The following is a work of fiction. All characters are at least eighteen years old.
Windows
“Throw you my lighter?” John had to repeat the request to make it more real. She expected him to toss it between the gap of their buildings and into her tiny fourth story window? And he would have to do it while hanging out of his slightly larger window, while trying not fall into the alley below.
“Come on, just throw me your lighter. You can make it easy,” she pleaded as she sat on the sill of her window with a cigarette dangling from her long, thin fingers.
“Well shit,” he thought. He was fairly sure that he had an extra lighter in his apartment if the aerial exchange did not go as planned, and he would love some company as he smoked his first after-work cigarette. God, he thought he was done with that dirty habit, but since the divorce he found himself craving the cancer sticks again. One of the highlights of his suddenly empty life was sitting on his window sill and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette while enjoying a beer, or more lately a glass of fine scotch.
She was someone he especially would love to talk to. He had noticed her as soon as he moved into his downtown apartment. She was quite a sight, with her brightly colored hair, wild outfits, and tall thin figure, that he imagined looked amazing out of her clothes. He guessed she would be considered a punk girl, or maybe emo, he wasn’t that up on the styles of kids today. Shit, kids. She was probably in her early twenties, and he in his mid-forties felt like those days were just a blink of the eye ago; however, so much had happened in the twenty-five or so years since he was a bohemian college student. Two divorces later, he was now living on his own in a downtown loft near the office where he worked.
This last divorce was real tough. He thought they had a great relationship, and then suddenly one Thursday over dinner, she calmly informed him that she had been having an affair for three years, and she was finally leaving him. Actually, she said she was leaving his “boring as fuck ass”. He never saw it coming. Sure, he realized that their lives had become full of routines: Friday movie night, sex on the weekends, dinner at six every night. But he just figured that was what happened in all relationships.
So he moved out, got an apartment downtown near his work, and had fallen into a different set of routines.
Her voice broke up his thoughts. “Come on. Throw me your lighter, please. I need a smoke bad, and I am out of matches.”
“Ok, but move out of your window. I don’t want you to fall out trying to catch it,” he said as he prepared to hurl the lighter.
“OK, Dad,” she teased with a grin as she hopped off the ledge and into her room. She moved as if she didn’t weigh a thing, and her bright pink hair seemed to hang in the air as she hopped down.
Her tease made him smile as he tossed his lighter underhand towards her window. He must have been worried that he wasn’t going to throw the lighter hard enough and over compensated, because it clanged loudly against the top pane of her window and began to fall into the abyss of the alley.
Luckily her hand shot out of the window with cat-like reflexes and she closed it around the prize. Her rainbow colored nails gripped tightly around the lighter.
Immediately she flicked the lighter and lit the cigarette, now dangling from her lips. She took a long drag of the cigarette and exhaled with a large sigh that sounded like the weight of her day being released in one simple act. Her eyes were closed and head tilted back as she enjoyed the onrush of nicotine.
“You could have fallen out of the window, diving after the lighter like that.”
She opened her eyes revealing two huge dark pupils, and focused on John as if it was the first time that she was seeing him. A coy smile crept to her black lips. “Don’t worry Dad. I am a very careful girl,” she responded as she took another long drag of her cigarette.
She was wearing very short jean shorts that were dyed red and frayed at the bottom. Her black wife-beater tank top was hugging her torso like a second layer of skin. God, she was so thin; ‘Heroin chic’ is what the magazines called it. Her breasts seemed so large compared to her torso even though they were probably B cups, maybe small C cups he figured. There was no way she was wearing a bra either. Fuck, she looked hot. Even on this hot summer day he could see the bulge that her nipples were making in the thin fabric.
“I just wouldn’t want to see you fall, that’s all.” He took a drag from his cigarette and then raised his glass to his lips, relishing in the strong burn of whiskey on his tongue.
“My name is Alice by the way. What’s it been, like a couple of days since you moved in?”
“Actually, a bit over a week. My name is John.”
“So what’s your story John? Middle age men don’t just decided to move into an apartment in this neighborhood.”
“Well when your wife decides to have a long term affair and tells you about it, your options are limited.