The Guy in Apartment 10a.
Chapter 01
Georgia sat on the fire escape smoking and listening to the sounds of a city refusing to sleep.
She should have been in bed after another long shift tending bar but she was too keyed up after six interminable hours of slinging cheap beer in a college dive bar with pretensions of mediocrity.
So Georgia sat out on the steel grating, tapping the cigarette and watching the embers drift down into the garbage packed alleyway far below like a shower of tiny shooting stars winking out in the cool night air. Listening to the distant honking of midnight traffic. The unintelligible cries of the drunken homeless. The muted bass music from the strip club down the block and the myriad other inauspicious sounds of downtown after a rational person's bedtime.
And above it all, the loud sounds of rampant animated fucking coming from the apartment directly above her own.
"You are nailing the sad goth girl look, Georgie." Her roommate Linh's head was poking out from the tiny kitchenette window and grinning at her across the short intervening distance. "Let me get my phone and we'll sell the snaps to lonely emo losers online for beer money."
"Yeah, right." Georgia took a short pull on her Chesterfield Slim. "I'll let that happen just as soon as you dress up in a tiny k-pop outfit for the same photo shoot."
"Ewww...
yuck. How would that even work?" Linh's pretty face screwed up in mock disgust. "My family is Vietnamese and I can't pose to save my life."
Georgia wondered, not for the first time, how her young life had become the premise to a lousy nineties sitcom.
Like, here's the elevator pitch. Freshly minted college freshman moves out of home in a desperate bid for independence. Said move comes with pesky new responsibilities like food and rent so she gets a part-time job pitching foamy suds and no-name whiskey for minimum wage and whatever tips her equally minimum patrons can afford to bestow upon her.
Tight money equates to tighter living quarters in a rat-hole apartment block on the wrong side of town with her workmate turned roommate (because hey, we girls have got to stick together) and somewhere along the line it was her study that went part-time while her shitty job took pole position to keep up with the mountain of bills that needed paying.
"You and me both..." Georgia muttered then paused as a ecstatic feminine wail cut through the flaky panel ceiling. "Jeezus, are they fucking or trying to kill each other up there?"
"Beats me but they've been going at it for ages!" Linh exclaimed, her long raven hair spilling out the little window as she tried to twist her shoulders to glance upwards. She was going to sprain her neck. "It's like they're training for the sex olympics or something. Have you met him yet?"
Him.
He of the endlessly thudding headboard. The composer of entire concertos made up of gratified girly moans. Mister Growly Grunts as Linh liked to giggle in the mornings after the lewd racket had finally died down. Georgia hadn't met the guy but she already wanted to kick him squarely in the scrote. She'd wear her heaviest pair of Doc Martins just to see if his balls were actually made of solid brass as she suspected.
And he'd only moved in a week ago.
"I think so? Maybe by the mailboxes." She hedged, trying to recall. "But I've definitely seen the kind of girl he is bringing home."
"Really, the Marathon Man has a type?"
He did, most certainly he did. Georgia didn't want to call anyone a slut. Nor a tramp or skank either. A modern educated woman knew better than to proliferate such terminology meant to internalize sexism with the intention of controlling women.
"They are... you know." Georgia floundered for an appropriately correct description. "Young, attractive, free spirited..."
"Under-dressed?" Linh snickered, abandoning her voyeuristic attempts to stare holes through the crumbling brick facade above their heads. "Suitably well fucked?"
Georgia looked down at her pitch black fingernails in shame and twirled her smoldering cigarette in thoughtful fashion.
There was the eternal sisterhood of all women everywhere to consider, but the girls she had witnessed stumbling down the stairs--all impressively busty, bowlegged, barely dressed and grinning from ear to ear--had all seemed a bit brainless in Georgia's opinion.
They were the sort to giggle a lot and flip their long glossy waterfalls of illustrious hair to grab some random hunks attention. Then titter on their way back to his apartment on precariously tall high heels which would soon be dangling up in the air as the young stud pounded their easy pussies.
"Something like that." Georgia conceded unhappily then sneezed... and sneezed again.
"Oh shit, Georgie. Is that flu bug still kicking your ass?" Linh asked in concern. "Wait there, I'll get you some tee pee to blow your nose"
"Izz just a bad head cold." She snuffled, wiping at her nose and flicking the last of the cigarette over the railing.
It bounced off the featureless smog-stained brick wall of the neighboring apartment block only seven feet away. What a great fucking view.
She shouldn't be smoking anyway. If they were scrimping on tissues to save a few bucks, Georgia couldn't really justify maintaining a nicotine habit. Easier said than done though and she needed a vice to keep from going totally bonkers...
She ducked back through her bedroom window and had to step across her single sized bed where it was crammed up against the wall to make room for a tiny dresser slash side table combo in her little eight by eight cupboard of a bedroom. Linh met her at the door.
"Here..." She said, giving her a bunched up wad of toilet paper and a worried look. "Maybe you should go see a doctor? Your nose is looking pretty red."
"Who's going to pay for that? Not you or me." Georgia scoffed, gratefully accepting the offering and dabbing at her pale face with it.
She hadn't been able to taste or smell anything for a week but she was no stranger to a late season cold or flu. She got them nearly every year and blamed it on a growing vitamin D deficiency. If her waking hours grew any more nocturnal, Georgia was going to graduate from sad but pretty goth girl to full blown vampire countess status.
"Still, you should consider one of the free clinics-" Linh was interrupted by a loud elated feminine squeal and a crash above their heads that shook a small line of plaster dust from the already questionable ceiling. "Oh, for fucks sake! I'm going up there with a bucket of cold water and..."
"Leave it." Georgia said miserably. "Try and get some sleep. We can... I don't know, slip a sternly worded note under his door tomorrow or whatever."
Taking her roommates silent glower at the floor above as tacit agreement, Georgia stripped off her torn black jeans and Motorhead skinny tee and slipped into bed.
The throaty grunts and passionate moans continued unabated until she finally fell asleep.
________________
Georgia didn't get the chance to pen her note before meeting the mystery man upstairs for the first time. He was collecting his post from the large bank of mailboxes in the ground floor entryway the next afternoon just as she was returning from class.
She didn't recognize him at first but his open olive green brass receptacle was labeled 10a which logically placed him directly above her own apartment 9a several floors up.
She sized him up with a glance, checking for any of the usual warning signs. It was a skill all young women quickly acquired after working behind a bar for any length of time. He was inspecting a small brown paper package with some eagerness but was otherwise remarkably unremarkable.
No bulging steroid enhanced muscles. No gang or biker tattoos. No squinty wandering eyes or gelled up Chad hairdo. Just a lean average twenty-something guy in worn acid washed jeans, a beige button up and slightly scuffed sneakers who could have been a face in any number of innocuous backgrounds.
This was the pussy-crushing sex god from upstairs? Surely not...
"Ummm, Hi... Can I help you, miss?"
Oh, shit. He had caught her staring and was looking back at her with a mildly helpful expression.
His hair was mud brown but neatly trimmed in a five dollar haircut, probably from one of the hole-in-the-wall budget barbershops down on Third Avenue. His eyes were a flat greenish hazel and his cheeks held the hints of some hold-out teenage acne under a faint shadow of wispy stubble.
"What? No... just waiting to get to my mailbox." Georgia said with a sniff. She had taken a decongestant earlier in the day but it wore off hours ago and her head felt stuffed full of cotton wool again. "Do you mind?"
"Sorry, go ahead." He said, locking his own box before stepping back and sorting through his mail distractedly.
Georgia didn't have any mail. She knew this because Linh brought it in every morning along with the cheap coffee from the donut shop on the corner. However, as she fished out her keys--making a pretense of opening and checking for letters (more overdue bills most likely)--she managed to spot his name inked onto a strip of masking tape stuck below his mail slot.
V. Powell.
What the hell did the
V.
stand for?
"Vince! Hey there, Hot Stuff. I'm, like,