Page 11 of Protected By Razor

He nods. Once. Slow. Goes back to his phone.

But something in his face has changed, and I know — I know — that the next time Greg knocks on this door, I am not the one who’s going to be opening it.

He knocks again the next afternoon.

I’m in the kitchen. Razor is on the couch. I know that knock — three quick, one slow — and my body goes stiff before my brain’s caught up.

Razor’s already standing.

“Stay in the kitchen,” he says.

He crosses to the door before I can say anything else.

Greg’s face is already in his customer-service smile — hey, Darcie, just need to pop in — and it stays there for about a second and a half before his brain catches up with what’s standing in front of him.

Six feet two inches of tattooed biker in a black t-shirt. No smile. Hands loose at his sides.

Greg’s face drops.

“Oh — I?— sorry, I think I’ve got the wrong??—”

“You don’t.”

Razor doesn’t move. Doesn’t raise his voice. The two words land heavy enough that Greg physically leans back.

“I was just checking the smoke detector??—”

“You weren’t.”

“I?—”

“You like knocking on her door.” Razor’s voice is flat. The kind of flat that isn’t calm. “You like making a nuisance of yourself. You like her being too polite to tell you to get the fuck out when you stay to long for no reason at all.”

Greg’s gone gray. He’s four inches shorter than Razor and about half as wide, and he’s got nowhere to go because the hallway’s narrow and Razor is filling the doorway.

“Here’s how it’s going to go,” Razor says. “You fix what she asks you to fix in this building. You do it fast. You don’t come up here unless she calls you. You don’t speak to her unless it’s about the lease. You don’t look at her. And if I hear you’ve made her uncomfortable even one more time, I’m going to find you. And I won’t knock first.”

Greg’s mouth opens, before quickly closing again.

“Understood?” Razor says.

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“I — understand. Yeah. Understood.”

“Good.”

Razor closes the door in his face.

I’m standing in the middle of the kitchen with my fingers wrapped around the edge of the counter and my stomach doing something I don’t have a word for.

Nobody’s ever done that for me before. No one has ever stared a man down and told them to back the fuck off and meant every single word of it.

Razor walks back past me into the living room without looking at my face.

“He won’t bother you again,” he says.