With my phone flashlight in one hand and my keys gripped in the other, I hug the wall of the stairwell and make my way up, jumpingat every noise until I arrive at my floor. Then I stop dead. A man is silhouetted in the dim light of the hallway, muttering at a door three down from mine. Is it safer to wait until he’s inside?
I look again. I instinctively recognize that profile. My heart speeds up.
“Rafe?” It comes out as a whisper. I’m sure I must be wrong and don’t want to embarrass myself in front of a stranger.
Rafe whips around so fast his bag drops off his shoulder, jerking his body to the side. Around him on the floor is luggage. A lot of it. “Luling.”
“Lucy,” I correct automatically as I walk toward him. Walking is an exaggeration. If anything, I’m merely inching closer, slow and deliberate, as I internalize the fact of his presence. He doesn’t belong here. Not on my side of the country; not in my building, my hall, or my life. “Why are you here?”
“I’m staying here.” His voice sounds normal, and that’s enough to turn my surprise into anger. The unexpected usually does, as it jolts my calm and orderly existence into something unpredictable and possibly, to my primal brain, dangerous. Rafe isn’t a physical threat, but he’s a psychological one that I’ve dealt with by trying to forget him.
“Why aren’t you in a hotel?” My voice sounds accusatory, although I know, rationally, that he can stay wherever he wants. Him being here is simply too much of a coincidence, one that indicates a purposeful, if malicious, hand at work. I’m close enough to see him give me a similar suspicious look, which is rich since I’m the one who lives here. It’s like we feed off each other’s bad energy.
“I can stay where I want,” he says.
How petulant. I stare at him, and eventually he shrugs.
“I don’t like hotels, and I need to be in Toronto for a few months on business. My mother recommended this place. She said a friend suggested it, and…” He stops talking as we follow the chain of events as easily as if we drew the map ourselves. The woman who lives inthat apartment is an assistant producer who rents out her place when she’s away on film shoots, something I’d mentioned to my mother while trying to make conversation. I never guessed she would hoard the information like a treasure dragon, waiting to deploy it at the right moment. There’s my hand of God. My mother. I feel a wave of admiration for her cunning, one that passes as soon as it appears. That’s why she hinted about Rafe. She had it planned.
There is nothing to say, so I say nothing as I go into my apartment and very loudly throw the locks behind me.
Then I lean against the door. Prickles run over my skin as multiple years of compressed emotion percolate through my blood like a scuba diver getting the bends. I’m self-aware enough to know holding a grudge for so long means it’s more about the grudge itself than the original offense, but can I be blamed? The man down that hall is the avatar of all my deficiencies, the physical embodiment of the time when everything changed for me, and not for the better. Rafe offered me the first rejection in a series of failures and might as well be wearing a sandwich board that reads “Lucy, remember you’re an undesirable washout.” I wish things could be different, but I can’t chisel through the feelings that have accumulated like cooled lava.
Even if the feelings faded, after so many years, I wouldn’t know how to back down.
When the knock comes at my door, I sag. Somehow, I’d been waiting and hoping for it, but in order to achieve what kind of resolution, I don’t know. All I know is, if the knock hadn’t come, I would have been up all night thinking about why. That makes me more upset because I shouldn’t care at all. Not after all these years.
“Luling?” Rafe calls.
“Lucy.” I’d used Lucy for school and when I left home, but I’d always been Luling to him. I don’t want that intimacy—not now.
“The key doesn’t work, and the host isn’t answering my calls.”
I walk to my closed door. “I don’t have an extra.”
“Luling—”
“Lucy.”
“Lucy. I didn’t know this apartment was in your building. There’s a blizzard outside and no way I can safely get another ride to a hotel.”
“What do you want me to do about it?” I know what’s coming, but I’m not going to offer. He has to ask.
Rafe doesn’t hesitate. “I swear I’ll get it sorted out in the morning if you let me in.”
I weigh the satisfaction of making him sleep in the hall against dealing with my mother’s pointed comments about hospitality and her friendship with the Jins. I sigh loud enough for him to hear but know what my answer will be.
“One night,” I warn as I unlock the door.
Rafe drags in his luggage and stands there dripping melted snow on the floor, looking as utterly done with his day as I am with mine.
“You can hang your coat to dry on the hook,” I say.
He nods and shrugs it off. Underneath, he wears a thick, soft-looking gray sweater with a turtleneck. It’s not a look every guy can pull off with confidence, but he makes it look good with the black business-casual slacks still caked with snow at the cuffs.
“Bathroom is down the hall.” I wave my hand in the correct direction and try to sound, if not cool, at least unaffected. It’s hard since my resentment is still seething, although below it lingers another feeling that I don’t want to fish up. “There’s no spare bedroom, so you can sleep on the couch.”
“Thank you.” He directs his reply to the floor, and his awkwardness is enough to make me somewhat more civil. After all, I let him in. It’s churlish to be rude for the sake of it, and I have a feeling it would only broadcast my own mixed feelings about the situation. The best-case scenario is we treat each other with the distant polite attention one would give a stranger sharing their train compartment. Rafe watches as I circle the apartment to light candles, providing theambience of a séance. They’re fat white pillars left over from my shop from last summer and combine a variety of scents that don’t necessarily complement each other. He sniffs the air. “Do you have any that don’t smell like vanilla or geranium flowers?”
