Sweet Talk by Cara Bastone

Chapter Eighteen

Eliot

I stand back and blink down at the woman I just ran into. We both turned the corner too fast and bam, smashed right into each other. She’s got her phone pressed to her ear and so do I. I’ve got one hand in the air in a natural, “hands away” sort of pose, but she’s balancing herself against my chest. I realize now that I was hearing that police siren both through JD’s end of the line and with my own ears.

Because that cop car was going by both of us. Because we are in exactly the same place. Because the person I’m staring at is JD. I can feel that my mouth is open but I can’t make myself close it.

We stare at one another as the police car passes us. I can hear the siren next to me and through the phone. When the police car is gone we’re both still just staring at one another. She’s gone white as a sheet.

“JD.” It’s a statement. Not a question. Because I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.

Suddenly, she animates. She hangs up our call, slips her phone in her pocket, and turns to walk the other way.

“Wait!” I call to her. “I—”

I would chase after her, but my feet are glued to the sidewalk. Besides. Let’s really think about what I’m dealing with right now. This is a woman who did not want me to know her identity. Probably, I’m realizing, because she lives in my building and I technically help pay her salary. And she just power-walked away from me on the street. If this were a television show, I’d probably be expected to run after her and make a speech. But this is real life. And in real life, you don’t chase down women on the street when they’ve made it very clear that they want to put a lot of distance between the two of you.

But still.

I watch her long legs eat up the rest of the block and then she turns the corner into our apartment building.

I cannot believe it’s her.

I cannot believe I know who JD is.

“Why were you staring in horror at our superintendent?” Frida Hawkins asks me as she appears at my elbow.

“Whoa!” I jump an inch off the ground. “How long have you been there?”

“Long enough to see you look at Jessie like you just realized she was Pennywise the Clown.”

“Jessie.” I hate so much that I’m learning JD’s real name from Frida. I also hate that I was too much of a twerp to ask again for my new super’s name after I forgot it the first time.

“Horror, you said?” I ask Frida in confusion. “That wasn’t horror on my face. That was shock.”

“Looked like horror to me.”

Okay, so if I’m being honest with myself, there might have been a dash of horror mixed in to my expression.

How do I explain this?

All right, it’s probably pertinent to explain about the first night I met JD. I mean Jessie. She was Jessie before she was JD. She’s still Jessie. She was always Jessie.

God. Maybe if I hadn’t met her on the worst night of my life I wouldn’t have such a hard time merging JD and Jessie into one person. But here we are.

It was two and a half months ago. I used to sleep like the dead. Passed out in a pile. I used to need two different alarm clocks placed in different locations to get me out of bed. I used to sleep like a champ. But that night I blinked awake at 3 a.m. Something had pulled me out of my dream. I still remember that in the dream I was in a bookstore but every time I went to pull a book off the shelf it would end up being a sandwich.

Regardless, I sat up in bed and froze because I heard a noise coming from my living room. It was a crunching sort of thump. And then there were footsteps.

Someone was in my apartment.

My sister had a key, sure. But she’d never wear boots in the house and I was certain that this was the tread of a grown man.

So there I was, in boxer shorts, standing next to my bed, trying to decide what the hell to do next.

Here’s the thing. Because of my tendency to get obsessed with things really easily, I always used to sleep with my phone in a different room. If I left it beside the bed, I might blink back into reality to realize that I’d been playing Bubble Shooter for the last four hours and now it was dawn. It was just generally healthier to charge it in the other room every night.

But at that particular moment, it meant that there was an intruder between me and my phone.

So, that’s how I found myself in my underwear with a baseball bat in my hand. I keep one in all my closets just like my dad taught me. I played Little League and was actually pretty good as a kid. I probably could have made the high school team but at the time my grades weren’t good enough. But right at that moment, I felt like I’d never touched a bat in my life. It was awkward and cold in my hands. I debated for a stupidly long amount of time whether or not I should take a second to put pants on. But then I imagined the intruder coming into my bedroom while I had my pants halfway up and me having to fight for my life while tripping around like an idiot.

Underwear was best, I figured. So, there I went, sneaking down the hallway toward the living room. Bat in hand.

I crept around the corner and saw the mess before I saw the man.

I’d apparently slept through a lot because all the books were off the shelves. I could see that the vase where I’d hidden a couple hundred bucks in emergency cash was tipped to one side and empty. My couch was disheveled, the blankets on the floor.

Carefully, quietly, I stepped around the corner into the living room. My eyes were focused on the window across the room, the desk where all of my computer equipment charged up at night. The laptop alone was worth a thousand bucks.

But then something moved right beside me and I realized the guy was not standing across the room about to steal my laptop. He was kneeling on the floor right next to me, pawing through my living-room closet.

There was this strange moment when he blinked up at me in confusion and I blinked down at him in surprise.

I could practically read his thoughts. Mostly naked man with baseball bat.

He must have been reading mine. Burglar on the floor.

I had just enough time to really look at him. He had pretty hair. Shiny and chestnut brown and pulled back into a bun. There were tattoos creeping up his neck and his eyes were blue or green.

But my moment to observe him was over in a nanosecond when he sprang to his feet. I cocked the bat and stepped toward him, pulling back to swing. It’s muscle memory to swing a bat. My body knew exactly what to do. But halfway through the swing, my gut clenched and my arms went screwy. Because there wasn’t a ball at the other end of this swing. It was a person. Yes, a person who had trashed my house, but a person with a pulse and breath in his lungs, standing there in two boots that he’d tied himself before his left his house. A person whose eyes tracked the bat. Who pivoted his body halfway away from me and flinched. The flinch was what really did it. Dogs flinch when somebody is about to kick them. Little kids flinch when a basketball comes flying at their nose. Drivers flinch before a car crash. There was something so . . . heartbreaking about that flinch. He was flinching because of me. Because of the weapon in my hands. Because my two arms were swinging toward him. About to hit him with a baseball bat.

My swing froze midway. I made a sound. He looked up, one forearm protecting his face from me. But seeing me pause was all the time he needed. He reached to the waistband of his pants and something black and metallic flashed in his hand. A bag fell off his shoulder. He was wearing gloves I hadn’t noticed before.

There was a handgun six inches from my eyeballs. Staring me down with one cold eye. You idiot, that gun seemed to say to me. You couldn’t even swing a bat and now this guy is gonna pull a trigger.

But he didn’t pull the trigger. Instead, he was standing in front of me and then he wasn’t. I heard my front door slam. I heard pounding steps on the hallway stairs. And then I was on the stairs, too. On spaghetti legs, in my boxer shorts, I stumbled my way down after him. Was I chasing him? No. Not really. Was I trying to get the hell out of my house? To get help? To get to another person who wouldn’t point a gun in my face? Maybe. Probably. Even now it’s hard to say.

I found myself in front of the doors to my apartment building, the burglar long gone. Lou, I thought to myself. Lou will help me. I banged on the door to Lou’s apartment but it wasn’t the friendly older man who answered. It was a young woman. She had her hair back in a wet messy bun, like she’d showered and just scraped it back afterward. She had on loose pajama pants and a black T-shirt.

I told her I’d just gotten robbed. At that point I didn’t even care who she was. I just needed to sit down. I remember she gently pried the baseball bat out of my fingers. I hadn’t even realized I was still carrying it.

She called the police, brought me inside Lou’s apartment. She dug out some sweatpants and a hoodie for me to wear. I vaguely remembered having seen Lou wear them at some point or another. The woman told me that she was Lou’s daughter. That she was taking over his job as the building’s superintendent for a while. She brought me a glass of water and sat shoulder to shoulder with me on Lou’s couch. We waited for the cops together.

When they finally came, she met them at the front door and then the two of us led them up to my apartment. I answered question after question. Turns out, the guy didn’t end up taking much of anything besides the cash he found in the vase. Everything else he’d taken was in the bag he’d dropped before he’d run. My phone and computers were in there. A waterproof Bluetooth speaker I kept in the shower. And that’s the one that really got me. He’d even been in my bathroom.

The cabinets in my kitchen were all open. There was even a glass of orange juice sitting on the countertop that I was positive hadn’t been mine.

The cops guessed that he thought I was out of town for some reason. There was no reason a burglar would stop and drink a glass of orange juice unless he thought he was totally alone.

I gave them a description of the burglar, told them about the gun. About the gloves. They took pictures and did all sorts of cop stuff. It was dawn by the time they left. Jessie stayed. The cops had told me that I could clean everything up. I didn’t need to keep it the way it was for any reason. So, Jessie helped me do that, too. We didn’t really talk.

The sun was fully up by the time she stood at the door of my apartment, giving me her phone number in case I needed it for anything. She left, and right as I was about to fix her contact name, my phone rang. It was Detective Cabela. She was assigned to my case and wanted to know if I could come into the precinct later that day.

The next day, I knocked on Lou’s door around dinnertime. Jessie answered again. This time I immediately noticed a lot of things I hadn’t noticed the first time we’d met. She had a nose piercing and a ton of tattoos. After all my portraiture classes in college, I got used to noticing the way people’s faces are put together, and she had a fierce, proud bone structure. Not pretty, not ugly, kind of intense. If I were to draw her, I’d start with rounded lines for her cheeks and forehead and sharp corners for her chin and nose. When she realized it was me at the door, she crossed her arms over her chest and I got a glimpse at her very defined muscles. Her hair was up in that messy bun again and she wore overalls and a tank top.

She looked like Rosie the Riveter.

She looked totally badass.

I held up the six-pack and the chocolate and the flowers and the burritos that I’d bought to say thank you for helping me out.

She’d invited me in and I watched in awe as she cracked open a beer for each of us using only the set of keys she had carabinered to her overalls. I am definitely a bottle-opener sort of guy. She couldn’t have seemed cooler to me in that moment. I thought back to the night of the burglary. I burned with humiliation. I’d showed up in my underwear on her doorstep. Weakly clutching a baseball bat I hadn’t even had the guts to use. I had cried in her living room. She’d put me in her father’s clothes and called the police for me.

I bet she would have singlehandedly beat the shit out of an intruder in her home. I was so embarrassed that I barely made it through that beer. I thanked her profusely, left the gifts, and was on my way.

And then, after that, every time I saw her, I found some way to make a total fool out of myself. She helped oversee the installation of my new security system. What had seemed totally reasonable when I was on the phone with the salesman then seemed like complete overkill in front of Jessie. I couldn’t help but wonder what she thought of me. The guy who didn’t even swing a bat to defend his own home but was now spending thousands to install a Mission: Impossible security system.

A week or two later I stood on the curb by our apartment building and admired a motorcycle that was parked out front. And then there came Jessie, a helmet under her arm and this tiny little smile on her face. She slung one leg over the motorcycle and couldn’t have looked more badass.

I awkwardly waved and tripped over the curb. Great.

Some time after that she came around with an exterminator to lay down some mousetraps. Before they left my apartment we all heard a trap snap from my kitchen. She must have seen the horror in my eyes at the thought of cleaning up a mutilated mouse carcass because with that little smile on her face she turned and walked into the kitchen, took care of it herself.

And then, of course, the light bulb debacle.

This whole time, she knew it was me. This whole time I was teasing and flirting with her, she knew it was Eliot Hoffman, scaredy-cat moron.

This, my friends, is why there was likely a dash of horror on my face when I rounded that corner and realized that JD was Jessie. Generally, you don’t especially want to start out a relationship with someone by showing them your worst qualities.

We were literally just talking about being fantasies to one another. Gigi Hadid and The Rock. I’d firmly believed that I wasn’t building her up as a fantasy because she was a she-blob in my head. And what kind of fantasy is that?

But now, I think she might have been right to ask me that. Because even though I wasn’t dreaming of her being a supermodel of some kind, I was thinking that she probably thought of me as a charming, interesting guy at the very least. I, almost always, make a first impression as someone friendly and fun. I’m not Brad Pitt, but I’m not terrible-looking. I thought there was a reasonable chance of her being into me. But now? Honestly, I can’t even think of it without cringing.

We’ve come a long way together, but is there any chance that she doesn’t still think of me as a twerp?

“And why,” Frida asks from beside me, “did she run away from you?”

My brain is on the fritz. I can’t think in a straight line. I’m still humming with adrenaline from figuring out who JD really is. I’m cringing with embarrassment and discomfort from the resurrection of that most horrible night. I’m stunned and confused and . . . yeah.

“Um. I’m not sure,” I tell Frida. Because it’s pretty much true.

I’ve imagined meeting JD about a thousand times and I never once pictured her going white as a sheet and literally sprinting away from me.

Frida is saying something else to me, but I’m not listening. “Sorry to run, Frida,” I tell her.

Just a few minutes later I’m closing the door to my apartment and looking down at my blank phone.

No calls. No messages. No nothing.

I kick off my shoes and collapse on my couch.

“She saw me.” I hold up my left hand. “And ran.” I hold up my right hand. I look back and forth at my two hands as if they could somehow help me figure out what she was thinking. My hands drop.

“She saw me. I said her name. She realized I knew who she was. And then she ran.” I press at the space between my eyebrows and get up for a glass of water. “She ran,” I tell the inside of the kitchen cabinet as I pull out a glass. “She ran,” I tell the running faucet. “She ran,” I tell the glass of water before I drink it to the bottom and set it in the sink.

I pull my phone out of my pocket and bring up JD’s number. I call her. Just like I expect it to, the call goes straight to voicemail. I realize it’s the first time she’s ever not answered my call because I’ve never heard her voicemail message before.

“Hey, you got Jessie. Try again later.”

There’s her name. In her voice.

Ugh. She literally ran to get away from me. I hang up without leaving a voicemail.

I feel sick. Unfortunately, I recognize the feeling that’s icing over the pit of my stomach right now. It’s the exact same feeling I had when I woke up in Vegas, right before I realized I was a newly married man. This is the feeling of me realizing that I’ve just screwed up something incredibly precious and important but I’m not exactly sure how.

I won’t pester her. She’s a woman who lives in my building who didn’t want me to know who she was. This isn’t a movie. Waiting outside her door would only be menacing and weird. First things first, she needs to feel comfortable in her own home. She sprinted away from me on the street.

I have to show her I won’t push. I will give her space.

I bounce on the balls of my feet. I’m nervous and uncomfortable because that course of action also gives her so much room for misinterpretation. She sprinted away from me for reasons I either don’t know or don’t understand. Now that she’s not answering my calls, the only thing she’ll have left of us is whatever that reason is. I don’t want that mysterious reason to get bigger than . . . us.

I go to my work desk and sit down, taking a deep breath. I’ve never sent her a text before because texting is the bane of my existence and I almost always end up misspelling something and then I feel stupid. But I don’t want to pester her with another call. And I don’t want to send her a voice message about this. I want it there, on her phone, in stark, readable letters. Like a contract. From me to her. I want her to be able to go back and look at it as many times as she needs.

I peck away at my phone. I’m sweating by the time it’s done. I go back and read each word independently, checking for any mistakes. Jessie. I don’t know exactly what is going on. But I take it you want space from me. I will never bother you. I won’t make things awkward for you around the building. But I will be here if you ever change your mind. Apartment 5D. You have my phone number. Please, if you ever want to talk, just call or stop by. My door is always open. Hopeful until then, Eliot. Figuring it’s all I can do, I send the text.