I glare at him and turn back to Calvin, the man the city sent to check out the hole after I called about it. Except I don’t want Gence to know I called the city—thus, my “friend” Calvin was born. My eyes dart to Gence and away. He is standing next to Calvin and glowering at me. I feel a trickle of sweat roll down the small of my back. He knows. I’m not a good liar. I shouldn’t have let Margie talk me into doing this, Jack hatred or no.
No. I can’t blame Margie. I’m an adult. And I have never been susceptible to peer pressure. Except when Margie convinced me to do shots until I was guaranteed a three-day hangover this past weekend. Or when she goaded me into taking a hammer to my wall last night to “fix the situation so you can shut up about your neighbor already.” She’s a bad influence. I should have listened to Avery. Bad, bad Margie. Dumb, dumb Penny.
“Anyway, so Calvin was visiting, and—”
“How do you guys know each other?” Jack asks.
“We—”
“Not you,” Jack adds, pointedly looking past me at Calvin. “Him.”
“High school,” Calvin says, looking desperately uncomfortable that I’ve asked him to lie.
I swallow my groan. Calvin looks eighty years old if he’s a day. And Jack looks like he’s trying desperately not to laugh. The nosy douche wandered over when Gence started flipping out about the hole.
“Oh. Were you a senior when she was a freshman, then?”
I march over to Jack, giving him my meanest glare. I ignore his scruffy, dimpled smile and grit out, “He was my teacher, actually. We had a torrid affair that culminated when I turned eighteen and he was finally able to ravage me on his desk.”
I slam the door in his face before he can respond, then return to the grandfatherly pair in my living room. They’re both awkwardly averting their gazes, staring at the wooden beams and the back of Jack’s wall through the enormous hole I’ve put in mine “by accident.”
Heat climbs up my neck.Nice work, dumbass. “Ah…Gence, that last part was a joke.”
“Eh, lopë kosit. S’ka marre hiç,” Gence mutters.
Calvin fills Gence in on exactly what Genevieve told me, and Gence shakes his head, as if denying all the work that’ll be required of him to bring the wall up to code.
I feel a twinge of conscience and resolve to give him a bigger holiday gift than usual this year.
But then Calvin drops a bombshell: Genevieve was right, and this wall was put up illegally. Which means that the building owner either needs to take it down and make it into a single apartment again, or he needs to legalize the unauthorized work and put up a new wall to code.
“Either way, the defect needs to be remedied. Sixty days, no extensions,” Calvin says.
As they’re leaving, I see Gence eyeing me and Calvin doubtfully, probably picking up on our less-than-familiar demeanor. Or at least I think that’s the look he’s giving me.
“Bye, Calvin! So good seeing you again. Say hi to the family for me,” I say, an octave this side of suspicious. I hold my hand up to Calvin for a high five, which he slowly reaches up to deliver. But in the split second he hesitates, I decide to go in for a hug instead. The result is an awkward hug-handclasp combo that makes it look as if we’re about to launch into a hallway waltz.
Fantastic. I’ve accosted a city official all because I couldn’t remember how normal human friends say goodbye.
I realize too late that Jack is lazing on the threshold to his apartment, lapping it all up. When Gence and Calvin have descended out of sight, I wheel on him, bracing for the onslaught.
“May I have this dance?”
I roll my eyes.
“No? Okay. Need help cleaning up the plaster instead?” He’s smirking, the right side of his lips quirked, his eyes more than a little amused.
“Not from you,” I snap, trying to preempt whatever insult he’s cooking up.
“Maybe we should call your good buddy Calvin back. He can help, since you guys are so tight.”
I sniff and cross my arms. “He’s the best.”
Jack shakes his head and leans against his doorframe. “Destruction of property, compulsive lying… What levels won’t she stoop to? What won’t this girl do, folks?”
“You. Thiswomanwon’t do you. I’m pretty sure Dante wrote about it as one of the circles of hell.”
He grins and straightens, taking a few steps toward me until we’re a breath from each other. I force myself to stand my ground and look up at him. His gray eyes twinkle like plummeting pieces of a defunct space shuttle. He should smell like sulfur. Instead, he smells woodsy. Like Pine-Sol. Or the air freshener from a cab I puked in once when I had the flu. It makes me want to gag. No human man should smell like air freshener. It’s disgusting.
