"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.
Not that Bev could ever bring herself to say anything so direct and confrontational. "Um, sorry," she mumbled, looking down at her shoes and shuffling as fast as she could despite her very real concern that the drawstring on her baggy sweatpants was beginning to loosen and there was no way for her to reach under her duffel coat to hitch them up. "You know me, I can't even boil water. You, uh, you're better off with the Boy." She scooched past just ahead of Hank's attempt to lean into her path and darted forward, walking ever so slightly bow-legged in an effort to keep her waistband from slipping too low on her hips.
"Well, feel free to come back and see how it tastes!" Hank called out, but that only made Bev move a little bit quicker down the hallway as she hurried toward her own door and the safety of solitude. She wouldn't put it past Hank to be making a crude double entendre with that particular comment, and judging by the stink of musk that wafted out of his apartment and made her muddy brown eyes water behind her chunky glasses, Bev didn't need to taste any more of that if she could possibly avoid it. God, how much sex did you have to be having with your Boy to make his scent come out in a cloud like that every time you opened the door?
It had been like that for almost a week now every time she walked past Letty's door, albeit not quite in the nostril-searing quantities that were coming out of Hank's place. Just a constant fog of that weird, musky scent, making Bev's head swim every time she spent more than a couple of seconds in its presence. She wondered which poor benighted research chemist got tasked with creating the 'artificial sex' aroma, and what they told their parents they did for a living. Maybe they just said--
"Hello Beverly," Nadira purred, stepping out of her doorway with her Boy's arms wrapped around her. "You're looking lovely today." And this time, Beverly stopped dead in her tracks. Because unlike most of her neighbors, Bev actually had a nodding acquaintance with the beautiful young Jordanian woman who lived a couple doors down from her. During Bev's month-long struggle with the insurance company after her car accident last year, she'd wound up busing to work every day, and she and Nadira wound up sitting at the same stop each morning and commiserating about the bad weather and the inconsiderately late bus driver. She wouldn't call Nadira a friend, exactly--Bev had never been very good at friends--but she at least knew her. And she knew the Muslim woman wouldn't set foot outside her door without a hijab.
And yet there she was, her long dark hair flowing past her shoulders, looking unlike Bev had ever seen her during their entire time together as neighbors. "Y-your scarf," Bev stammered, the words coming out all wrong in her shock and dismay as she stared helplessly at her neighbor's uncovered head. "I, um, I mean your, your headscarf, you--you're not wearing it." She blushed furiously, sure she was probably coming off as some sort of bigot... but at the same time, she knew Nadira. They'd actually had a few real conversations in among the gripe sessions. The hijab was a symbol of her cultural heritage, a reminder of the country she still carried in her heart. It wasn't something she would give up lightly.
