I just hope my room in this new house is as nice as it looked in the photos.
I’ve been to the neighborhood where Aiden lives—although I guess his sister owns the house?—but it’s on the other side of town from where I grew up with my mom. We lived on the west side of Center, where the houses are smaller and the grass overgrown. Now, though, I find myself driving down a picturesque lane, lined with trees and houses with white picket fences. Nothing quite as fancy as the Heights or anywhere over there, but still nice. It’s the perfect image of suburbia,something I would have scoffed and sneered at when I was in high school.
But I know better now. The reason this kind of neighborhood is the American dream is not that it’s fancy or aesthetically pleasing or whatever. Human beings like those things, but what we really crave is stability. We want to go to bed at night and know that things will still be okay when we wake up. We want to rest easy. And that’s the feeling a white picket fence gives off: safety. Stability.
Sometimes it’s an illusion, of course. But sometimes it’s not.
I find 18 Theabelle Lane?* with ease, thanks to the numbers posted on the picket fence posts. It’s prettier in person than in the pictures online, although that may just be because the leaves are so vibrant right now; they add splashes of color to the white siding and black shutters. There’s a porch and a large porch swing, one of those that’s more like a hanging platform bed than a bench. I’m already planning to turn that into a prime reading spot when the weather warms up. I smile at it as I walk up the porch steps and to the front door, imagining all the pillows I can justify buying for a swing of that size. Then I check the door handle.
The door is unlocked, so I let myself in and start looking around. My first, immediate thought is that Chip and Joanna would definitely approve. It’s an open floor plan, with hardwood floors and white shiplap on the walls.
Joanna is all about that shiplap.
I wander sort of aimlessly, checking things out. The decor is minimalist but just enough—clean lines, muted colors, lots of light. No seasonal decor, I note, but there’s still time for meto change that.
“Wow,” I say when Aiden emerges from around a corner. He’s lost the blazer, but he’s still in full professor mode, even at home. “This place is nice.” Then I smile at him. “Do I get a tour?”
He raises one brow as he passes by me and moves into the kitchen. “Sure, if you do it yourself.”
I shake my head while also forcing myself not to sniff in his general direction to see what he smells like. “A tour needs a tour guide. That’s a basic rule.”
“They’re calledself-guided tours, and I hear they’re all the rage,” he says dryly, pulling a glass from one of the cabinets. I watch as he fills it with tap water and then gulps the whole thing down in four swallows, his throat bobbing.
“All right,” I say. “You win. How do I get to my room? It’s in the loft, yeah?”
He places the glass in the sink, staring out the kitchen window and taking his sweet time answering.
“Aiden?” I say when he doesn’t speak. I wait (less than) patiently as he moves the curtains aside, leaning in until I think he might actually press his face to the glass. He doesn’t, though; he just looks out that window for a second longer and then lets the curtains drop again.
He finally turns to me, leaning back against the counter. “Sorry, thought I saw something weird.”
Something weird? What’s that supposed to mean?
I guess it’s not surprising. My day was a little weird too. Aiden being my roommate—the coincidence to end all coincidences—and the slightly strange yoga instructor and my obvious paranoid hallucination outside Namaste.
Maybe Autumn Grove is just a little weird now.
Or, more likely, maybeIjust got a little weird, and it’s affecting how I see theworld around me.
Aiden points to the staircase on my left. “Your room is up the big stairs, around the corner, then up the little stairs.”
“Up the big stairs, around the corner, up the little stairs,” I repeat. “I’m excited about the loft. Hopefully this will give me some space and quiet to work.” I head in that direction; I’ll look around a bit on my way there, too.
I take my time going up the steps, mostly because I stop to look at all the pictures hung along the wall as I climb. They’re a bunch of black and white travel photos, most of them of easily recognizable sites—the Eiffel Tower, the London Eye, the Colosseum. I examine each one, trying to figure out if Aiden or his sister took them, or if they were simply purchased. I could ask him, I guess, but that feels like cheating.
“What’s the verdict?” Aiden says from behind me, just as I’m squinting at the foreground of the Eiffel Tower picture to see if I can recognize any identifying factors.
I jump, spinning around and wobbling dangerously as my feet lose themselves on the wooden staircase. I throw my hand out to steady myself, clutching desperately at the first thing I find as the world goes sideways.
And look. It’s not my finest moment, okay? Normally I think of myself as a decently poised woman. My balance is good, thanks to the core strength I’ve developed from doing yoga for the last five years.
But we all have off days, and…well, today seems to be one of mine.
Because as I pitch headfirst down the stairs, my wildly grasping hands find one thing and one thing only: Aiden Milano’s ear.
Hisear.
I am a rock climber at a climbing gym, and Aiden’s ear is the finger hold that will stop me fromplummeting to my death. But there’s no chalk on my hands, no safety rope, no harness—and Aiden, it seems, is not interested in taking this fall with me.
