January 1998
This is the worst part. The part where I'm standing on a precarious little icy step that doesn't seem entirely stable, leading to some upper-basement studio apartment that doesn't seem entirely clean, and I'm probably, stupidly, going to slip and fall just before they'll answer the door. I won't even get to the part where I have to mumble some half-assed excuse for showing up at ungodly party hours just to ask for a favour. It's not so bad for the eight whopping weeks when we get summer here (then you worry about your stench and the general listlessness of the whole deal), but for the most part it's just like this. The things we do for employment, I guess.
When I left my boss' office it wasn't snowing, but it sure as fuck is now. I had the slip of his DARRYL EVANS stationery with the briefest of notes crammed into my jeans, but I didn't feel like fumbling for it on the street, so I'm carefully unfolding it as I go down the back stairs of the building, re-folding it as I elbow my way out the fire door, and walk into the evening.
Trudging up University sounds like the best course of action. Wide-open, and in this snowstorm no one will want to bear it, and I'll be alone after a fucking 50 hour work week for what seems like the first time.
I pull up my hood, the fake fur already making snowy dreadlocks, and walked through crowds of undergraduate students and, later, into the wooded residential streets to the west. This won't take me long, I'm thinking. Just pay for everything, take a cab back, give him his stuff, and get the hell out of the financial district.
I reach into my coat pocket, and with itchingly cold fingers I pull out the address. After ten minutes the directions take me to a charming-ish Victorian rowhouse, a decaying little clay number with one of those dugout garages that's, yes, converted into a studio apartment with light-up christmas deer. Surprisingly, though, that unit's not the one on my list, and so I walk up the imposingly steep stairs to the entrance - christ, it's dirty- and push the bell.
After a while: the familiarly droll, slightly amused, hazy voice of an unmistakable T'rono weed dealer. "Hello?"
"Yeah, I'm Kate?, I'm hear for Darryl Evans' stuff? He talked to you today?" No matter what people tell you about scoring contraband, this part never gets easier. I never know how to start conversations like this, and they can go either way because either way they sound like you're awkward or brash or trying to get them arrested. Well, two out of three ain't bad. It could be worse, I could be a narc. Which I'm not, by the way. Fuck, it's icy on this step.
"Is that a question, Kate," the electronic voice drawled, like he skipped over the "t" in my name but I can still hear him delivering those words with a smile. My numb fingers, gripped around the front door handle, felt an audible, thick click beneath them, as well as a buzz that opened the door.
I practically slide in from the icy step, gripping the handle for good measure, and wipe my boots as best I could on the mat (which says "GO AWAY" in Edwardian script, for some reason). The main floor of what had once been this house's parlour and dining room were thoughtlessly blocked up into individual units, as have most of them in the Annex, but a hardwood staircase leads me to the second floor landing. There's something blaring from the stereo - Morcheeba? Trip-hop?
I knock a few times on the overpainted metal and white door, number 5.
And then I find myself staring into the most enormous hazel eyes I've ever seen.
(Actually, that's not quite what happened: just the brass spylatch on the door opened. If I were anyone else I would have found it comical, but there was something in those dark eyebrows furrowed over his eyes - brown, ringed with green with short black lashes and kind of angry, that makes you wonder the last time I had looked at a disembodied face that closely. And it suddenly made me wonder when I had last gotten laid).
He opens the door, and he's leaning on the doorway. He must've been bending over when he looked out of the spylatch, because I have to tilt my jaw slightly upwards to see him, baring my throat a little, making me vulnerable while my starved eyes travel past the thin, ripped corduroys and up through a long, lean, broad-shouldered body about my age, actually maybe a bit older, wearing a snug t-shirt.
I waste no time in hiding my feelings but I can't help but stare in my peripheral vision. He seems older, with irritation and amusement in equal measures on his face. Who the fuck am I? He looks impatient, as if he's expecting me to speak - I should say something! But the rapidly rising colour to his cheeks tell me now might not be the time...
It's funny because it's not what I usually go for in a guy. He's got regular features as if they're just mounted on his face, the slightly Slavic swoop under his nostrils echoing his carved upper lip so perfectly it makes me want to cry out. And I have to actually concentrate on breathing, because for some reason that instinct has left me right about now.
I blink, remember to dig out the note from my jeans, and stare at it. The melted snow had bled out the dye from the indigo denim, seeping onto the note. I felt pretty amateurish, staring at this handsome, slightly stoned guy in his doorway entrance.
"Iain?" I asked weakly, reading the note my boss had scrawled over the address. He looks like an Iain, spelt the Scottish way. The painted Victorian heaters in the hall start to rattle and I still can't stare at him.
"Yeah," he says. Avoiding my eyes as well, like I'm an embarrassment.
"Yeah," I say, no doubt totally intelligently. I stare out from under hooded lashes, willing myself to look him in the face without giving anything away. Fuck he looked good. Fuck I'm being an idiot, aren't I?
"You should probably come in, then?" he abruptly turned his back to me and walked into the unit, running his fingers through his hair.
"Is that a question, Iain," I say, deadpan behind his back. I don't know what my intended effect was but there was probably no mirth to be gathered from the fact that I could only see the aforementioned back, the muscles from his shoulders tapering down to that nice thick waist. Are those scratch-marks? A girlfriend, maybe? I bet he gets laid a lot. Does he have a big dick? Shut up just get the stuff and get out, I need to get home before I make an embarrassment of myself!
Angela Chase was right: walking into somebody's house is like walking into another planet. This one's got an affinity for the 1920s, with beehive tiles in the kitchen and leaded glass above every double-hung window. It's fucking shabby, smelling of burnt out weed buds and no mistake, but there's kind of a roughened elegance to the place, and you don't see something like that in an Annex townhouse without some sort of gentrification seeping in. Or a really good drug dealer.
"Fucking cold out there," he says, going into the kitchen with baggies and a scale.
"Some New Years', eh?" I hear from the bedroom. And my heart sinks. A young woman emerges, clomping on platform boots and hugging her too-thin coat around her and she looks about a thousand times more gorgeous than me, naturally.
Of course he's got a girl. Dealers who look this good always have girls, and they're invariably slender and long-haired and chill about everything and have tons of money. Fuck! I have to get out of here in case she gives me the evil eyes.
