Saturday, 6:30 pm
Tabitha's eyes kept dancing to and from the windows as she worked, her fingers catching and winding lengths of thick crimson yarn. The metal needles rasped when they scraped together. Outside, the world had turned gold and violet with the fading twilight.
The night before became a blur sometime after one in the morning, when the movie had finally run its course. She remembered curling up on the couch across from James—still warm and sluggish from sex and all the rampaging endorphins it had set loose in her system—and fighting to keep her eyes open even during the chaos of the movie's climax. Then there was a brief period of blankness, interrupted only by the sound of her doorknob rattling before she slipped back into delirium. She woke up several hours later alone on her couch with a blanket draped over her body and dawn streaming into her apartment, illuminating her carpet in tall rectangles where it came in through her windows.
For the first time in over a week, Tabitha was able to enjoy her day off.
She almost hadn't known what to do with herself. She threw on some sweatpants and prepared herself for the weekly cleansing of her apartment after her shower, but remembered as she went to retrieve her cleaning supplies from her closet that the entire place had been scoured within an inch of its life the day before. So she busied herself with plowing through another one of her older books instead, and after a rather late lunch, she pulled out her knitting needles and zoned out on a few nature documentaries on her couch, her fingers working with the deftness of well-sustained muscle memory. Three hours and three feet later, she was ready to finish.
As she bound off the bulky edges of her knitting, her attention strayed to the book on her coffee table.
The Scarlet Letter.
She remembered buying a paperback copy for her high school English class and, even after the semester had ended, reading it again and again until it fell to pieces in her hands. She might even still have it, she thought—probably bound up in scotch tape and stuffed in a box in her closet.
She picked up the ancient red book and opened it carefully, relishing the weight of it in her hands. It was dripping with the smell of old, well-loved paper and dust, and the soft creaking noise the cover made as it spilled open in her lap made her feel like Indiana Jones prying open some long-forgotten box. She skimmed her fingers over the paper, marveling the old, spaced-out type and the flowery decorations that filled the first pages, and the pad of her index finger came to a stop at a line of handwriting, long and looping and painstakingly deliberate:
Marie Belanger, 1934
And below that, in a messier scrawl:
James Nevin, 1955
Tabitha's brow wrinkled with her squint.
There came a whining creak coming from somewhere beyond her bedroom, followed by a series of heavy footsteps, and she tore her eyes from the cover page to stare down her hallway. She hadn't heard much from James's apartment all day. Maybe he was getting ready for work.
She shut the book and placed it back onto her coffee table, summoning up the courage to make that nerve-wracking five-foot trek to the apartment next door. She'd already seen him twice this week, but that didn't make her any less nervous about seeing him again. It wasn't a particularly
terrible
sort of nervousness, not anymore, but all that giddiness and warped excitement was keeping her a hair's breadth away from planting her feet firmly into the carpet and screaming. Humans weren't supposed to feet this many things at once, she thought glumly as she rose to her feet and snatched up the scarf. It had to be unhealthy.
The bathroom light was on, and the trip inside to turn it off quickly became a quest to fix her hair in the mirror...followed by her makeup, and then smoothing out the wrinkles in her shirt. After several minutes, she finally yanked herself out of the mirror's clutches, feeling ridiculous. She had to hurry if she wanted to catch James before he left for work.
She exited the bathroom and flipped the light switch behind her, but just after she turned to make her way to the front door, she spun back around with a gasp.
The hallway was dim and still in front of her, and she put a hand to her chest to steady her pounding heartbeat. For just a sliver of a moment, she could have sworn she saw a very humanoid silhouette standing just outside of her bedroom; a brief flicker of thin limbs and long, raggedy hair lurking in her peripheral vision.
Her vacuum sat innocently in the corner next to her hall closet, casting a long shadow on her wall from the light of her living room, and she glowered at it as she knelt to slip on her boots.
James answered his door wearing a vacant expression, but it melted into one of his little smiles when their eyes met. "Tabitha."
"Hi," said Tabitha. She tried to keep the concern from entering her voice. James's usual pallor seemed accentuated somehow, and his eyes were surrounded by circles like soft bruises. They made his dark eyes seem even darker, larger, like two oil spills in his face. He looked so...tired. "Please don't take this the wrong way, but...are you feeling alright? You look exhausted."
"Haven't been sleeping well. It'll pass." He scratched the nape of his neck and blinked slowly, looking all for the world like a man who had tried and failed to sleep off a bender the night before. "Want to come in?"
"Oh, that's okay," Tabitha said quickly. "I just came by to drop something off. You have work, right?"
"Not tonight." He opened the door a little wider. "I've got a couple beers we can split, if you want."
She slipped past him, and as he shut the door behind her, she observed her surroundings with a little worry. His usually neat apartment seemed messier today. A few dirty glasses were stacked alongside six empty beer bottles, a dish towel was on the floor, and the throw blanket that was normally folded over the couch was lying in a lumpy heap on the carpet. His television was on and displaying a blank, bright blue screen.
"Sorry for the mess," he said from behind her, and she chided herself. Her scrutiny must have been incredibly obvious.
"I don't mind," she said quickly.
He leaned his elbows on the counter and smiled at her. "Yes you do. How did you know I was home?"
"I heard you moving around and thought I'd come say hello before you left for the night," Tabitha admitted. Then she met his eye and winced. "That's...that's not creepy, is it?"
"So you
were
lying that night, when you said you couldn't hear me," he said. To her relief, however, the idea only seemed to amuse him.
"I was trying to be polite but...yes. You used to wake me up. I'm pretty immune to your early-morning tintinnabulation now, though."
"I'll try to keep the tintinnabulating to a minimum from now on."
She grinned. "That would be sweet of you."
His eyes dropped to examine the bag in her hands. "What's that?"
"Oh...right." She placed the bag on the counter and pulled out the long, red, bulky length of knitted yarn. She offered it to him, and he took it from her with a curious look. "I, um...made you a scarf," she mumbled, looking down at the counter.
When she finally dared to look back up at him, his lips had split into a wide, utterly delighted grin. "You made me a scarf," he repeated, unfolding it to inspect it. "How long did it take you?"
"Only a couple days. Big yarn knits fast," Tabitha told the countertop. "I just thought that since you walk everywhere, it would help you stay warm." Across the counter, James was winding the scarf around his neck.
