonged to my ex," he said. "You're lucky you got it before I throw all this shit out."
Virginia grabbed it from him and made to leave, before turning on her heel to address him. Since he was following her out, her abrupt spin almost made him run into her. She'd been about to speak when she flinched due to the uncomfortable closeness, and, backpedaling, her whole voice changed.
"Was Clay your friend or something?"
Be honest? Why the hell not?
"I knew the guy, but, 'friends?' Not really. He just subletted the place from me last year while I was gone."
"So, you guys don't talk?"
"Not really," Robert said.
"But you probably hit him up after yesterday, right?"
"Maybe," he said warily.
"Well, he's a douche," she said. "So...sorry for throwing all that shade. I figured you knew."
"Knew what?"
"Just about Clay. What he's like. What he did," she said cryptically.
"Which was?"
"Be a douche," she replied, seemingly uncomfortable with the turn the conversation had taken. "So, sorry and all that."
"It's not a big deal," he said. "It was honestly just weird to have a stranger stare daggers at me for half an hour—even a cute girl."
Virginia laughed for the first time. It was nice, warm.
"It wasn't that long! You probably thought I was some crazy, yet still totally super hot murderer."
Robert decided to keep Clay's warning a secret.
