"Hello, Beverly. You're looking lovely today." The voices came to her in an ominous harmony from Letty's front door, spoken in stereo as though the statuesque Black woman and her new Boy(tm) were auditioning for the role of the Grady twins in a really weird remake of 'The Shining'. Bev found her pace instinctively picking up as her social anxiety kicked into a whole new gear--she normally only managed a brief, perfunctory exchange with Letty when they bumped into each other in the parking lot or at the mailbox, and this aggressively friendly attitude her neighbor down the hall had developed over the last week only made Bev more tense and nervous around her.
"Um, uh, thanks," she mumbled in reply, keeping her eyes down and her shoulders hunched in the tight, tense posture that usually discouraged unwanted interaction. She didn't think she looked lovely at all; the shower at the gym was broken, so she'd just shoved her lank, untidy chestnut hair under her winter hat and bundled up in her ratty old duffel coat to conceal the fact that she didn't want to change into clean clothes without first rinsing the sweat off her body. Letty was just being polite, and her Boy was probably just... following his programming, Bev supposed.
Even so, Letty sounded intensely sincere when she said, "I've got a fresh pot of coffee brewing if you want to come in for a moment and have something warm to get the chill out of your bones," in a cheerful, folksy sort of way that felt a little bit out of place coming from someone who was standing hand-in-hand with her ambulatory sex toy at the threshold of her cozy apartment. Not that Letty necessarily had to be using her Boy for his... intended purpose, she euphemized mentally--she'd heard about people who bought Boys to do household chores, run errands, even walk their dogs. Then again, she'd also heard that Revolution Technologies had a whole bunch of fake accounts providing testimonials for their product online in the hopes of astroturfing a viral marketing sensation.
It didn't much matter to Bev. Even if Letty was all by herself, Bev didn't want to sit in the kitchen of a woman she barely knew wearing her sweaty gym clothes and making awkward small talk. "I, um, a-another time," she squeaked out, unable to conceal her anxiety as she scurried down the hallway without throwing so much as a backward glance in the other woman's direction. "I, uh, I gotta get inside, I think I might have left the, uh, stove on." It was a blatant, transparent lie, but at least it salvaged the tiniest shred of Bev's dignity. At the cost of making her suddenly wonder whether she had in fact left the oven on and forgotten.
But that was always the way of it with her, wasn't it? If it wasn't social anxiety making her want to shut herself in her little corner efficiency apartment, it was neuroses making her triple-check for dripping taps before she left for work or hypochondria sending her to WebMD every time she felt a twinge in her stomach. Bev was jumpy about everything, and even if she knew she was overreacting and letting her overactive imagination spin out of control, that didn't make it any easier to just ignore the--
"Hello, Beverly," Hank said, stepping out of his front door as if he'd been looking out the peephole and waiting for her to approach. "You're looking lovely today." He said it in the exact same tone of voice Letty had, which was bad enough, but he had a Boy standing right behind him looking over his shoulder at Bev with a smug little grin on his sculpted features, which was even worse. Not that Bev had any business inquiring into her neighbors' sex lives, but she'd spent enough time trying to edge past Hank in the hallway while he made himself as obtrusive as possible to know that he liked women maybe a little too much. If he had a bi side, he'd kept it quiet before now.
"Oh!" Bev heard herself exclaim, unable to stop herself from visibly flinching in startled surprise at the unexpected intrusion. "Um, that's new. Uh, thanks." She hadn't meant to say all of that out loud, necessarily, but their appearance out of nowhere had left her a little bit rattled and her filters were gone. She could feel fresh sweat soaking into her already clammy gym clothes, not from exertion or even from the heat of wearing her stiflingly warm duffel coat zipped up all the way to the collar indoors. This was pure flop sweat, and she knew it.
And from the way Hank looked at her, she felt like he could tell. She quickly looked down, unable to meet his gaze as he said, "Say, I don't suppose you could come in for a moment and give me a hand making dinner? The Boy(tm) is supposed to have a culinary program, but it doesn't help as much as I hoped and I really think I might need a woman's touch for this one." Good lord. Hank was only about fifteen years older than she was, but he sounded like he stepped straight out of the Fifties. No wonder he needed a walking sex toy, if this was his attitude toward women.
