He scratches one eyebrow with the back of his knuckle, frowning. “I’m watching a movie,” he says. “But I can turn it down. Sorry.”
Without even meaning to, I’m peering over his shoulder to get a better look.
Unlike the rest of our apartment, which was perfectly tidy when I arrived and is still perfectly tidy, his room is disastrous. Half of his records are stacked atop the milk crates they ostensibly belong inside. His bed is unmade, a rumpled comforter and the sheet untucked all the way around. Two tattered flannel shirts hang out of his mostly closed dresser drawers, like little ghosts he’s pinned there, midescape.
In direct opposition to the creams and taupes of my room, his is a messy, cozy mix of rusts, mustards, seventies greens. Where my books are neatly organized along my bookcase and the shelf I installed above my window, his (very few) are face down, spines cracked, on the floor. Electronics manuals, loose tools, and an open bag of Sour Patch Kids are scattered across his desk, and on his windowsill, a stick of incense burns between a few surprisingly vivacious houseplants.
His TV, though, is what catches my eye. Onscreen is the image of a thirty-year-old Renée Zellweger, sporting red pajamas and belting a song into a rolled-up magazine.
“Oh my god, Miles,” I say.
“What?” he says.
“You’re watching Bridget Jones’s Diary?”
“It’s a good movie!” he cries, a little defensive.
“It’s a great movie,” I say, “but this scene is, like, one minute long.”
He sniffs. “So?”
“So why has it been playing for at least”—I check my phone—“the last eight minutes?”
His dark brows knit together. “Did you need something, Daphne?”
“Could you just turn it down?” I say. “All the plates are rattling in the cabinets and Mr. Dorner’s trying to bust down the living room wall.”
Another sniff. “You want to watch?” he offers.
In there?
Too big of a tetanus risk. An ungenerous thought, sure, but I have recently tapped out my supply of generosity. That’s what happens when your life partner leaves you for the nicest, sunniest, prettiest woman in the state of Michigan.
“I’m good,” I tell Miles.
We both just stand there. This is as much as we ever interact. I’m about to break the record. My throat tickles. My eyes burn. I add, “And could you please not smoke inside?”
I would’ve asked sooner, except that, technically, the apartment is his. He did me a huge favor letting me move in.
Then again, it’s not like he had many options. His girlfriend had just moved out.
Into my apartment.
With my fiancé.
He needed to replace Petra’s half of their shared rent. I needed a place to sleep. Did I say sleep? I meant weep.
But I’ve been here three weeks now, and I’m tired of showing up to work smelling like I came straight from the least famous of the Grateful Dead’s spin-off bands’ concerts.
“I stick my head out the window,” Miles says.
“What,” I say.
Immediately I picture a chocolate Labrador riding in a car, its mouth open and eyes squinting into the wind. The few times Miles and I met before all this, on awkward double dates with our now-partnered partners, that’s what he’d reminded me of. Friendly and wiry with an upturned nose that made him look a bit impish, and teeth that were somehow too perfect in contrast to his scruffy face.
The toll of the last three weeks has given him a slightly feral edge—a Labrador bitten by a werewolf and dumped back at the pound. Relatable, honestly.
“I stick my head out the window when I smoke,” he clarifies.
“Okay,” I say. That’s all I’ve got. I turn to go.
“You sure you don’t want to watch the movie?” he says.
Oh, god.
The truth is, Miles seems like a nice guy. A really nice guy! And I imagine that what he’s feeling right now must be comparable to my own total emotional decimation. I could take him up on his offer, go sit in his room on an unmade bed and watch a romantic comedy while absorbing fifteen hundred grams of weed smoke via my pores. Maybe it would be nice even, to pretend for a bit that we’re friends rather than strangers trapped together in this nightmare of a breakup.
But there are better uses of my Wednesday night.
“Maybe some other time,” I say, and go back to my computer to continue looking for new jobs, far away from Peter and Petra, and far away from Waning Bay, Michigan.
I wonder if Antarctica is in need of a children’s librarian.
One hundred and eight days, and then I’m out of here.
2
