Hinged Eggs Break Easy

"Y-You?"

I called out the name cautiously, my inquiry directed towards the grey-haired girl locking her apartment door. I had just gotten home from work a little past 6, and I had just caught her coming out of her apartment; my keys suddenly hung forlorn in my lock. She was new, a neighbor who had just moved in the week before. This was my first time actually seeing her.

And I swore to God it was someone I've seen before.

"You...Watanabe?"

The girl whipped her head towards me then, and I caught them: the sparkle of blue that was impossible to forget. My throat felt a little dry and my eyes latched onto her soft lips that fell open in surprise.

As much as I thought it was her, it

couldn't

be her. It just couldn't.

She gave me a once-over. I did the same, noting how cute she looked in that infinity scarf, in the scruffy baby blue varsity jacket that was so baggy it almost covered her short shorts.

"Yeah? Who ar-"

Her voice trailed off. A silence pervaded the space between us, and I was left looking at my neighbor with the same disbelief that suddenly began to churn in the look she gave me. Recognition sparked.

"No..." the girl said, and her lips curled into a playful smile, a playful smile that was impossible to forget.

She turned her head slightly, giving me a sideways squint as if I was playing a trick on her. I wanted to give her the same look, if I wasn't so preoccupied looking so dumbfounded.

"No," she shook her head in disbelief, the smile growing wider, cheeks peppered with an excited blush. "Taft? Taft Miller, is that you?"

This was it. That confirmed that my new neighbor really was

her

. I tried my best to reply without a hint of that awkward bemusement but-

"Y-Yeah! The one and only."

-that was a lost cause, as I dumbly put my hands on my hips.

You let out a squeal and within moments, she strode over to crash into my chest in an ecstatic hug. I almost lost my balance from the force of her impact, but I returned her embrace all the same. In her excitement, the white dad hat on her head plopped next to our feet, but it didn't seem like she cared. She was laughing now, her breaths and shuddering lilts softly pressing into me from her soft breasts. I couldn't help but laugh with her. Her scent wallowed up to me from her scalp- with her in my arms like this, I remembered the dance we shared on prom night.

When she withdrew and looked up at me with eyes vibrant as I remembered, I felt my cheeks ache and realized I was smiling as wide as she was.

"God, how long has it

been!

"

She asked, but we both knew the answer. Just a formality, but if it was with You, I could wade through as many formalities as she wanted.

"Since graduation..."

"No way," she said in a gasp, stooping down to pick up her hat. "That long?"

Another formality. These were the usual questions I expected whenever I ran into someone back from high school. But there was a sincerity in her voice and her eyes that I couldn't shake, even when we both were just knowingly going through the motions; her words had weight even if they were supposed to be frivolous social fodder.

I shrugged obligingly.

"I guess so." Then, with a wry smile, "But it's not like you ever bothered to keep in touch..."

All at once the brief procedural of expected questions melted away, and You's eyes lit up brighter. She scoffed, cocking her brow.

"It's not like you did either, jerk!"

A punch on my shoulder. I reeled back. I clutched the area as if it really stung, and then I looked at her.

Glared

at her. Wordlessly I raised my hand, my index finger, middle finger, and thumb forming a fleshy pistol. I aimed for her head. You looked down in horror at down the barrel of the gun...

Then there was this... moment where we suddenly just became self-aware, grasping the situation we were in. Mere moments after conventional conversation and now?

You looked up from the finger gun I still had pointed at her. And then she laughed. I followed her not a moment after, and we just stood there, laughing our asses off, with her choking out "

Stupid

, Taft, you're still so

stupid!

" as she struggled to breathe while my ears turned red.

Just like that, I was a teenager again.

It took a while for us to calm down, wipe the tears away, but when it was over, You and I sort of deflated when we shared a moment to really just...appreciate the fact that we were standing mere feet away from each other. She smiled a smile that made me feel like I was more than a guy in a cheap polyester suit, working a dead-end gig down the street at the Wells Fargo.

The moment passed. I turned away first.

"Well uh, I'm gonna go stuff myself with pizza rolls and watch some hentai. If you ever need company, you know where to f-"

"Uhhh, no you're not," You said suddenly, shaking her head. She was suddenly tugging at my sleeve and I felt my feet drifting towards her.

"Weren't you just leaving to go somewhere?"

"Yeah I was just gonna go to Barnes or something but not anymore. Because of your lack of an effort, we have years to catch up on." she said.

I didn't say much else in protest, and we shuffled down the stairwell to her beat-up Kia and soon we were on the off-ramp on the 5 to downtown with her beat-up speakers blasting her favorite Strokes album. It all moved so fast, but it all moved so naturally, and my cheeks began to really ache with the smile that I couldn't seem to ease out of.

I didn't even realize I left my keys in the door.

We drifted through the Tricity for a couple hours. Taco stop here, boba there, walking through a dead mall here. It was as if nothing had changed, and soon enough I was the one being an idiot and cracking stupid jokes and asking her all sorts of stupid, mundane questions just so I could hear her answer, just so I can see her laugh when I'd give my own stupid, mundane answers.

"Seriously though, if my dick glowed in the dark, that'd be like ten fucking times more beneficial than my nips glowing in the dark," I said as we sat out of the back trunk of her Kia, staring out at the refinement plant behind the Del Taco, watching the flumes of white steam curl and stack and roil from the chimneys. A churro lay neglected in my lap; my hands were too busy helping me in my presentation. "Like if I'm walking around my room, right, and let's say I dropped my phone and the light switch is too far away for me to get up and walk there. All I'd do is pump a few strokes, and

bam!

instant lifesaver. If I had my

nipples

glow after a few strokes, I'd have to crawl on the floor like a goddamn fool just so I could even see the floor. With that much effort of getting onto my hands and knees, I might as well just walk over to the light switch and do it the normal way."

You was looking at me in the way that I remembered her looking at me: she peered at me with attentive blue sparkles, shaking her head occasionally, giggling or laughing to spur me on, and, the part that made me feel warmer than I ever could in the blanket we shared that night, the way her lips curled to her cheeks, as if saying that every word that came from me was wanted, that what

I

had to say was wanted, no matter how stupid it was.

"What's with your obsession with dicks?" she asked.

"

Excuse

me? The question was whether I wanted a glowing dick (which is objectively more convenient and logical) or if I wanted glowing nipples, which, is fucking dumb. How is that even-"

"No dude," You shook her head, adamantly. She took a finger and flicked it at my nose. "

you

are just obsessed with dicks."

"But dicks were part of the

question

, you idiot."

"Yeah, but who brought

up

the question?"

She laughed when I just told her to shut up, and proceeded to tell me with pride that she would

rock

glowing nips if she ever had them, to which I said she was better off taping a glowing dick between her legs, which was infinitely more useful.

And so on and so forth. The churro was cold by the time we rolled out of that parking lot.

Not a single minute in those hours of fucking around town was dedicated to

actually

catching up, but I realized neither of us cared. We weren't catching up; we were making up for lost time. Time we didn't even know we lost until that night, and God did it feel good.

We found ourselves in a sports bar. It was almost midnight at that point, but we were still as wired as when she crashed into a hug in front of my door that afternoon.

There were green streamers and tacked-on shamrocks for St. Patrick's. There was a booth in a corner of the creaky wooden joint, the only empty place we could that night other than the bar. It was packed with a bunch of salty middle-aged blue-collar workers, some folks from the salt-water refinery downstream of the river, their girlfriends, a lot of others going solo, looking for bored middle-aged tail, or just taking a load off from their 9 to 5.

We had a bit of a tousle with who'd be settling up the tab. The bartender would have none of our shit, and said she'd close her eyes and pick out which credit card slipped between her extended fingers. I won out in the end, and soon we were about three or four beers deep.

The band onstage kept singing Shania Twain but we were a bit too loud that night to care, anyway. We kept on just messing around until five beers in, we settled down.

You surprised me again by suddenly asking questions that were usually things you'd ask when you brought someone out to catch up. And soon, I found myself spilling everything that I'd been up to. There was no filter or any sort of restraint when I was with her, and You accepted it all with a quiet smile until she'd interject something snarky. It was as I remembered it.

I realized I never actually drank with You. Even at parties I'd catch her at a distance and approach to share some laughs with a Solo cup in hand, but we never sat down to actually have a good time revolving around booze.

Soon I was asking

her

things. The scratchy voice of the lady onstage occupied the space between us as You's expression grew distant. Her eyes dimmed and I caught the sparkle of the gold anchor-shaped pendant her father had given her before he passed. Instantly I knew it'd been a while since she had to open up about things, but it only took a few swirls of her finger around her empty glass before she did.

"Yeah...the Navy was a pipe dream. I took part in basic training, shipped off to the Great Lakes and all that, but after a while I just realized...maybe I was just doing it because I missed him. Maybe I wasn't really doing it for myself, you know?"

She looked up at me for a moment. I tried to give her my most reassuring eyes.

She smiled.

"So I dropped out. Got sent back here to the Tricity. Lived with my mom for a bit, worked in the glorious world of retail, and then out of nowhere, I found this online...collective I guess, for fashion design. Soon enough, I was helping them by giving critiques and just quality checks even though the only background I have is from the time back in Senior year when I was in the design club and fucking around with Ms. Martinez' endless supply of fabrics for the drama club.

"One thing led to another, and now I'm on the group's main board, and soon I had enough to move out. I lived in Cannawick for a while, kept working from home while keeping my sidejob at the Kohl's until I began working commissions and quality checks fulltime from home. Stayed there almost a year until last week," You concluded in a sigh, and looked up at me again with a lazy smile. "when I moved in next to you."

I smiled back and took another sip from my beer. I watched the band onstage and let the silence settle in between us. The chronicle of her life up to this point had much more material than mine, yet I had taken at least thrice as long telling it.

"Doesn't seem like much has changed, though..."

I let that slip without really meaning to. You chuckled all the same.

"Yeah. Even though we always talked about how much we wanted it all to be different," she said. The distant look was still in her eyes and I couldn't help but to feel an ache when I saw her longing smile. "Looks like the only real difference now is that it's only us two left here."

Another silence. I wanted to ask if she kept up with anyone else. The other guys she hung with in high school. A list of names flickered through my head, but I knew the answer.

"Hey, at least we're neighbors now!"

I tried, but the melancholy that dampened the pink of her cheeks was too heavy. She obliged a small chuckle.

More silence.

Then,

"Hey, Taft?"

"Yeah?"

"Let's do some shots."

I was a lightweight, always have been. So being that many beers deep was already taking its effect on me. Plus,

someone

still needed to bring us home that night...

I ended up taking one shot, while I watched her do three. It amazed me how much she could handle, but by the fourth one, I stopped her from getting up to ask for another.

"Jesus, you really are making me regret putting up the tab."

You giggled. She was finally feeling it, and she raised her shot glass at eye-level. She peered into it, letting out another slurred titter.

"Disgusting," she said blissfully. "This shit? Alcohol is so

disgusting

. It just tastes...so gross.."

I couldn't formulate a response before she downed the shot. The bottom curls of her grey bob were beginning to waver more freely now.

It was nearing about one in the morning, and if the hours I spent with her sober were a blur, the time it took me driving her back home after the sports bar was blurrier. We started singing and rapping and laughing, and I felt high. The streetlights of the 99 passed in a rhythmic orange metronome through the windshield. She put her hand on my leg when we started listening to

Graduation

, and I loved how she clutched the fabric of my shitty black workpants when she got really into the songs.

Just like her smile, You's enthusiasm for drunken sing-a-longs was infectious.

And I wonder...if you know...what it means...

"DO YOU EVEN REMEMBER WHAT THE ISSUE IS," she bellowed and looked at me expectantly.

"YOU JUST TRYNA FIND WHERE THE

TISSUE

IS" I shot back at her, and she laughed and we kept spitting back and forth and I swore to God I was Kanye in Madison Square.

I drove as recklessly as the songs demanded on those empty streets. On the straightaways I'd drive real fast with the windows rolled down, and the smell of the Pacific would fill our noses. She'd laugh at some jab I gave or when I dared reach over and poked a tickle at her side. Her face would appear and disappear underneath the passing orange lights. It was hard to stay focused on the way home when she would glow so bright like that, like magic.

We finally got back home and I rolled our car back to her parking spot. She was still clutching my pants when I made the move to get out of the car. Then there was the click of a seatbelt hastily unbuckled, and the clang of the buckle smashing against the window before her other hand grabbed my button-down and pulled. I looked at her. And I froze when her face was suddenly closing in, coming in closer and closer.

"Y-You what-"

"Wait, wait..." she said, and suddenly all I could see where her blue. Her hot breath misted onto my lips and I could smell the alcohol on her tongue. She was smiling, she obviously thought this was still us just fucking around, but the way my heart began blasting in my chest was no joke. I was sobering up, fast. "I just want to see if your eyes are still as brown as they were back then..."

We sat there for what seemed like forever. Prom night flashed through my head again, and my lips twitched with the possibility that maybe I could finally muster up the courage to give her the kiss I never gave. But I sat frozen as she kept looking at me, peering deep into my face for something I didn't know I had.

Then, it was as if I shoved an ice cube down her shirt. Her eyes widened, huge, and it was like she was sobered up. She slowly withdrew, and we kept looking at each other's faces, her blush pinker than what booze could manage to do. I've never seen her make that expression at me, and I was still frozen stiff.

"I uh, yeah I forgot my contacts," she said, quickly. I forgot she wore contacts. At the moment, I didn't really care. I was still frozen at the way she looked at me.

She didn't apologize though, and that merely made the onset of tension congeal thicker.

Wordlessly I got out of the car. I felt like my heart was beating so fast that it sounded like a steady hummingbird hum. Wordlessly she followed me, up the stairwell, third level of apartment block D. Wordlessly, I went to my door, and I just accepted the fact that my keys were in the lock as I waited for her to arrive at her own door.

I kept looking down at my feet until I heard the jangle of her keys. Gulping I looked up at her, and when our eyes met I gulped again. I mustered up the best smile I could.

What the fuck was this?

"Hey I had fun tonight."

"Yeah."

No smile. No smile from

You Watanabe.

She didn't even put the key into the lock of her door, and just kept staring at my chest as if she could see right through me. I didn't know what else to do, so in my buzzed state I opened the door, gave her a "See you tomorrow?" and closed the door behind me.

She must have heard that I didn't lock it, because only a minute passed with me standing there like an idiot before I heard the hinges squeak open. I started. You stood there with that look on her face, and the blush that I knew for sure wasn't from the bottles of Coors.

Her lips opened as if to say something. They quivered, as if she was about to cry, but then, with a wry smile that denoted an insinuation of something I never thought I'd see from her, her fingers grasped the front of her varsity jacket, and in a spread of her arms she shrugged it off to the floor. Her infinity scarf followed suit, along with her white dad hat. She stepped out of her blue Doc Marten's and started coming towards me.

In the dim light of the hall, her skin practically glowed for me. Her full breasts swelled against her tight pink t-shirt, my eyes redirected towards the sensuous shudder of the thighs bared underneath the fabric of her short shorts and I found myself rooted to the floor, growing stiff in more ways than one.

"You..." I said, but the way I whispered her name would have been better off as a wordless whimper.

She had the right idea; her lips stayed wordless as she slipped her thumbs underneath the ruffled blazer of my suit, prompting me to shrug it to the floor. And they stayed wordless as she closed the distance between our bodies. Her fingers unbuttoned my shirt, and I could feel her heated breaths suddenly condensate onto my chest. Four buttons, and she spread the shirt apart, running her fingers down my collarbone to the "U" of my tank top.

I was made aware of how hard I was breathing. With how close we were standing and the way we looked at me I felt like we were in a jar without any holes for air. The feeling of her fingers against my neck was electricity that only grew stronger in voltage when the rest of her bare arms snaked around me as she tiptoed closer and closer to my face.

My hands clutched the small of her back. Her breasts swelled and pushed against my heaving chest. Closer her face came, like the way it did in the car, but the intent made all the difference. I knew what she wanted and I knew that I wanted it too. Her breath swirled and swirled, I lost myself in it as my own breath came out in shallow gasps, dry and desperate until those lips of hers pressed against mine...